Author: openjargon

On Monday, as part of its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled software features for its various products, including the iPhone and the iPad. The most anticipated part of the show was getting details on how the company would integrate artificial intelligence into its phones and operating systems.

During the presentation, Apple executives showed off how the tech giant's AI system — which they pointedly referred to as Apple Intelligence instead of artificial intelligence — could help with searching texts and photos, creating images, fixing grammar and spelling, summarizing text, and editing photos.

After the announcement, tech pundits, extremely online billionaires, and cheap seats the world over complained that the features were small potatoes. CNET's Katie Collins wrote that Apple's most interesting new features were long overdue, summing up her reaction as "finally." Bloomberg's Mark Gurman called them "minor upgrades." My colleague Jordan Hart said they weren't the silver bullet Apple needed to reinvigorate the company. And Elon Musk registered his disappointment by sharing a stupid meme. In sum, many people are underwhelmed by Apple's practical integration of AI. Sure, maybe summarizing long emails and making transcripts of calls sounds boring compared with conjectures that AI could be used to detect cancer earlier, but guess what? Apple's scale and specificity of vision also make it the first Big Tech company to get AI integration right.

Apple is using AI to do what the technology has proved it can do: be an assistant. Yes, the virality of OpenAI's ChatGPT-3 put AI's potential on display. But using AI to power a robot that does your chores or to answer open-ended questions is still extremely imperfect. Chatbots lie, they hallucinate, they tell my colleagues to eat glue. Google's rollout and subsequent rollback of offering AI answers to people's search queries is just one sign that the current iteration of the tech isn't ready for all the use cases Silicon Valley is dreaming about — to say nothing of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's claims that AI will be able to "save the world," "improve warfare," and become our therapists, tutors, confidants, and collaborators, ushering in a "golden age" of art.

Apple's updates are an appeal for everyone to get a grip. They are a clarion call for other tech companies to be practical with what they promise consumers and to deliver AI products that make our lives incrementally easier instead of confusing us with overpromises. Apple's use of the best of AI is also the best way for normal people to develop an understanding of what it can do. This is a way to build trust. Sure, maybe one day AI will figure out how to destroy civilization or whatever, but right now it's best at finding that photo of your dog dressed as a pickle you took back in 2019. And for the vast majority of people, that's perfectly fine.

What does AI do?

The fact that people are disappointed in Apple says more about the hype around AI's capabilities than it does about Apple. Musk has since 2019 been promising that Tesla will make a self-driving robocar, and for even long he's been overselling his driver-assistance technology as "autopilot." OpenAI's internal arguments turned palace intrigue turned media fodder are mostly centered on concern for the speed at which AI's supposedly fearsome power will reshape humanity, not the limitations of its current practical application. The biggest models, the most powerful Nvidia chips, the most talented teams poached from the hottest startups — that is the drumbeat of AI news from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. We've seen tech hype cycles before; they're mostly about raising money and selling stock. Only time will tell if the investments Wall Street and Silicon Valley are making in AI infrastructure will actually produce commensurate returns. That's how this game goes.

Apple's updates are an appeal for everyone to get a grip.

But in all that noise, the reality of what AI is good (and bad) at right now has gotten lost — especially when it comes to the large language models that undergird most of the new AI tools consumers will use, like virtual assistants and chatbots. The tech is based on pattern recognition: Rather than make value judgments, LLMs simply scan a vast library of information they've hoovered — books, webpages, speech transcripts — and guess which word most logically comes next in the chain. There is an inherent limitation in that design. Sometimes facts are improbable, but what makes them facts is that they are provable. It might not make sense that Albany, not New York City, is the capital of the state of New York, but it's a fact. It might make sense to use glue, an adhesive, to stick cheese on pizza, if you're a robot with no context for what "food" is. But that's definitely not how it's done. Such as they are, large language models can't make this value judgment between pattern and fact. It's unclear whether they'll ever be able to. Yann LeCun, Meta's lead AI scientist and one of the "godfathers of AI," has said that LLMs have a "very limited understanding of logic" and that they "do not understand the physical world, do not have persistent memory, cannot reason in any reasonable definition of the term and cannot plan." He has also said they cannot learn anything beyond the data they're trained on — anything new or original — which makes them mentally inferior to a house cat.

In other words, they're not perfect.

Enter Apple, a company known for a culture of perfection. It was slow to embrace the hype surrounding AI, and, as I mentioned, for a while it refused to use the term "artificial intelligence," instead preferring the long dethroned, snoozefest name "machine learning." Apple started developing its own generative AI after ChatGPT-3 launched in 2022, but it revealed the new features only when it felt they were good and ready. This tech is what will power features like Genmoji, which allows you to describe a custom emoji to fit whatever's going on and then creates it — say, one of you crying while eating an entire pizza. It will also power more-practical applications, like writing an email to your boss when you're sick or pulling up that link your mom sent you in a text message. Right now, these basic call-and-response applications are the things at which LLMs excel.

Apple's rigorous standards serve as a way to firmly establish AI's present capabilities — or limitations, depending on how you see the glass.

If you want to use the latest Apple products to get into the freakier and more fungible world of talking to a chatbot, Siri will call up ChatGPT for you and let you run wild. This is Apple making a clear delineation between where its reliability ends and where a world of technological inconsistency begins. For Apple, this distinction makes sense. It wants its products to be associated with cutting-edge technology but also efficacy and productivity.

