Editorial note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. The world loves breakthroughs in technology, not only for what they can do for society but also for what they have done and can continue to do for employment. According to McKinsey & Co., most historical technological breakthroughs have led to more employment, even if they displaced previous jobs. Unfortunately, we will not see that with artificial intelligence (AI). Before we discuss the current state of AI , let’s look at the biggest technological breakthroughs over the past 250 years to see how different AI is when it comes to the relationship between investment, impact, and employment. Starting with the Industrial Revolution, this era had two key periods that produced different breakthroughs. According to Britannica, the First Industrial Revolution, from 1760-1830, was in Great Britain and brought about technological developments like the Spinning Jenny — a mechanical way to spin thread for...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. Being the CEO means you are the face of the company. Not only when talking to prospective clients, partners, investors or employees, but to the public as well. This is especially the case today, where consumers want to trust decision-makers for the brands they interact with. As a result, founders and CEOs often must maintain a public-facing presence on social media. That visibility can sometimes become a distraction from the business they are building. The recent controversy with Fawn Weaver and Nearest Green Distillery highlights just that. As AFROTECH ™ previously reported, on Aug. 14, a Tennessee federal judge ordered Uncle Nearest to be placed into receivership. This means that a third party is given the power to manage the business’s finances to ensure that creditors are paid. In the case of Fawn and Nearest Green Distillery, the creditor is Farm-Credit Mid America, which has filed a lawsuit...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. If you work in tech, or any field for that matter, you probably have heard of LinkedIn. Whether you have used it as a job seeker, hiring manager or the butt of your jokes, the professional networking site, LinkedIn, has been at the center of white collar work for decades. LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly and Jean-Luc Vaillant in 2002 on the heels of the dot-com boom that changed the professional landscape for the tech industry. The founders met via Hoffman’s previous venture, SocialNet.com, which some call the precursor to Facebook and PayPal. The site minted billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, some of whom the industry refers to as the “ PayPal Mafia.” Although people use LinkedIn for a variety of reasons, Reid always saw it as a place for building a professional network across white collar industries. As LinkedIn has grown over the years,...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. The current and future benefits of AI have been mostly what is centered in conversations about the emerging technology, but recently, people have been bringing attention to what this may be costing people, especially Black and brown ones. We are all aware of how racism exists as it relates to systems, but you can also see signs of racism in the way environments are formed and how they are, or are not, tended to over time. Prominent Black figures and organizations have recently been calling out how AI could affect Black communities. Billboard reported that R&B artist SZA stated her concerns about how much energy and pollution goes into running AI. She specifically mentioned Memphis, TN, where the NAACP has notified Elon Musk’s xAI with their intent to sue the company for the pollution it’s creating in the city, as reported by AP. Environmental racism is not a new topic, but it has come to light...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. AI has changed the way that creatives work across audio, text, and video. It has given people access to a knowledge base and skill set that you previously had to put years of experience into in order to get anything out of it. Now we have AI tools that give people the power to do what they need to do in a matter of minutes. While these tools may be taking center stage now, technology has been changing the creative process for years. Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who both previously worked at Xerox and wanted to take an all-digital approach to printing and publishing. Their first product was called PostScript, a page description language that made it so people could have consistent quality when printing documents, no matter the system. In 1987, they introduced their first creative-focused product called Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Illustrator was, and still is today, a...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. The more mature an industry becomes, the more conservative it becomes. T his has happened in white collar functions such as law, finance , and consulting, and has now come for the tech industry as well. An industry that used to pride itself on embracing liberal politics and culture has now become more politically and culturally conservative than any other time in recent history. Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz ( A16Z) said, per The Washington Post, that elite universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University will “pay the price” for DEI in a tech group chat moderated by a former employee of A16Z, Sriram Krishnan, who is now a White House senior policy advisor on AI. Andreessen’s issue with universities may be more personal than anything else, since in the group chat, he said that Stanford forced his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, out of her position as chair...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. It’s easy to assume that just because you can use AI for something that you should use AI for everything. People are already using it to create websites, images, and videos. These uses of AI do not carry a lot of penalties if something is wrong (depending on what you are building). However, an area in which people are increasingly using AI and should be cautious is the legal system — navigating legal issues, creating legal documents, or doing legal research. Ever since the release of ChatGPT over 2 years ago, we have seen people rush to bring AI to the world of professional services. Founders and investors alike have increasingly seen opportunity in leveraging AI to help in-house attorneys become more effective, and the everyday citizen has been looking to use AI instead of paying the cost of employing an attorney. Legal tech companies have made it their mission to reinvent legal professions and...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. When thinking about AI , your mind may not immediately go to the NBA, but the truth is that the basketball league has embraced the technology for years. The NBA first embraced the technology to help staff and players better analyze the game to improve individual player and team performance. The system used is called player tracking, implemented during the 2013-2014 NBA season, as reported by the Sports Video Group. The NBA sets up cameras at every stadium and then processes the captured information through its software, which analyzes and extracts data on all players who touch the court; this helps players, coaches, and organizations make better decisions about gameplay and the overall strategy for the team. Analyzing the game to make better decisions is one thing, but one of the most important places to have technology play a role is in the health of players, as they play through the season and...