As usual, Christopher Mims gets to the heart of the matter in his latest WSJ column, this one about the so-called Sharing Economy, in which little or nothing is shared, the only real change being jobs destabilized by businesses that are pure app and no inventory. It’s a Libertarian dream, a market with fungible, low-paid workers and no nets, and you, rabbit, had better get used to your task because it’s fractional employment and you are a very common denominator.

Mims wonders how this new breed of workers will ultimately be classified and whether an eventual class-action lawsuit could kill the category, though I if I had to bet, I would guess that’s not how things unfold.

An excerpt:

The first thing everyone misses about the sharing economy is that there is no such thing, not even if we’re being semantically charitable. Increasingly, the goods being “shared” in the sharing economy were purchased expressly for business purposes, whether it’s people renting apartments they can’t afford on the theory that they can make up the difference on Airbnb, or drivers getting financing through partners of ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft to get a new car to drive for those same services.

What’s more, many of the companies under this umbrella, like labor marketplace TaskRabbit, don’t involve “sharing” anything other than labor. If TaskRabbit is part of the sharing economy, then so is every other worker in America. The only thing these companies have in common is that they are all marketplaces, though they differ widely in the amount of control they give their buyers and sellers.

In the minds of critics, perhaps the worst offender in how it controls its labor force is Uber. Uber sets the prices that its drivers must accept, and has lately been in the habit of unilaterally squeezing drivers in two ways, both by lowering the rates drivers are paid per trip and increasing Uber’s cut of those wages. Behavior like this has led to some pretty overheated but not entirely undeserved rhetoric.•

In his WSJ column about Silicon Valley’s newest wave, Christopher Mims points out something I mentioned in an earlier post: Uber’s trollish tactics with journalists and competitors is nothing new in Silicon Valley. That doesn’t make it less disturbing but provides context. Another thing Mims wisely asserts is that Uber is incentivized to play rough because there’s nothing remarkable about its intellectual property. An excerpt:

“Uber owns almost no physical infrastructure and has an unremarkable app that is little different from those of a half dozen competitors. And yet it might soon reach $10 billion a year in revenue, according to a slide deck recently published by Business Insider in what feels like a successful attempt to change the subject.

Internal documents from Uber published by Business Insider, and later confirmed to Business Insider by Uber, outline the company’s criteria for hiring. They include traits like ‘fierceness,’ which Uber defines as ‘do whatever it takes to make Uber a success.’

Here’s what it takes to make Uber a success, apparently: Enter new markets without asking regulators for permission, then build enough of a customer base to make classifying the service as a traditional taxi company politically expensive for regulators. Tell investors who want to put their money in the company that they are banned from investing in its competitors. Aggressively recruit drivers from competitors, while also interfering with those drivers’ ability to make a living by ordering and canceling rides. Collect information on all Uber rides and users in a ‘God View’ dashboard that is accessible to Uber’s salaried employees and was, at least until last year, displayed by Uber’s marketing staff at launch parties.

Yet Uber is thriving.”

Artificial Intelligence doesn’t have to do things the way you and I do them to do them better. We only believe that to flatter ourselves. The opening of Christopher Mims new Wall Street Journal article about AI, which demonstrates how it has quietly wormed its way into our lives:

“The age of intelligent machines has arrived—only they don’t look at all like we expected. Forget what you’ve seen in movies; this is no HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it’s certainly not Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied voice in Her. It’s more akin to what happens when insects, or even fungi, do when they ‘think.’ (What, you didn’t know that slime molds can solve mazes?)

Artificial intelligence has lately been transformed from an academic curiosity to something that has measurable impact on our lives. Google Inc. used it to increase the accuracy of voice recognition in Android by 25%. The Associated Press is printing business stories written by it. Facebook Inc. is toying with it as a way to improve the relevance of the posts it shows you.

What is especially interesting about this point in the history of AI is that it’s no longer just for technology companies. Startups are beginning to adapt it to problems where, at least to me, its applicability is genuinely surprising.”

Christopher Mims, now at the Wall Street Journal, has a new column that explains the basics of so-called “fog computing,” likely the next step beyond cloud computing as the Internet becomes the Internet of Things. An excerpt:

“Modern 3G and 4G cellular networks simply aren’t fast enough to transmit data from devices to the cloud at the pace it is generated, and as every mundane object at home and at work gets in on this game, it’s only going to get worse.