The distinction, however, does not serve the rest of Silicon Valley or their venture-capital investors. Anyone fundraising or investing in this technology would prefer you see the capabilities and value of AI as a moving target — specifically moving up, to the right, and fast. Apple's rigorous standards serve as a way to firmly establish AI's present capabilities — or limitations, depending on how you see the glass. The alternative is what we're seeing at other companies, where users are guinea pigs, used to working with tech that makes them question what they see. Societies around the world are already grappling with a crisis of faith in institutions; faulty AI just spreads that mistrust wider and faster. It's another stone in the wall between people's faith and what they read on the internet. In that way, Apple's cautious approach may be a service for the rest of the tech industry. By slowly acclimatizing its constellation of users to AI that makes their lives better instead of frustrating them, Apple makes the tech feel like a natural upgrade instead of an unreliable, scary intrusion.

Sure, Apple's AI may not be sexy or scary, but at least it doesn't seem stupid. Ideally, that means it won't make our world any stupider either.

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Linette Lopez is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

• Seb lives in Hamburg, Germany but works in London.
• After his team switched to more in-person work this year, he started commuting five hours to the office.
• It allows him to live with his partner in Hamburg while keeping the job he loves in London. 

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Seb, 32, about his commute from Hamburg to London for work. He chronicles the commute on TikTok. The following has been edited for length and clarity. He wishes to keep his last name anonymous, but Business Insider has verified his identity and his employment.

After meeting my partner while traveling a few years ago, my being English and her being German meant that we spent a lot of time flitting between both countries.

When Brexit rules came in, restricting the number of days UK residents could spend in the European Union, I made the choice to become a resident of Germany. It meant I could spend time in the EU without stressing that I was overstaying.

But I didn't want to quit my role as a director of a company in London.

Immediately moving back to London wasn't an option. My partner is a doctor in Germany, so it's a lot harder for her to up sticks and come to work in the UK.

However, my team was switching back to in-person work, so it wasn't particularly fair for me to work completely remotely.

My company and I decided that I'd switch to coming into the office three days a week, two or three times a month. That way, I'd be able to collaborate with my teammates and take meetings in the office.

So, around January of this year, I started doing my super commute— a five-hour journey that takes me from my home in Hamburg to my office in the UK and then back again after 3 days.

And then, as a bit of fun to add some enjoyment to the long commute, I decided to start documenting it on TikTok and challenge myself to beat my time. There was a lot more interest in the videos than I thought there would be.

The travel day

I usually don't bother booking too far in advance.

My fastest time so far has been four hours and 44 minutes, and the longest has been close to six hours. Luckily, I've managed to avoid any big travel delays so far.

Monday is always a long day, especially considering Germany is one hour ahead. I wake up at 4 a.m. (3 a.m. UK time) to begin my journey to work.

Of course, I pack all my belongings the night before. Being an efficient packer is a necessary part of having a super commute.

It's a waste to bring a checked bag just for three nights. I can be a bit of a nerd about this sort of thing: I've got a carry-on roller suitcase that converts to a backpack, so I can cycle to and from the station in Hamburg. I also keep things in the office, like a toiletry bag and gym sneakers.

All that forward planning means I'm out the door within 30 minutes. I hop on an hour-long train to the airport, and at this point, I only bother arriving an hour before takeoff.

My many frequent flying miles have earned me enough British Airways airline points to access free fast-track security.

I rush through security, grab a coffee, then go through passport control. I aim to spend as little time there as possible without missing my flight.

I'm still one of the first people to arrive at the office in the morning

The flight typically takes off around 6:40 a.m., and it takes just one hour and 20 minutes to get to London Heathrow — unfortunately, there aren't any flights from Hamburg Airport to the more convenient London City Airport.

You may think that I'd be more productive during the five-hour commute. But I usually just take the time to watch Netflix or something on the flight.

By 7 a.m., I've landed in London. I speed through passport control. Then, jump on whichever train is available to hop onto the tube straight through to Canary Wharf.

That adds another hour to the journey, so I tend to get to the office in time to clock on at 9 a.m.

To the annoyance of my colleagues, I'm often the second or third person to arrive.

Then after all that, I have to start the working day.

I work until around 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. and head to check in to a nearby hotel. Now that I go so often, I've found a favorite — just a 10-minute walk away from the office

It's not cheap, but I wouldn't change the situation

The 3-night trip comes to slightly over £500 ($636). Return flights are around £150 ($190), and the hotel is £120 ($150) per night, plus some extra money spent on public transport on either side.

I negotiated with my company to have them foot the bill for the commute, but it is then reflected in my salary. If I lived in England, I definitely would earn more.

It's a temporary measure. The plan for the future is to move back to England, so ideally, it'll be a maximum of one more year doing this long commute.

I get to live the best of both worlds, even though it can't last forever

At the moment, I get the best of both worlds: experiencing living in a different country, immersing myself in a new culture, and learning a new language, all while being able to keep my job in London, which is my home city and a city that I love.

I try to make the most of my time in London; I meet friends and family after work to catch a football game or go for a drink, even if I'm tired. But living between two countries comes at a cost financially and timewise as well.

Hamburg is a lot cleaner than London, and the roads are a lot quieter. But there's not a huge draw for me to stay in Hamburg — the taxes are still high, and the weather is equally bad. It's not like I ended up with someone Spanish and got to live in a sunny beach destination in Spain.

Ultimately, my life is in England, and I miss my friends and family. It's not sustainable to keep with the commute forever.

For now, it's fun to document my journey on TikTok and experience living in Germany, even if it's inconvenient. But a five-hour commute is not something I'd recommend to others.

