We thought creative jobs would be immune to automation as we believe being creative is quintessentially what makes us human. This tune is bitterly out of date now. Text-to-image generator platforms, most notably Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion can now turn text prompts into high-quality images in under 10 seconds. There are numerous platforms out there, all one is needed to do is to choose which platform they want to try (mostly for free).
Generative AI is all the rage
The debate of whether AI art can replace human creatives remains theoretical until August 2022 when Jason Allen won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition with a work generated on Midjourney. That wasn’t an one-off incident, Boris Eldgasen also won Sony World Photography Awards with an image created ...
The revolutionary natural language processing model developed by OpenAI has unveiled a multitude of opportunities in transforming industries. At the same time, it has kicked off an existentialist angst among us all. Thousands of articles headlined ‘whether ChatGPT will replace XXX industry’ surfaced in the past few months. If you asked me, the questions taking over the headlines are pseudo-problems, due to the fact that the power of ChatGPT and other AI tools are growing at an exponential rate everyday thanks to its self-learning capability.
On 22 March 2023, Elon Musk and dozens of tech leaders, professors and researchers had signed a letter published by the Future of Life Institute calling for AI labs to stop training the most powerful AI systems for at least six months as it is...
Do you think companies struggled with productivity in times of recession? No, at least not all of them.
Companies have secret weapons up their sleeves when facing the fall of productivity. In 2023, tech companies such Google, Amazon, Microsoft Yahoo and Zoom announced another round of layoffs cutting down over 120,000 jobs. In that way their productivity is likely to go up again — productivity being the measure of output per unit of input. Although productivity could be weighed against all kinds of input, output per labour is one of the most common measurements. If we look back at the 2009 recession in the United States, productivity was growing while output and hours worked were both falling.
Mass layoff, however, has profound impact on the organisation. It is crippling the c...
Bad communication is costing money
According to a 2018 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), verbal communication skills are ranked first among a job candidate’s ‘must have’ skills and qualities. No wonder majority of job candidates put down ‘communication skills’ in their CVs, but how many of them truly possess these skills? If it is really that many people in the job market are having good communications skills, why communication barriers are still costing businesses around $37 billion a year? There is 86% of employees and executives citing the lack of effective collaboration and communication as the main cause for workplace failures.
It is either people have bluffed on their CVs or they simply don’t understand what communication skills are. Luckily...
Understanding ChatGPT
ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer application in history. It has reached more than 1 million users in just the first 5 days of launch in November 2022, a feat that took Netflix 3.5 years, Facebook 10 months and Instagram 2.5 months to achieve.
The name ChatGPT stands for “Generative Pretrained transformer” designed to chat. Developed by Open AI, a company founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and a few others, its core capability is to generate human-like responses for all kinds of queries, even to those it is not capable of answering—instead of giving you “Error 404”, it will politely explain why it could not generate an answer. The current version, however, cannot interpret recent data for it is trained on a knowledge base that ends in September 2021.
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With more remote work options available nowadays, some argued that the idea of digital nomad is dead, at least no longer relevant to the post-pandemic world. This article explains what digital nomadism is, how its essence of being locational independent has become more mainstream and what it takes to make it work.
The idea of digital nomadism
The embryonic form of digital nomad first emerged in 1983 when the world’s first portable computer, Compaq Portable, was launched. Upon its launch, the PC World magazine proudly featured a man working on the computer by a swimming pool. Technology has enabled us to work wherever we want, even when we are on holiday.
Figure 1Credit: PC World magazine 1983
Fundamentally, a digital nomad means someone relying on technology...
We have seen too many companies turning great candidates away for doing something silly, if not downright rude. This is not just a waste of time and resource, but harmful to their employer brand. Down this road, their chance of getting good workers would slip faster than they could ever imagine. Be sure you are not one of them.
You might be losing competent candidates by doing these 2 things when you hire
1. Having an insatiable desire to collect forms and information
A whopping 92% of people who clicked “apply” button on the company’s website never complete an application. Employers thought a complicated process can test how determined thecandidates are to get the job.
They would make applicants to fill out forms after forms, and by the time the applicants get to the int...
While the outlook for global economy remains bleak for 2023, economy in Hong Kong is expected to boom. Businesses are now competing on their readiness to grasp every opportunity followed by the reopened border. According to a survey conducted by ManpowerGroup, 44% of employers plan to recruit in the first quarter of 2023.
All these happened when the unemployment rate in Hong Kong has dropped to 3.5% in the last quarter of 2022, and the number of unemployed and underemployed had continued on a downward trend. Amid the migration waves, talent shortage reached 16-year high — 83% of employers in China and Hong Kong reported talent shortage, compared to 75% globally.
As the Chinese saying goes, “banking is the mother of all industries”. The anticipation for the market to rebound has...
If you operate business in Chinese or Asian countries, Feng Shui is something you must understand, at least on the extent of its influence.
Feng Shui, literally meaning wind and water, is a kind of Chinese geomancy. The field of practice factors in the flow of energy constituted by astrological, geographical, architectural compositions and works out how human could work harmoniously with these energies for their familial, monetary, social and health benefits.
You may be surprised to hear that the richest people in Asia are spending millions on Feng Shui advice. Feng Shui had not only shaped the design of Chinese ancient towns, not least the Forbidden City, but it had also shaped modern urban designs and architectural designs. For example, the road network on Macau peninsular f...