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. Learning how to code has been centered as the most probable path to prosperity since Mark Zuckerberg rang the bell as Facebook went public in 2012. After the success of Zuckerberg and Meta , being able to learn how to code was marketed by the public and private sectors as a path to not only financial stability but also outsized prosperity. The number of computer science graduates has more than doubled over the past decade from 51,696 to 112,720 when comparing the 2013-2014 academic year to the 2022-2023 academic year, according to the National Student Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that serves as the central source for educational reporting, verification and research across the U.S. The increased focus on computer science makes sense when you learn that computer science graduates also have an average starting salary of $77,000, while the average recent graduate is $68,400, according to...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. Venture Capital , the lifeblood of startups, is undergoing a transition that may decrease the number of Black venture capitalists and venture-backed founders while reducing diversity in the types of ideas that Silicon Valley takes seriously. Historically, venture capital was viewed as niche, unlike other areas of finance. However, venture capital has grown into a global industry that has helped usher in our technological future. Companies like Uber and Airbnb have raised venture capital to build and grow their businesses into the household names they are today. Since 2021, the world of startups and venture capital has been going through a watershed moment that may alter the future of the industry. As AFROTECH™ previously reported, interest rates heavily impact how the startup ecosystem operates. Ever since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, interest rates have been hiked globally to combat...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. When people hear the word “Apple,” they do not automatically think of the fruit; they think about the company that has been a mainstay in the world of consumer technology since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded it in 1976. Apple was founded in Los Altos, CA, a suburb of Silicon Valley , in the home of Steve Jobs’ parents. The time Jobs spent building the original vision for Apple in his parents’ garage is why many entrepreneurial stories reference the garage as a symbol of humble beginnings when discussing how their companies first got off the ground. While many millennials and Gen Z remember how life-changing the iPod was when it was released, it revolutionized the way we listened to music, along with iTunes, which changed the way music was purchased and consumed. Long before the iPod, Apple’s first consumer smash hit was the Apple II . Released in 1977, the Apple II debuted alongside other...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. Data centers have been in the news lately due to their connection to AI, but they have been around in some form or capacity for decades. Data centers originally were created to hold mainframe computers because they would tend to overheat, needing to be stored in climate-controlled rooms. This was at a time when more businesses began relying on computers for their day-to-day operations, and things needed to be moved from single rooms to larger dedicated facilities. What caused data centers to explode in popularity was the rise of personal computing. With more and more data needing to be stored, more facilities needed to be created in order to house all of this new data that was being generated every day, not just from businesses but from people living their lives as well due to the adoption of mobile devices. What exponentially increased the amount of data centers was when software started “eating...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. President Donald Trump’s tariffs have rocked industries across the globe, from manufacturing to fashion and retail. The current crop of tariff policies will do damage to retailers, large and small and one of the retailers that has gotten caught in the crossfire is Nike . Nike has been an American staple in the world of business and fashion since the company was founded in 1964 by University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman and his former student Phil Knight as Blue Ribbon Sports. The company originally started as a distributor for the Japanese shoe brand Tiger (now ASICS) but began making its athletic footwear in 1971 and rebranded as Nike, named after the Greek goddess of victory, as reported by The Street. The iconic “Swoosh” logo was designed by Carolyn Davidson, a student at nearby Portland State University, for just $35 as reported by Reuters and became one of the world’s most recognizable...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. The culture and energy of the tech industry has changed overnight. The industry once stereotyped as a bastion of liberalism, which has a history of backing more liberal candidates in presidential elections, has changed. This all became more apparent during the 2024 presidential election between Kamala Harris and now President Donald Trump . During the election, the industry was split in a way that felt unprecedented to those who had been in the industry for the past 20 years. When Trump was first elected to office, his presidency appeared to be one that the industry would resist, given his first term as president as well as his 2020 campaign. He had policy views and beliefs that were against what the tech industry stood for, specifically around the topics of immigration, social media moderation, and climate change. What we saw leading up to the 2024 presidential election was not only less...

Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™. AI and its effect on current and future employment has been a focus for employees and employers alike, and a main topic of conversation in the media since ChatGPT came out over two years ago. ChatGPT made people think about what the future of work would look like, especially when it comes to things a person typically would have to outsource. They saw how they could do it themselves by leveraging AI. The first types of jobs that came to mind for using AI were ones that have a black-and-white approach to the work and follow a series of steps. For example, a bookkeeper who puts the same inputs and outputs into QuickBooks could be replaced by automation leveraging AI tools. These tools can build a bridge between your bookkeeping software and your accounting software and route the entries where they need to go automatically. The belief about which type of jobs could be automated/reduced seems to have...