• I wanted a big family, but my husband wasn't so sure.
• We decided we were done having kids. Then, I felt a little off one day and realized I was pregnant.
• I was nervous to tell him, but when I did, he was thrilled. We had a girl and named her Lily.

I always liked the idea of having a bigger family. I'm the youngest of five kids, and growing up, I enjoyed the noise and chaos in our household. I loved having multiple siblings to seek advice from and to have fun with.

While my husband also came from a bigger family with four children, he was satisfied with two kids. After the birth of our second child, he said he felt like he didn't have the energy for another baby at the age of 40.

So, there we were — both with different visions for our family. I wanted another baby to love, but I also respected my husband's wishes and let it go. Fate had other plans.

I found myself pregnant and wasn't sure how to tell him

One day, I was doing the dishes at my mother-in-law's house when I started to feel a bit off. I'd been drinking alcohol, but it wasn't a drunk kind of feeling. More lightheaded and a little bit nauseous.

The next day, I decided to do a pregnancy test. Sure enough, I was pregnant. I was so excited about the news, but I wasn't sure about how my husband would take it.

We were on holiday at the time, and I decided to wait until we returned home to Melbourne to tell my husband I was pregnant. When I walked in the door of our rental, he took one look at me and knew immediately something was up.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said, and started making dinner.

I've never had a good poker face, and he can read me like a book. As I brought out the plates and we sat down outside together to eat, he kept looking at me over the table. "Are you sure nothing's happened?" he asked.

I started rambling about all sorts of random things. "Do you believe in destiny?" I asked.

"I guess…" he replied hesitantly, taking a sip of his drink. At that point, I could see he was getting really worried. I knew I had to spill the beans.

"I'm pregnant," I said, holding my breath.

My husband jumped up and scooped me up in his arms. He said he was so relieved that the news was a baby and not something sinister, like a terminal disease.

"OK, we can do this," he whispered into my ear, holding me tight. A wave of relief drifted over me, and suddenly, I felt very excited. He actually seemed excited, too.

He was thrilled with the news, even if being an older parent has its challenges

A few weeks later, we shared the news with my son, then 6, and daughter, then 3. They were over the moon. As the months passed and my belly grew bigger, I could feel my husband's excitement continue to grow too. At night, he would lie with his head in my lap, chatting to baby No. 3, whose sex we kept a surprise until the end.

In August 2022, our baby girl came into the world. We called her Lily.

From the moment she was born, my husband and I were completely besotted with her. Almost two years on, she is the light of our lives and completely adored by us and her two siblings.

Being an older parent has its challenges. I was 37 when Lily was born, and my husband was 40. Neither of us has the energy we had when we had at the time our other kids were born, and most nights, we fall into bed utterly exhausted after chasing a toddler around all day.

But there are also lots of positives to being an older parent. For one, we're more relaxed and definitely in a better position financially than we were when we unexpectedly fell pregnant with baby No. 1.

No matter how old you are when you have a child, there's one thing that's timeless — and that's the love you feel for your child. That love is immeasurable and infinite, and it gets you through all of the hard times. It makes it all worthwhile.

• Rachel Pohl and her husband left San Francisco and traveled around the US for around a year.
• They ended up looking for a place to settle down when Pohl was pregnant.
• While they thought Durham, North Carolina, would be the answer, Chattanooga, Tennessee, ended up being their home.

San Francisco is the home of the Golden Gate Bridge, the setting for "That's So Raven" and "Full House," and host to a robust professional and business services workforce.

It's also an expensive city and has seen more people moving out than in for somewhere else in the US.

Rachel Pohl, 34, who lived in San Francisco for several years, and her husband, Jesse Rosenthal, are just two of the people who left. After traveling around the US for around a year, they're happy having settled in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Pohl said while she was also happy in San Francisco and enjoyed living there, she's "grateful to call Chattanooga home" in her current phase of life. She and her husband moved to the city of more than 180,000 people in late 2021.

They had been considering moving away from California for quite some time before leaving San Francisco in the fall of 2020.

"It's very expensive, of course, difficult to buy a house, raise a family," she said. Pohl said they also wanted to live closer to family and wanted to be somewhere with a "slower pace of life" than the more fast-paced, large city of San Francisco, home to over 800,000 people.

"I think just the overall situation, livability there because of the cost of living is more difficult than smaller to mid-size cities," Pohl said.

The California wildfires in August 2020 were another reason the two decided to leave. "Around that time, we were thinking, let's get out of California. It's time," Pohl said.

'A grand nomadic tour of the US'

Amid remote work flexibility during the pandemic, the two ventured out of San Francisco and decided to explore the country to see the sights and decide where to settle down. "We did a grand nomadic tour of the US," Pohl said.

They packed up their things and put some stuff in storage. Pohl said goodbye to the city she had called home for years and where she met her husband. The two of them headed to Airbnb locations throughout the US.

Montana was one state they visited. Chattanooga was another place they got to see on their trip, and she found it was "very beautiful and lovely."

"It was springtime, and the flowers were blooming, and I thought, 'this is a nice place,'" she added. While she and her husband continued on, they eventually ended up moving there after roughly a year of travel because they wanted somewhere steady after finding out Pohl was pregnant. Pohl said she and her husband liked the size and Chattanooga's energy.

"It felt like there was enough and a lot going on for the size of the city, but not so overwhelming," she said.

They did end up in Durham, North Carolina, in the summer of 2021 before Chattanooga, partly because of its potential work opportunities. However, Pohl said they simply weren't feeling that location.

"We thought if we could pick to go anywhere, basically, in the US, we want to love it, and we want to feel great about our decision," Pohl said. "So we decided at that time to come back to Chattanooga. We hadn't been back since the spring."

