Growth in on-demand services helps customers improve their lives by finding somebody else to clear out the garage, put up the shelves or run errands. But do the people handling your to-do list benefit as well?
TaskRabbit founder and CEO Leah Busque is concerned that the deal may be one-sided. “In the last 12 to 18 months, I believe there has been a slippery slope of new companies that have formed in the name of on-demand services … that maybe aren’t having as much of a focus as they should on the worker,” she told The Huffington Post’s Jordan Jayson at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Saturday.
TaskRabbit is a website that links customers up with people ready to handle a wide range of small jobs.
“Our whole premise was empowering a new generation of workers to be their own entrepreneurs, to build their own schedules, to set their own prices and accept and decline work,” Busque said.
“If you build a services app without taking into consideration the quality of the lives you’re creating for those workers, then you’re completely missing the point of this whole industry,” she added. “I do believe it’s a slippery slope. It can become a race to the bottom, and we have a responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Below, live updates from the 2015 Davos Annual Meeting:
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“Could there be a piece of technology that figures out an intelligent next question to ask somebody? Yeah,” McAfee said.
“For 200 years of industrial technology, we’ve been making workers obsolete,” McAfee said.
McAfee said nobody knows if we’re reaching the point where technological developments could lead to unemployment.
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Woods said it’s normal for government entities to reach out to consulting groups, but usually the process takes a lot more time.
“The coordination has been better than I’ve ever seen it on a global scale,” Woods said.
Courtois said new devices are “enabling people to do more stuff, to do great stuff.”
Courtois also spoke about new technology being developed by Microsoft that will allow users to interact with 3D holograms.
Courtois shared how Microsoft played a role after the recent terror attacks in Paris, partnering with French law enforcement and the FBI to get police information they needed within 45 minutes of the attack’s start.
Jean-Philippe Courtois on HuffPost Live
Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, spoke about the steps his company is taking to maintain the public’s trust as data moves further into the Cloud.
Courtois said Microsoft has been focusing on several aspects: improving how they anchor the data; certification and compliance of infrastructure; and transparency.
“This is a big deal to actually report back to society what we do with data and how we deal with government requests,” Courtois said about being a transparent company.
Valerie Keller and Cheryl Grise of the EY Beacon Institute talk with HuffPost Live about how to transform your business through a better sense of purpose.
