Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas

FASHIONOPOLIS by Dana Thomas is subtitled “The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes” and it is clearly a topic of interest to millennials and their younger counterparts in Generation Z. In fact, I have two students who independently chose to explore fast fashion for Junior Theme so far this year. Thomas is a best-selling author and frequent contributor to a number of publications on topics related to style.  In this new non-fiction work, she begins by describing the problem and noting that “in the last twenty years, the volume of clothes Americans throw away has doubled – from 7 million to 14 million tons. That equals 80 pounds per person per year.” Thomas continues, offering numerous examples to illustrate the “creative thievery, indifference to others, corruption [and] pollution” which she argues categorizes the industry. Later in the book, Thomas shares interviews with innovative practitioners and points to more efforts towards sustainability, like exploring the use of organic cotton or more natural dyes.  She also outlines efforts by Amazon (now a major player in retail apparel) to manufacture clothing on demand – after it has been ordered.

Although less practical and action-oriented than The Conscious Closet, FASHIONOPOLIS is an intriguing blend of social issues (working conditions, NAFTA, environmental impact), fashion and technology (robots who sew, new bio-fabrics, and 3D-printing). Thomas has included almost thirty pages of notes, a selected bibliography and a helpful index for researchers. We will be purchasing and pairing FASHIONOPOLIS with other relevant titles like Inconspicuous Consumption or the much older The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy when we make book recommendations on this topic.

 

More Business Books ... looking to the future, learning from the past

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE from Harvard Business Review Press is part of a series which also has texts dealing with Blockchain and Cybersecurity. This one, on artificial intelligence (AI) points out that companies that wait to adopt may never catch up and suggests some questions that ALL employees should be able to answer: How does AI work? What is it good at? And what should it never do? The contributors’ experience and background range from academicians (at University of Toronto, MIT, Stanford) to practitioners (at Facebook, Accenture, and more). One, Andrew Ng, currently CEO of Landing AI and who has worked for Baidu, Coursera, and Google Brain describes how to choose your first AI project.  Others write about collaborative intelligence as humans and AI join forces or about the future of using far less data, developing efficient robot reasoning with less reliance on deep learning from patterns. Each essay or reprinted article ends with a useful “takeaways” section. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE focuses on a topic which is highly interesting for many of our students and offers varied perspectives so that our business faculty could choose to incorporate a few selections (e.g., about ethics, bias and lack of transparency or about AI’s varied impact on work) for class readings.

As you may know, we currently have school-based subscriptions to both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And on Friday both of those papers had stories about comments from Brad Smith. The New York Times said, “Microsoft Corp President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said on Friday that technology companies are likely to change how they moderate online platforms in response to new laws from foreign governments, regardless of whether U.S. lawmakers act to change … U.S. law …” And The Wall Street Journal also discussed ethical issues while mentioning the new book, TOOLS AND WEAPONS by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne. It contains a foreword by Bill Gates where he describes this book as “a clear, compelling guide to some of the most pressing debates in technology today.” Smith and Browne subtitled their book “The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age” and they do not shy away from relating events and raising issues associated with Snowden and diplomacy, with facial recognition and artificial intelligence and with social media, surveillance, or personal privacy. As reflected in the duality of the title, TOOLS AND WEAPONS prompts many questions about the concentration of power in corporations (e.g., amount of energy used to power machines) and in governments (e.g., relative to political activism and human rights).

Get informed for these key discussions – and please see a librarian or our ClassLinks page for help activating your digital newspaper subscriptions.  

 

Also of high interest to students will be THAT WILL NEVER WORK by Marc Randolph which deals with “The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea.” Of course, so many students are regular Netflix users and while they will relate to today’s product, they will likely find the company’s transformation over time to be surprising.  In particular, it will be valuable for them to see the frequent fails (such as never realizing the Blockbuster merger) or near failures (deficits and layoffs) that occurred prior to Netflix becoming the force it is today. Hopefully, it is also stimulating for them to think about the process of idea generation (and rejection or modification) as well as needed research on market needs, trends and competition.  Randolph, who co-founded Netflix, also has extensive experience in the entrepreneurship sphere in Silicon Valley.  He writes with an often amusing, very conversational tone, providing in THAT WILL NEVER WORK an inside look at many of the decisions and efforts to adapt as the company moved forward.

Talk to Me by James Vlahos

“How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think” is the subtitle of a new non-fiction book, TALK TO ME, by author James Vlahos. He argues that we are entering the era of voice computing and that like previous technological disruptions (e.g., changes with mainframes, desktops, internet search and mobile computing), it will involve a paradigm shift and platform war. Vlahos divides his text into three parts labeled Competition, Innovation and Revolution, with about ten percent allocated to notes and an index. Of course, there’s quite a bit of discussion about Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, plus chatbots, conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language systems. Some of the historical background describes the roughly twenty-five-year development of Siri and “her component technologies” and briefly touches on the choice of Alexa as a wake word. Later, there is an entire chapter devoted to personalities, noting our penchant to personify and to invest more emotionally when a digital assistant is anthropomorphic (if you doubt this, take a moment and think back to Microsoft’s annoying on-screen helper, Clippy). Vlahos also discusses some of the reasons why female voices were chosen and the potential for truly individualized AIs in the future (described in US Patent 8,996,429) whereby “the bot can present the best possible personality to any given user.” Other factors like the impact of virtual companionship on one’s desire to socialize, and downsides such as eavesdropping or privacy concerns are included. Overall, Vlahos succeeds in making the potential advances of voice computing understandable and relevant, thereby captivating student interest with TALK TO ME.