The family-friendly location and other pros of being in Chattanooga

Pohl likes the access to nature in Chattanooga.

"We love to go on hikes and go by the river and go paddle boarding," she said. "We love to go to playgrounds and parks with our son. All of that is very accessible."

Pohl said people are also friendly in Chattanooga, and she thinks it's a family-friendly location. She has also found the people are more diversified in terms of jobs, as opposed to the dominance of tech in the San Francisco area.

"I was meeting entrepreneurs in the food and beverage industry and people doing all kinds of things," Pohl said about Chattanooga. "It felt approachable and accessible here to do that."

Chattanooga is also much more affordable for homebuyers than San Francisco. Realtor.com noted both San Francisco and Chattanooga as buyer's markets at the moment, where the "supply of homes is greater than the demand for homes." While that may be the case, Realtor.com also shows the median sold home price in Chattanooga is far below that across the country in San Francisco — $347,500 and around $1.1 million respectively.

"It is just much more accessible to buy a lovely larger-sized home in Tennessee and Chattanooga," she said. "Your dollar goes much further here. We had looked at potentially buying a house in California and just in the end thought this makes no sense because of the cost, because of the distance to family, and just kind of the whole situation we felt like, let's go yonder."

While Pohl is happy living in Tennessee, she misses the cuisine in San Franciso and access to some national parks nearby. Pohl noted to BI she had visited San Francisco since moving away, mainly for work. And while she does love the energy in Chattanooga, there's just something about the energy in California, too.

"It's such a beautiful state," Pohl said about California. "Sometimes I miss a little bit of the energy, but again, I feel like that was an active part of my choice to leave being in a big city, but there's so much innovation happening there around technology and AI. So sometimes, from a work perspective, I miss that."

Have you moved out of San Francisco or somewhere else in the US? Reach out to this reporter to share your moving experience at mhoff@businessinsider.com.

• AI could boost the appeal of corporate offshoring by making overseas workers stronger.
• The tech can increase the efficiency of foreign workers and make them capable of higher-skill roles.
• Andrew Yeung predicts we'll see "an army of offshore talent equipped with AI tools."

One of the tropes about artificial intelligence is that AI won't take your job, but someone who knows how to use it will.

There's another possibility, however: Someone who knows how to use AI — and who's based abroad — will come for your job.

AI-powered offshoring could pose a threat to workers in heavyweight economies by making people in cheaper markets more efficient and better able to take on higher-skill jobs.

The double hit of AI superpowers plus low-cost labor could mean that the types of roles at risk of being offshored shift from repetitive tasks like data entry, which have traditionally been gestured to as actions AI can replace, to meatier work like prompt engineering, high-end customer service, and marketing, industry experts told Business Insider.

Andrew Yeung, a former product lead at Google and Meta, predicted in May that overseas workers who get their AI glow-up will someday take over numerous jobs.

"In a few years, every scrappy founder and high-powered executive is going to have an army of offshore talent equipped with AI tools that completely replace the need for traditional engineers, designers, marketers, and assistants," he wrote on X.

His thesis seems to be backed up by Sagar Khatri, cofounder and CEO of Multiplier. The company's platform lets employers hire workers from anywhere by automating functions like payroll and labor law compliance. He told BI that companies will face more pressure to go global — not to boost sales, but to find the skilled workers they need.

Thanks to productivity gains from AI, a company in New York might more easily hire accountants in the Philippines, customer-success workers in Mexico, and customer support teams in India, Khatri said.

"With AI, a customer support agent can do their job much better," he said.

Everyone's getting schooled

Online learning is making it easier for workers abroad, especially young ones in developing countries, to build their skills, according to Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera.

He told BI that workers will increasingly face competition from others overseas who are using technology to automate and be more efficient.

And it's not just learning about AI, but learning from AI. Maggioncalda said the technology can help workers in emerging areas get up to speed faster and compete with those who command higher salaries in developed economies. For many workers, a big factor will be what he calls "talent agility." Essentially, it's how fast workers can learn new things to add value to business models.

"It sounds kind of crass, but that's what it's going to come down to," Maggioncalda said.

He added that a worker in a low-cost region who might have previously taken five years to become as effective as someone in a more expensive job market can now do so far sooner. The person overseas doesn't necessarily even have to be better, Maggioncalda said.

The threat simply comes from "someone who matches you but costs less," he said.

Maggioncalda added that it's easier to hire, fire, and move workers in many developing markets. Many workers in these markets, he said, are young and hungry to gain skills that will help them build their careers. Then, you give them AI.

"Now they have a tool that has a differentially positive impact on their productivity compared to someone who's at the higher end," he said. "The only other question is, how fast is this going to happen?"

Based on Coursera's numbers, it could be soon. In 2023, the company enrolled a person every minute in a Gen AI class. In 2024, it's drawing four people every minute, he said.

Fifty-two percent of enrollments in Coursera's Gen AI classes are from emerging markets like India, Pakistan, Brazil, Vietnam, and Egypt.

AI is also making it cheaper to bring lessons on AI and other topics to people in languages other than English. Two years ago, it cost Coursera $10,000 to translate a course into another language. Now, with GenAI, the company can do it for $20, Maggioncalda said.

The massive drop in cost has enabled Coursera to translate 4,500 courses into 22 languages, he said.

"Everybody can now learn this stuff because language is not a barrier anymore," Maggioncalda said.

