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Let's dive right in with a question:

Sam Jayne / Axios

Over the last decade or so, we've seen ordinarily apolitical topics polarize us into angry opposing mobs, among them vaccines, atmospheric gases and Russia. When there has been a super-strong view one way or another, it's been sucked into the hothouse and associated with an ideology. Charges of fake news and a general deterioration of debate have followed.

Checking my emails since the last newsletter, I've noticed politics seeping into the subject of the future of work. One technically expert reader, for instance, explained why he sides with the singularity, the theory predicting super-human intelligence, and the Universal Basic Income, the call for a basic stipend for all Americans as an antidote to robotization. Then he wrote: "Trump will do eight years. The Democratic Party is totally obsolete. Something will replace it." A non-sequitur? An identification of issue with party?

Or perhaps we are headed for political cleavage over robots and artificial intelligence.

Read here for the discussion.

Lazaro Gamio / Axios

It's the great economic conundrum of our day: if the unemployment rate is so low, why aren't wages growing faster? The law of supply and demand tells us that as labor gets scarce, wages should rise. Yet, as we saw in the latest jobs figures on Friday, average U.S. hourly earnings have barely exceeded inflation for three years running.

What's going on? My colleague Chris Matthews writes that the answer may lie in the Wage Growth Tracker (see above), an alternative gauge produced by the Federal Reserve's Atlanta bank. It substantiates what a lot of people have suspected: that older, higher-paid workers are leaving the workforce and being replaced with cheaper, younger workers who hold little bargaining strength when they can be quickly replaced by automation.

A level deeper: Automation technology has held down the wages of lower skilled workers for more than four decades, by giving employers a fallback option when labor gets too expensive. Recent employment growth has been bringing these workers back to the labor market, but their power to negotiate higher wages remains weak.

Read the rest here.

MIT

Imposing in size and resembling a retired linebacker more than the MIT economist he is, Daron Acemoglu has built the reputation of an iconoclast. Over the last five years, he has taken on the grasping leaders of the world's failed nations, and, most recently, automation.

In March, Acemoglu, along with Boston University's Pascual Restrepo, made waves with a paper that described industrial robots punching a hole in employment and wage growth, and potentially costing millions more jobs by 2025. While challenging the orthdoxy, the paper immediately became central to the early scholarship on the new wave of robotization. Policymakers, fellow economists and journalists rely on his core conclusion that each robot will cost three to six jobs.

Read the rest here.

DLA Piper's 3,600 attorneys work in 40 countries, making it one of the world's largest law firms. One of those countries is Ukraine, which on June 27 placed the firm on the front lines of one of the most penetrating commercial cyberattacks ever: Petya. When it hit, it took down DLA Piper's global computer systems, which appear to still not be fully back up. But DLA Piper was only one of hundreds of thousands of victims of the malware in more than 60 countries.

Can't artificial intelligence protect us? Intelligent programs can ferret out breaches in the troves of data accumulated by most big companies, ReliaQuest's Joe Partlow tells Axios. But when it comes to malware like Petya, that will be too late your data and your entire hard drive will already be encrypted. Petya victims lost much of their stuff to eternity.

BUT there is other protection: On the day of the attack, Microsoft published a blog post and a video describing software to protect against such malware. Called Windows Defender Application Guard, it should prevent Internet terrorists, at least for now, from taking down the world's infrastructure and economy, according to Simon Crosby, CTO of Bromium, an Internet security firm, who worked with Microsoft on the technology.

Read the rest here.

Tweeted this morning: the first Model 3

Tesla

Carnegie-Mellon University

Not only do we not always say what we mean, often we don't say anything at all. Which can be a terrific problem if you're thinking of hanging around service robots, or self-driving vehicles.

But at Carnegie-Mellon, a team led by Yaser Sheikh, a professor of robotics, has classified gestures across the human body. Using a dome containing 500 video cameras, they took account of every movement, down to the possibly tell-tale wiggle of your fingers.

The objective: Sheikh's effort gets at a couple of realities going forward:

Read the rest here.

Another fun thing: Check out these AI-produced (and apparently not entirely appetizing) recipes, created by Janelle Shane.

Link:

Axios Future of Work - Axios