Tag: robot

Valley Voice

Valley Voice

Executive Director & Founder
Kern River Conservancy

For the past month, I’ve heard from many good people in our community who disagree with an Op-Ed I wrote against increasing oil drilling and fracking near the Kern River. My argument boils down to this: oil and energy companies have made the automation of human jobs a key plank off of which to build profits. As the energy companies have acknowledged numerous times, cutting back on employment costs is one way to offset the cost of environmental regulations.
Meanwhile, as I noted in the Bakersfield Californian, the hundreds of jobs produced […]

South Africans are upbeat about new technologies, but worried about jobs

South Africans are upbeat about new technologies, but worried about jobs

Powerful new technologies are emerging that will continue to affect individuals in multiple ways. This has led to references to a Fourth Industrial Revolution – a new era involving the application of digitisation and automation to different areas of society and everyday life. This revolution is one that presents distinct opportunity. But it also presents major risk and human costs.

These changes have become a growing point of discussion in most countries in the world. In South Africa the debate has drawn in policymakers, business and unions. But the voices of average South Africans have been missing from the debate. […]

What do automation and artificial intelligence mean for Africa?

What do automation and artificial intelligence mean for Africa?

During the last four decades, manufacturers all over the world have outsourced production to countries with lower labor costs. American, European, and Japanese firms moved a lot of their production to developing Asia and Latin America, first helping countries like Malaysia and Chile, then others like China and Mexico, and then others like Vietnam and Bangladesh. Today, Chile and Malaysia are high-income economies, China and Mexico have become upper-middle, and Vietnam and Bangladesh have reached lower-middle-income. Africa’s turn was supposed to be next. But the latest round of technologies seems to be dealing Africa’s economic prospects a serious blow. […]

Fed’s Kaplan says inflation likely to stay low even though economy near ‘full employment

Fed’s Kaplan says inflation likely to stay low even though economy near ‘full employment

Robert Kaplan, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, says inflation is likely to stay low. The chief of the Dallas Federal Reserve on Tuesday said inflation is likely to remain low because of vast changes in the economy wrought by new technologies that have severed the historical link between wages and prices.

It used to be that wages rose in a good economy and businesses passed rising labor costs onto consumers through higher prices.

“That was true historically. Not today,” Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan said at an event in Washington, D.C. “Wages and prices are different processes.”Kaplan said businesses have […]

DomainTools expert on smart technology in the cybersecurity industry

DomainTools expert on smart technology in the cybersecurity industry

Corin Imai, Senior Security Advisor at DomainTools, outlines the current perception of automation and AI among cybersecurity professionals across the globe, according to the findings of a recent study, and contextualises the predictions that emerged.

The speed at which technology has been evolving over past decades is enough to justify the fear, deeply embedded in some individuals, that ‘robots will steal their jobs’. Indeed, many professions have already been completely replaced by automation: have you ever thought of becoming a switchboard operator? Or a car manufacturer? Probably not.

The cybersecurity sector, however, has seen a 0% unemployment rate since 2011 […]

I, robot

I, robot

If you visit a website called willrobotstakemyjob.com, you can discover the probability of automation, at some point in the future, rendering your job either obsolete or safe. Since the Gazette is for lawyers, I can save you the bother – it is 4%.

This compares with a mere 0.8% for priests, 11% for journalists, 67% for bus drivers, and 94% for accountants and auditors, which perhaps goes a long way towards explaining why the ‘Big Four’ auditing and accountancy firms are making inroads into the legal space!

The calculation is based on a methodology developed by Oxford University researchers looking at […]

What Happened to Weirton? Part 5: Moving Forward

What Happened to Weirton? Part 5: Moving Forward

A crowd of attendees at the Festival of Nations at the Millsop Community Center in Weirton If someone had a crystal ball, they could tell you exactly what the future holds for Weirton. Sadly, there are no magic tools to make this a short story. But, with a bit of help from the gift of gab, I’ll tell you about the current trajectory of the area.

As it’s already been established, Weirton Steel offered a seemingly unbreakable backbone of employment, high wages, and community identity to the city and the nearby stretch of the Ohio Valley. The mill helped Weirton […]

Axios Future

Axios Future

Welcome to a special edition of Future. Six years ago, two little-known researchers from Oxford University came out with a startling and controversial paper : By their calculations, 47% of American jobs were vulnerable to automation. With their frightening outlook, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne ignited everything from robot hysteria to outraged denunciation, the latest in a cycle of visceral emotion that has accompanied every wave of new technology since before the Industrial Revolution.

Frey’s new book: " The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation " pivots off of the now-famous 2013 paper to […]

‘Cruel changes’ ahead as automation comes for employment, Forrester says

'Cruel changes' ahead as automation comes for employment, Forrester says

Credit: Adobe Stock Dive Brief:

By 2030, automation will cut jobs by 29% while contributing as little as 13% to job creation, according to Forrester’s Future of Work report .

Automation will disproportionately impact digital laggards because non-digital workers will be unable to upskill at the rapid pace of change, according to the report. Companies already have a portfolio of intelligent technologies used for automation, though right now the use cases are fragmented and small. Eventually automation will stretch further into new use cases, risks and rewards, according to the report. Designed for 60-second consumption, the CIO Dive newsletter […]

Economists Predict the Automation Takeover Will Be Bleak

Economists Predict the Automation Takeover Will Be Bleak

Close this ad Economists have long waved off the concern that robots are coming for jobs by reassuring those in white collar positions that the takeover will only involve blue collar jobs. As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, however, they are able to perform tasks that are still rather mundane but require some sort of cognitive function. This means that the jobs many experts promised to be safe, are now at risk, The Guardian reports, and lower-income areas will be the most vulnerable.

In fact, high-end consultancy Oxford Economics wrote a report titled How Robots Change the World in which […]