AI can deliver the real answer

Multiplier's Khatri said AI is making it easier for a bigger pool of workers in countries enjoying demographic tailwinds to get trained to become software developers and other lucrative roles. That's helpful, he said, for companies operating in countries with aging populations like the US, the UK, Japan, or Germany.

Khatri also said AI could make companies less hesitant to look overseas to fill needs like customer service reps because the technology can quickly serve up a "real answer" that an agent can give a caller. That can make the conversations shorter, which, in turn, reduces the risk that customers will hang up feeling dissatisfied by how hard it was to get the information they needed or because of hurdles like language.

That's because even if AI provides the answer, "customers still want to talk to a human being," he said.

Daron Acemoglu, an institute professor in the economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told BI that AI could open up parts of the world where language barriers might have kept regions from becoming offshoring hotspots like India or the Philippines.

"Workers in Indonesia couldn't do some services because they're not fluent in English. Perhaps with better AI translators, they can do that," he said.

Acemoglu also warned that there is a danger of AI becoming so good that it undercuts the need for offshore workers.

"It has to be a sort of rather narrow path — that AI is good enough to do the translation but not good enough to do these pretty low-skilled tasks," Acemoglu said.

'This isn't the cotton gin'

Scott Vincent, CEO of Digital Futures, a UK company that helps people of varied backgrounds land roles in tech, told BI that the global trial of remote work brought by the pandemic proved to companies that they don't need all workers to be together to remain productive. As a result, he said, more organizations are looking at lower-cost locations to tap into workers.

Vincent said he's seen "a real acceleration" of offshoring offerings across industries since the pandemic.

"It poses a significant threat to the labor market," he said.

The threat doesn't stop with workers in expensive markets like the UK or the US getting undercut by someone in a developing market, Vincent said. Offshoring can make it harder for companies to produce home-grown talent that can rise through the organization, he said.

"Generative AI impacts, or can replace, a lot of foundational skills that are learned at the start of one's career. So you've got this double whammy," Vincent said.

Many big companies, he said, see Gen AI as having two horizons. One is the immediate impact on the workforce — the sugar rush of productivity gains. But the other, more consequential effect is what he sees as an "outflow of human capital" due to AI's eventual ability to do much more than it can now.

"It is an exponential trend in terms of the pace at which it's moving," he said.

The time it took for earlier technologies — including automation and robotics — to rejigger the labor market was longer than what we're seeing with Gen AI, Vincent said.

He expects companies' spending on overseas labor will grow. Digital Futures examined spending from the top 100 publicly traded companies in the UK and found that, on average, each spent about £750 million (about $951 million) a year on offshore offices. Vincent said that works out to about 1.2 million jobs in the UK and about £16 billion in lost tax revenue.

But short-term gains overseas may not lead to long-term jobs. Drew Cesario, who consults on revenue operations and marketing systems and is the founder of Botanical Grp, told BI that the fate of some offshore workers who might work alongside AI is likely similar to that of the minders who sat in self-driving taxis during testing phases. "They are training themselves out of a job," he said.

Because of how many tasks AI can take on, Cesario expects there will be widespread job displacement both domestically and internationally.

"I would love to say that there isn't, but this isn't the cotton gin," he said. "It is a general technology versus a specific technology."

How you can use tech

Vincent said governments in developed economies and businesses need to work together to deal with the coming changes to the job market. Businesses that say they're offshoring in part because they can't find the skilled labor they require need to see improvements in education systems to produce better-prepared workers, he said.

Governments, Vincent said, could consider regulating the percentage of a company's workforce that can be offshore.

Coursera's Maggioncalda noted that if you buy a car from another country, you often have to pay a tariff.

"Maybe if you pay wages to another country, you have to pay a wage tariff," he said.

Maggioncalda said it could be a way to help even out the cost of labor.

In the meantime, he said, workers need to consider how they can "add real value in a world where more and more pieces of your job get automated."

"What you need to be thinking about is, 'How can I use technology to automate certain parts of my job?' Maggioncalda said. "Because if you don't do it, someone else is going to do it someplace else in the world."

• A new TransUnion survey found that Gen Zers are the most optimistic about their financial outlook.
• That's even as inflation remains a top concern across all generations.
• It's partly because Gen Zers have more job flexibility, and they're outpacing other generations in wage growth.

Gen Zers are feeling pretty good about their financial situations right now. Older generations can't say the same.

While inflation slightly cooled year-over-year in May, it's still high, and with the Federal Reserve holding interest rates steady yet again on Wednesday, many consumers are feeling strained.

But even with the range of financial stressors, a new survey from credit reporting firm TransUnion suggests some Americans are feeling optimistic about their own conditions over the next year. According to TransUnion's Consumer Pulse Study for the second quarter of 2024 — which surveyed 3,000 adults from April 29 to May 8 — 55% of consumers said they were optimistic about their finances over the next year, expecting to see wage increases.

That was especially true for younger generations — over 60% of Gen Z and millennials said they were optimistic, compared to less than 50% of Gen X and baby boomers.

There's good reason for Gen Zers to be optimistic. The hot jobs market means they have the flexibility to leave their current employment to seek higher wages elsewhere, and they're starting to invest and save for retirement earlier than other generations did at the same age.

Charlie Wise, senior vice president and head of global research and consulting at TransUnion, told Business Insider that "a lot of that optimism comes from a really strong jobs market."

"There are lots of jobs out there for people that want them, and who is often most positively impacted by that is the younger consumers, those consumers who have the flexibility to say, 'If I don't like where I'm working, if I don't like what I'm earning right now, I'm going to walk across the street and probably do pretty well," Wise said.

