Blog Post #8

I have long been aspiring to work for multi-national companies, and many of the companies I associated with had diversity in human resources, such as employees with various cultural backgrounds. Once I lived in the area where international expats from many countries temporarily rent houses (several months to several years, typically), and I, at that time, wished I would be able to hold the same type of position in future.

When I was working for a holding company, I was under a boss, who got near to his retirement date. The man was sent to more than 23 countries as an expat. He was, by our employer, required to learn foreign languages, cultures, and histories of many different countries, of course. Interacting with so many people having varying socioeconomic backgrounds and value systems, he was mentally strong and showed amazing adaptability to difficult situations in which people normally get bewildered, which was astonishing, considering the fact he was nearly 70 years old at that time. I still remember how he was, and he was definitely one of the individuals who directly inspired me.

Now, living overseas and in an international community, I learn foreign languages every day. I use Duolingo, an famous app for learning basics of foreign languages. First, I honestly did not expect much from this app and was planning to use it as a supplemental learning material. Some reviewers also complain about “rote memorization”.

But I noticed learning a foreign language requires boring repetitions, and this app can help ease this tedious learning processes. The app kept recommending, “making friends”, by following others, but I ignored the notifications first. But now I have been inspired by some people whom I follow and who follow me — we cannot chat or do any direct communication with them, but we can cheer up each other by clicking buttons for our achievements, which is surprisingly encouraging. Also, we can track progresses of “friends”, which makes me stay motivated. Of course, we cannot solely rely on this app — we need to read books in order to understand complex grammatical structures; however, I feel lucky I can use the app and share similar interests with others.

Working globally is difficult sometimes. Conflicts occur and the fundamental resolution is actually not very easy. Building trust is time-consuming and requires so much patience. But still it is rewarding.

Blog Post #7

Since the terminology, “AI”, or Artificial Intelligence had been spawned, we have being seeing the related topics on media and it has been said that the use of AI has been witnessed in many fields now, such as robotics, virtual assistance, SNS monitoring, and so on.

Although the technology probably can save a lot of money for corporations where the majority of their employees are doing tasks that can be easily automated, there are quite strong public opinion and concerns that human beings will be deprived of more and more work by AI in the future.

If we look back on the past, even simple computer programs replaced many tasks that were originally done by more than 1 person manually. When I was very young, I did a part-time job at an accounting firm. The owner sometimes took a trip down memory lane, and then shared her stories about the workplace in the past.

Nowadays, we take it for granted we have office software such as Excel, but at that time, the owner said all the tasks were literally done by hand (e.g. with paper and pencil, and a simple calculator), and one task often required more than one person to be completed. So, the owner used to hire more people — even if the average wage (inflation-adjusted) for each employee was not as high as the one a current employee is entitled to. The owner also said that was like “work sharing”.

Of course, we cannot idealize the past, getting high on nostalgia, but being in a society where more and more things get automated, then people may feel a sort of ostracized.

Although I cannot recall the source, I read a blog article written by a lawyer a couple of years ago. The lawyer insisted that, although nowadays many lawyers often depend on AI technologies for researches, only humans can wisely decide how to effectively use the found information, considering various situations for the ultimate users. Still there seem to be fields AI excels at (e.g. processing a lot of information and extracting only useful ones) and fields humans are good at (e.g. creatively using / combining the information). And I really wish AI can bring positive outcomes for our future.

Blog Post #6

Since the onset of Covid-19 pandemic, so many of us have been getting used to working remotely, utilizing various tools that allow us to communicate online. Even students in non-online curriculum were opting for learning online (and only show up in person for lab sessions, for example). One of my relatives, who is a male in his 50s, has recently been asked to download a chat app for work by his employer. The app is widely used by young people, and he was laughing he never ever expected he would use that type of app. Once he gets used to the app, he finds it more convenient than a regular email — with the app, he can join meetings, send messages, and exchange images of high quality instantly using a camera.

So, we have often been using online meeting tools, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams nowadays. Basically, I think having a casual business meeting over Zoom is a good idea — we can avoid unnecessary commuting, which can save significant amount of time, can get rid of some psychological stress of employees, and also save money (e.g. the use of meeting rooms, extra utilities fees, and so on).

At the same time, I read some downsides of online meetings, especially, when those meetings involve people who have just met. Being unable to fully feel non-verbal cues, eye contacts may be too close (in a human’s vision) and too intrusive on screen. Besides, we may excessively rely on the voice tone of the person to get a feel for the atmosphere of the meeting. All those awkward situations may perplex someone who gets used to (and prefers) meet-ups in person and face-to-face communication. So, establishing genuine rapport may be difficult for some people if the communications are strictly online-based.

Personally, I like virtual meetings; however, I thought I would need to be more careful in how I communicate in those meet-ups.

Reference: “The Disadvantages of Online Meetings” by Ellis Davidson