Reinvent Podcast

Lee Rainie, Director of Internet, Science and Technology Research at Pew Research Center, believes we are in the middle of the fourth major technology-based revolution of the 21st century. The first was Internet broadband, Rainie says, which has skyrocketed from zero percent of Americans using it to 73 percent. The second was the explosion of mobile phones—today 77 percent of Americans have smartphones and 51 percent have tablets. The third was social media, which 69 percent of Americans use. The fourth revolution, which we are currently in the middle of, is the rise of the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. When Pew first began tracking Internet usage, in March of 2000, fewer than half of American adults were on the Internet. “We’ve never seen a suite of consumer electronic technologies be adopted this fast with this much impact,” Rainie says. Rainie views the story of the sharing, or platform, economy as paralleling the growth of the Internet. From the earliest days of the Internet, people use

Lee Rainie, Director of Internet, Science and Technology Research at Pew Research Center, believes we are in the middle of the fourth major technology-based revolution of the 21st century.

How can we better prepare everyone from teens to Millennials for a more decentralized and increasingly independent future of work?

Martjin Arets, an international expert on the emergence and development of the collaborative economy, has studied and discussed the sharing economy in many European countries. Arets sees a difference between sharing economy innovation in the northern half of the continent, which he says is focused more on online platforms, and the southern half, which is focused more on offline sharing, like cooperatives. In the southern half of Europe, people are more accustomed to living in tight communities, says Arets.

Martjin Arets, an international expert on the emergence and development of the collaborative economy, has studied and discussed the sharing economy in many European countries. Arets sees a difference between sharing economy innovation in the northern half of the continent, which he says is focused more on online platforms, and the southern half, which is focused more on offline sharing, like cooperatives.

Kai Jia, a lecturer at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and visiting scholar at UC Davis, talks about two models of the sharing economy: one requires the platform to own little capital, like Airbnb and Uber (or Didi Chuxing, largest ride-sharing platform in China). The other model is capital intensive. The bike-sharing startups that have proliferated across China in recent years are an example of this. In this second model, the suppliers are not the consumers, Jia says, but rather, the suppliers are the companies. Because bike-sharing grew so quickly in China, the industry has very little regulation, and there are so many bikes that they have become a source of waste and overproduction rather than a means for creating more sustainable cities. On the positive side, bike-sharing apps are often far more convenient than alternative forms of transportation, and don’t contribute to the pollution of China’s cities. Jia argues for increased regulation of the sharing economy on the part of

Kai Jia, a lecturer at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and visiting scholar at UC Davis, talks about two models of the sharing economy: one requires the platform to own little capital, like Airbnb and Uber (or Didi Chuxing, largest ride-sharing platform in China). The other model is capital intensive.

Orville Schell, veteran reporter and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, has covered China for decades and recently accompanied President Trump to Asia as a Vanity Fair correspondent. Trump loves to be pandered to, Schell pointed out, and cares more about whether he’s “winning” the leader of a foreign country than advancing the national interests of the United States. Despite the aggressive and often antagonistic remarks that Trump made about China while on the campaign, the Chinese government has treated Trump in a more strategic and less reactionary way. They appreciate the transactional nature of the relationship, Schell suggests, and the fact that Trump doesn’t raise vexing questions about democracy and China’s record on human rights.

Veteran reporter and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society Orville Schell has covered China for decades, and recently accompanied President Trump to Asia as a Vanity Fair correspondent. Trump loves to be pandered to, Schell pointed out, and cares more about whether he's "winning" the leader of a foreign country than advancing the national interests of the United States.

Robin Chase is here to say the future is coming much more quickly than many of us think, particularly where autonomous vehicles (AVs) are concerned. Chase, who co-founded Zipcar, believes that AVs will go on the market as early as 2020. Chase is a proponent of what she refers to as FAVES (fleets of AVs...

Pieter van de Glind and Harmen van Sprang, the co-founders of shareNL (a knowledge and networking platform for the Netherlands) and Sharing City Alliance (a global organization facilitating the interconnection of cities), are passionate advocates for the sharing economy’s potential to transform cities. The business partners hail from Amsterdam, which incorporates the sharing economy into...

Jonathan Tourtellot, the CEO of Designation Stewardship and a longtime veteran of National Geographic, effectively illustrates the concept of “overtourism” by pouring a bright red liquid into an overflowing vessel. When transatlantic commercial flight began in 1958, Tourtellot explains, there were 25M annual international tourist arrivals, but by 2010, that number had topped more than...

Roy Bahat, Head of Bloomberg Beta, may spend his days “slinging money around,” as he phrases it, discovering and investing in hot new artificial intelligence (AI) startups, but he devotes much of his free time helping to imagine and plan for the future of work. These aren’t unrelated pursuits—Bahat says that AI gives him the...

Bloomberg Beta Head Roy Bahat may spend his days "slinging money around," as he phrases it, discovering and investing in hot new artificial intelligence (AI) startups, but he devotes much of his free time helping to imagine and plan for the future of work.

Rachel Botsman, world-renowned trust expert and University of Oxford lecturer, has a new book, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart, explores questions of transparency, scale, and ownership that are at the heart of the sharing economy. Botsman says she “became obsessed with understanding how...

World-renowned trust expert and University of Oxford lecturer Rachel Botsman's new book, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart, explores questions of transparency, scale, and ownership that are at the heart of the sharing economy.

Paul Hawken asks, “Can we stop global warming in the next 30 years?” According to renowned environmentalist, the answer is yes. We can keep the temperature of the Earth from rising past the critical mark of two degrees Celsius and actually draw down carbon out of the atmosphere to reverse the warming by 2050. We...

Sunil Paul took his first ride in an autonomous vehicle (AV) in 2009—at least a decade before most of will have the opportunity. That ride inspired to think about the future of transportation. Just two years later, in 2011, Sunil co-founded Sidecar, where he also served as CEO. Sidecar invented the modern ride-sharing model, operated...

Ken Goldberg, William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair of Engineering at UC Berkeley, doesn’t buy into the prevailing robot panic of our times. His experience running a robotics lab suggests that AI and robots will empower humans, not replace them. “The important question is not when machines will surpass human intelligence, but how humans can work...

Julian Agyeman, a professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, believes that social justice and environmental justice are—or at least, should be—inextricably intertwined. The question we need to be asking, Agyeman says, is how do we improve people’s lives in a just and equitable manner, and how do we do that...