Despite that broad optimism, rising prices are still troubling Americans. 84% of respondents ranked inflation as a top-three concern, a five percentage-point increase over the second quarter of 2023.

Additionally, per the survey, everyday expenses like groceries, gas, and utilities were top of consumers' minds when it came to rising prices, and the other top two concerns were housing prices and interest rates.

Gen Zers have their own specific worries about high costs as well. Many of them are skipping out of college due to student debt, and high rent costs are hitting a lot of them hard, particularly if they don't have the option to live with their parents or a roommate.

But, Gen Z is outpacing other generations when it comes to wages, retirement savings, and homeownership — giving them reason to feel optimistic about their financial futures amid stressful economic conditions.

"Inflation, while it's still top of mind for a lot of people, it's receded significantly from the levels that we saw back in 2022," Wise said. "

"At the same time, we also see consumers are relatively confident about their financial futures," he added, and that "over a majority of them say, 'Yeah, I feel pretty good about me personally, but man, this inflation thing, this is really weighing on people."

How Gen Z can feel good about themselves — but still worry about high prices

BI has previously reported that many aging boomers and Gen Xers cannot retire or are struggling financially in retirement.

According to a recent report from the Alliance for Lifetime Income's Retirement Income Institute, over half of the "peak boomer" cohort — the final cohort of boomers that will start to turn 65 this year — have $250,000 or less in assets, meaning they'll have to run through their savings and rely on Social Security in retirement.

But when it comes to retirement preparation, Gen Z might be ahead of the game. According to a survey last year from the CFA Institute, over half of Gen Z respondents said they were already investing, and 82% of them started doing so before turning 21.

Additionally, a paper from economists at the American Enterprise Institute and the Federal Reserve found that the typical 25-year-old makes over $40,000 annually, which is more than 50% above what boomers made at the same age, adjusted for inflation.

To be sure, although Gen Zers are making more, they also face financial stressors that older generations did not have at the same age. A Pew report from January found that today's young adults are far more likely to have student debt, and they also have more mortgage debt compared to young adults in 1992.

Overall, the TransUnion report said, Gen Z is "the most stable of any generation" in this year's second quarter, citing 45% of them reporting wage increases in the past three months. But they can still feel worried about broader economic conditions.

"When you look at consumers and their sentiment about their personal finances, when they see wage gains, for a lot of consumers, that to them feels earned. I worked hard, I deserved that. I got that raise because I earned it. Inflation is something that is inflicted on them. It comes from outside of their control. There's nothing they can do about that," Wise said.

"And that's why, even if prices are up 5% and their wages are up 5%, I feel really good about the 5% that I'm making, but it feels like someone just took that away from me in the form of inflation," he added. "And that's got people not just concerned but, in many cases, pretty upset."

• Sam Dogen and his wife retired in their 30s, raising two kids on a nearly $300,000 budget in San Francisco.
• Dogen and his wife pull in well over six figures from passive investments and side gigs.
• Their current expenses nearly equal their net income, though they may soon face a $60,000 gap.

Sam Dogen and his wife both retired in their mid-30s, haven't had a full-time job since the mid-2010s, and are raising two kids in San Francisco on a budget of nearly $300,000.

During their careers, they frequently saved over 80% of their income and put most of their money into passive investments to achieve financial independence — meaning they could stop working and still have enough for their future expenses. After they both retired, which Dogen said is rare in the financial independence, retire early (FIRE) community, they had two kids, worked various side gigs from tennis coaching to Uber driving, and bought a new home in cash.

Dogen shared his budget with Business Insider, which, for his family of four, he expects will be about $280,000 over the next year or so. He said his budget is high because he wanted to provide the best life he could for his kids before they go off to college.

"FIRE-ing with kids is like a superpower, a secret weapon," Dogen said. "FIRE-ing with kids, especially if you really love your kids, you like to spend everything on them, and then doing that in an expensive city is really, really hard."

How a FIRE family budgets

In 2012, Dogen reached financial independence after 13 years in banking, predominantly in San Francisco. By the time he retired, his net worth was over $3 million, which he achieved by "living like a college student" for a few years and saving most of his money. His wife retired in 2015 at 35 and worked part-time until they had their first kid.

Dogen said it took years of planning to figure out how to maintain financial independence with two kids in an expensive city.

He was stressed about buying a larger home in San Francisco last year, selling off some of his investments and going back to part-time work. He said about 70% of his reasons for purchasing the home was to be a loving father so his kids could live comfortably before going to college.

Similar to how he felt after leaving his $250,000-a-year job, he spent a few months feeling buyer's remorse over the home purchase. He contemplated whether he should've continued living frugally after doing so for two decades, though he eventually came to terms with the fact that he made the right decision.

Still, this meant finding other places to cut back on spending. Using last year's budget, his family of four lives off $350,000 in San Francisco, and their net income is $223,840 after a 401(k) contribution, standard deduction, and tax bill. Meanwhile, their total expenses are practically equivalent to their net income.

Their mortgage has the highest annual cost at $46,800, and their property tax is $22,320. Utilities, property maintenance, and property insurance add another $10,260.

Childcare and occasional babysitting for his younger kid cost $29,400, while preschool for his older kid costs $24,000 yearly. The family's food costs $25,548, and they contribute $12,000 to their kids' 529 college saving plans.

Their healthcare costs are $10,200, while life insurance runs them another $2,040. Other family expenses include $7,800 for three family vacations, $6,000 for entertainment, including sporting events and social functions, and $4,200 for baby items.

Their car payment, insurance, maintenance, and gas cost $9,360 combined. They also spend $4,800 yearly on clothing, $3,600 for charity, and $1,800 for a family phone plan.

