In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state's failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.
One way to become more attractive as an employer to millennials is to offer different kinds of contracts - not only the classical contract of indefinite duration, but also to be open to having more contractors and flexibility.
America has two clear tiers of workers: contractors and employees. The former have few regulatory protections; the latter have many.
Autonomous tractors would enable a farmer to focus on the work that matters the most on a farm.
Our education system has succeeded so far in teaching generations to do different routine tasks. So when tractors displaced farming labor, we taught the next generation to work in factories. But what we've never really been good at is teaching a huge number of people to do non-routine creative work.
After I joined Google and stopped working on robots - I'd built some self-driving tractors on farms in the meantime - I was always tinkering and playing with robots at home and just as a hobby.
When we went into World War II, I was a tractor driver then. I drove tractors on the plantation. So when they start calling people my age, 18, up, I was one they called.
In the countryside, you're always hearing sheep, birds, tractors and farm equipment.
At the White House, everybody works for the same person. They're all part of the same company. But on Capitol Hill, they're all independent contractors. They all work for themselves. That's a formula for getting news.
Whenever people in Washington complain about spending cuts, they mean spending cuts that would affect defense contractors. They want to massively increase spending cuts everywhere else in the budget.