Luckily there’s an obvious solution: Stop focusing on the cloud, and start figuring out how to store and process the torrent of data being generated by the Internet of Things (also known as the industrial Internet) on the things themselves, or on devices that sit between our things and the Internet.

Marketers at Cisco Systems Inc. have already come up with a name for this phenomenon: fog computing.

I like the term. Yes, it makes you want to do a Liz Lemon eye roll. But like cloud computing before it—also a marketing term for a phenomenon that was already under way—it’s a good visual metaphor for what’s going on.

Whereas the cloud is ‘up there’ in the sky somewhere, distant and remote and deliberately abstracted, the ‘fog’ is close to the ground, right where things are getting done. It consists not of powerful servers, but weaker and more dispersed computers of the sort that are making their way into appliances, factories, cars, street lights and every other piece of our material culture.”

The opening of a Quartz article by Christopher Mims detailing what needs to be established before the Internet of Things can take off:

“As Quartz has already reported, the Internet of Things is already here, and in the not too distant future it will replace the web. Many enabling technologies have arrived which will make the internet of things ubiquitous, and thanks to smartphones, the public is finally ready to accept that it will become impossible to escape from the internet’s all-seeing eye.

But a critical piece of the internet of things puzzle remains to be solved. What engineers lack is a universal glue to bind all the of the ‘things’ in the internet of things to each other and to the cloud.

To understand how important these standards will be, it helps to know a bit about the history of the web. When the internet was born, it was a mishmash of now mostly-forgotten protocols designed to accomplish different tasks—gopher for retrieving documents, FTP for sending and receiving files, and no standard for social networking other than email. Then the web came along and unified those protocols, and made them accessible to non-geeks. All of this magic was possible because the internet is built on open standards: transparent, agreed-upon ways that devices should communicate with one another and share data.”

I have never met a Starbucks barista who wasn’t delightfully off in some way, but they’re all amazingly patient and hardworking people who wish to tell me about their childhoods in rural Oregon. Alas, they are people, so their days are numbered. In the long run, when the pain has diminished, it will be for the best. The opening of Christopher Mims’ Quartz article about automated caffeine:

Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesn’t need sleep. It’s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It can’t quit. It has memorized every one of its customers’ orders. There’s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks.

It doesn’t require health insurance.

Don’t think of it as the enemy of baristas, insists Kevin Nater, CEO of the company that has produced this technological marvel. Think of it as an instrument people can use to create their ideal coffee experience. Think of it as a cure for ‘out-of-home coffee drinkers’—Nater’s phrase—sick of an ‘inconsistent experience.’

Think of it as the future. Think of it as empowerment. Your coffee, your way, flawlessly, every time, no judgments. Four pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup in a 16 oz. half-caff soy latte? Here it is, delivered to you precisely when your smartphone app said it would arrive, hot and fresh and indistinguishable from the last one you ordered.•

The opening of Christopher Mims’ Quartz post about Google’s push into screenless computing:

“The spread of computing to every corner of our physical world doesn’t just mean a proliferation of screens large and small—it also means we’ll soon come to rely on mobile computers with no screens at all. ‘It’s now so inexpensive to have a powerful computing device in my car or lapel, that if you think about form factors, they won’t all have keyboards or screens,’ says Scott Huffman, head of the Conversation Search group at Google.

Google is already moving rapidly to enable voice commands in all of its products. On mobile phones, Google Now for Android and Google’s search app on the iPhone allow users to search the web via voice, or carry out other basic functions like sending emails. Similarly, Google Glass would be almost unusable without voice interaction. At Google’s conference for developers, it unveiled voice control for its Chrome web browser. And Motorola’s new Moto X phone has a specialized microchip that allows the phone to listen at all times, even when it’s asleep, for the magic word that begins every voice conversation with a Google product: ‘OK…’

There’s nothing new about voice interaction with computers per se. What’s different about Google’s work on the technology is that the company wants to make it as fluid and easy as keyboards and touch screens are now. That’s a challenge big enough that, thus far, it has kept voice-based interfaces from going mainstream in our personal computing devices. And in cases when they are in use, such as interactive voice response systems designed to handle customer service calls, they can be frustrating.”