They anticipate their anticipated expenses starting in September 2024 to be about $280,000, while their pre-tax passive income will be about $275,000, as they sold a lot of stocks and bonds last year to buy a new home. Their unsubsidized healthcare insurance will jump to $2,500 a month, and they're adding $7,600 a month for both of their kids to attend Mandarin immersion school.

Dogen noted they're not technically financially independent anymore, as he estimates there will be a $60,000 gap. He's hoping to accumulate enough capital again in the next few years so there's no passive income deficit.

"I wanted to own the nicest home I could afford while my kids were still at home," Dogen said. "It's not like I'm going to buy a nicer home once they leave college since I'm probably going to downsize. I made a conscious choice to blow up my passive income by like $110,000 to buy a nicer home to provide for my family."

While he's considered moving to a less expensive part of the country, he said he values his strong network of friends and acquaintances, the city's cultural diversity, and the tech scene. He also said he feels safer as an Asian American in San Francisco than in many other parts of the country.

"A lot of people say, well, you can move to the Midwest and cut housing costs by 80%, but as an Asian American, it's not that simple to just go pick up and move to Memphis or Houston; it's diverse, but it's different," Dogen said. "There's this big blind spot for white people who are pursuing FIRE to just say, you can go live anywhere in the country that's lower-cost. I just don't think it's that easy for minorities to do that."

Continuing to work

In the years since retirement, he and his wife wanted to continue being frugal, living minimalist lifestyles. However, they both felt they could afford to invest in life experiences and a quality home. Though Dogen didn't want to return to an office, he felt unfulfilled without working.

Though he retired at 35, he didn't fully leave the workforce. He maintained his blog, which brought in over $1,000 in supplemental income. Between 2013 and 2015, he did part-time consulting, assisting startups in the Bay Area for 15 to 20 hours a week.

He wrote a book, "How to Engineer Your Layoff," which generates about $30,000 annually. He and his wife also slashed their expenses by at least 40% by renting out their home and buying a fixer-upper on the west side of San Francisco.

He also tried lower-income side gigs to follow his desires and continue building toward his actual retirement. He drove over 500 rides for Uber, estimating he made about $30 an hour.

He also worked as a high school tennis coach, making $1,100 a month, which, he said, allowed him to learn how to deal with high school boys years before his son reached that age.

His wife taught piano lessons in her spare time, in addition to helping him edit his book and blog articles.

Still, most of his time has been spent being a stay-at-home dad. Once his younger kid attends school, he's looking for the next challenge.

He's itching to "fill that void" with part-time consulting work in the tech or startup industry, hoping to get more involved with AI companies in San Francisco. He did fintech consulting from November 2023 to April 2024 but stepped away after it became too much work.

"Both kids will go to school full-time, leaving us with 40 hours a week to twiddle our thumbs," Dogen said. "After you've been doing something for a long time and put in so much effort, you're going to feel this trough of sorrow that I've experienced before."

Are you part of the FIRE movement or living by some of its principles? Reach out to this reporter at nsheidlower@businessinsider.com.

• Amazon's typical shopper makes 72 purchases per year from the site, usually with small basket sizes.
• Now, Walmart's CFO says Walmart+ members are increasingly placing orders of just one or two items.
• The Walmart US CEO also said it takes a shopper four orders on average to embrace frequent delivery.

Amazon was able to achieve e-commerce dominance in part through millions and millions of tiny orders.

The typical Amazon shopper makes 72 purchases per year from the site, according to consumer analytics firm Numerator, spending about $37 per order for an annual total of $2,662.

By contrast, Walmart's typical shopper shops a little less frequently and spends more per transaction, and tends to shop more in-store.

But now, Walmart's CFO John David Rainey says Walmart+ members — who spend twice as much as the retailer's typical customer — are starting to act a little more like Amazon shoppers.

"Maybe this is intuitive, but they tend to shop more frequently and also have smaller baskets. They're using us for those one or two items," he said Wednesday at the Evercore ISI Consumer & Retail Conference.

Rainey also said that while Walmart's e-commerce orders historically tilted toward pickup, more shoppers are opting for delivery in recent months.

"I believe that that's a trend that's not going to reverse," he said. "It really speaks to how customers are thinking about this convenience factor for us."

In addition, as America's grocery king, the company is able to glean compelling insights into shopper behavior, Walmart US CEO John Furner said Tuesday during the Oppenheimer e-commerce conference.

"When you look at our baskets by type of channel people shop, and we can see differences," he said. "When you see the ingredients selling, it tells you the intent."

In other words, knowing what's going on with customers' shopping baskets gives a good clue into what's going on in their minds.

Furner also said it takes a shopper four orders on average to embrace delivery.

"After the fourth delivery, we see the patterns change: more usage, more frequently," he said.

• Scott Galloway warned against following a passion, betting the farm, and paying for private school.
• The NYU marketing professor and "Pivot" co-host said rejection is inevitable on the path to success.
• Here are Galloway's four key arguments from a recent podcast.

Almost nobody should try to turn their passion into a career, bet the farm on a single investment, expect to escape rejection in life — or pay for private school, says Scott Galloway.

Galloway is a marketing professor at NYU Stern and a host of podcasts like "Pivot" and "The Prof G Show." He offered some frank and surprising advice to young people on a recent episode of the "Modern Wisdom" podcast.

1. Passion comes later

The author and founder of multiple startups including L2 and Red Envelope emphasized that chasing a passion rarely pays the bills.

"Just keep in mind that the person telling you to follow your passion is already rich usually, and they made their billions in iron ore smelting," he quipped.

Instead, Galloway advised working hard to hone a talent that lets you pursue a career you can excel in, but in an industry with ample jobs.

"Find something that you're naturally good at, that you could become in the top 10% or top 1%, in an industry that has a 90%-plus employment rate, and focus on it," he said.

The business guru said that people become passionate about careers that provide them with status and economic security, and allow them to meet the demands of other parts of life.

"As you get older, you become really passionate about taking care of your kids," he said. "You become really passionate about doing wonderful things with your spouse, taking care of your parents, and your priorities change."

2. Spread your bets

Galloway said he never wagers more than 3% of his net worth on a single investment. He explained that diversifying your portfolio allows you to shrug off losses from bets that don't pay off.

"It's a bullet to the chest when it goes to zero, but I've got Kevlar," he said. "Yeah, it knocks me off my feet, but then I get up and I've got a bruise and I'm like, I'm fine.

"Nothing's ever critical, much less fatal," he continued. "Whereas before, when I got shot in the chest in 2000 with the dot-com explosion or implosion, and the great financial recession in 2008, I almost never could get up again."

3. Prepare to hear 'no' a lot

Putting yourself out there and asking for a job or date is often the only way to snag the position or partner you want, but it carries the risk of being turned down. Learning to shrug off a "no" is an important life skill.

"All you need is one good mentor, a few good friends, one wonderful mate, one business that works," Galloway said. "But to get there means putting yourself in a position of rejection over and over and over."

"You're Kanye or Madeleine Albright or Stephen Hawking, you're going to be fine," he continued. "Assume you are not that person. A much more reliable route to success is just resilience and an ability to eat shit."

4. Save, don't spend — even on your child's education

Galloway argued that paying a ton of money to send a child to private school isn't the best option for many families.

If their goal is to give their kid a better life than they had, he said, sending them to public school and investing the cash they would have spent in a low-cost index fund for the long term is a better idea based on historical returns.

"Assume you are wrong," Galloway said. "You sent that kid to public school and you screwed up. They didn't get into the best college. They ended up with a mediocre career. They have trouble buying their first home.

"They can't live the life that you got to lead or that you really hoped for them," he continued. "Here's what's going to ease your pain. If you were disciplined and reinvested that money you would have spent on Grace Church, by the time they are 35, you'll have $5.3 million to give to them."

Last week, my friend Robbie and I cycled along a bike path for about three miles, then locked our bikes and walked through brush to a small beach. No one was around, so I had a nude dip, and afterward, we sat on a rock and talked.

Robbie is my only bicycling friend, and soon we'll be cycling even more, because we both recently acquired spiffy new electric bikes. I got to know her through another friend whom I met on a retreat. Getting "out there" and circulating is one way I make friends.

Creating friendships is harder as you get older, but it's important

I'm 72 years old, and in my experience, making friends when we're older takes more initiative and creativity. We may be retired, divorced, or widowed, or have moved closer to our kids, knowing no one and having to start over.

When my husband Barry and I moved to Eureka, California, 23 years ago, we knew nobody. But over the years, we've found ways to make friends in a few different ways.

Look for people with similar interests

My friend Beth, whom I met at a meditation group, is my oldest contact in Eureka. One day I ran into her and discovered she worked five minutes away from our apartment. Barry and I invited her for lunch, and she and I discovered we had more in common, including the fact that we had both grown up partly on the East Coast and that our parents lived in the same county.

I made another friend at a Spanish-language meetup. Because Barry and I spend winters in Guanajuato, a city in central Mexico, I wanted to become more fluent in the language. At the meetup, I asked if anyone would like to meet regularly and chat in Spanish. Ever since, Sue and I have met every week to walk and talk — although, I confess, as we shared more and more about our lives, we reverted to English (so much for practicing).

Always be open to new connections

I keep an eye out for potential candidates because I've lost friends to moves and deaths. I'll ask someone out for coffee and see how it goes. Occasionally I end up wondering why I bothered, but usually I'm glad I did, because even if the connection doesn't turn into a friendship, it's worthwhile. A few years ago, for example, I discovered that a woman I'd invited out for coffee earlier was an accomplished painter. Since then, I've developed my own watercolor practice, and she has become a supportive mentor.

Last week, my yoga teacher mentioned that she was studying yoga therapy. Curious, I asked her if we could have tea so I could find out about it. I don't know if we'll become friends, but if nothing else, I'll learn about a kind of therapy I'd never heard of.

Stay connected with old friends online and in person

While I was growing up, my family moved a lot, so I treat old friends as my roots. I sleuth around on the internet, where I've found two pals from my teen years who I'd lost touch with.

A few years ago, a writer friend from high school helped me edit an essay I wrote about the death of my teenage brother. She leads writing retreats in Mexico, so we share a love not only of writing, but of Mexico.

Recently, I sent her a few questions — about what she's currently focusing on, reading, how her family members are doing, and so on — which I also answered. The interchange turned out to be both illuminating and fun.

Focus more on individual friends than couple friends

Barry and I don't have many couple friends, and for a long time it bothered me that we've rarely been part of what our single friends call the "couple culture." But I find couple friends to be overrated — a four-way quadrant dynamic is usually less intimate than a one-on-one or three-way connection. Generally, he has his friends, and I have mine, and occasionally they overlap, and that works just fine for us.

Mulling over my friends past and present, I think of the message I learned from the round we used to sing in Girl Scouts when I was 9: "Make new friends, but keep the old / one is silver, and the other gold." This timeless truth still applies to my life today.