Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Taxing Robots Is a Great Way to Make People Poor

Taxing Robots Is a Great Way to Make People Poor

(Bloomberg Opinion) — Of all the ideas that presidential candidates are offering to address the country’s economic woes, here’s one of the worst: Taxing, or even outlawing, automation.

Many people worry about the prospect of automation causing mass unemployment. This might be justified in the science-fiction future, if machines learn to do anything a human can do. But there’s no sign that the robot takeover is happening anytime soon.

First of all, despite rapid progress in industrial automation, most Americans still have jobs. This means that the economy is creating plenty of new jobs to compensate for those eliminated by robots. […]

Artificial Intelligence: It’s Complicated And Unsettling, But Inevitable

Artificial Intelligence: It’s Complicated And Unsettling, But Inevitable

If artificial intelligence came to life today and set up a facebook profile, it would have a relationship with all of us, and our relationship status would be "It’s Complicated". Although we don’t see the motivation or reasoning behind the algorithms we spend so much time with, they are doing great things for us, and so we love them. Unfortunately, we don’t necessarily understand them or how they will change us. By we, I don’t just mean the general public. I mean software developers, their managers, and even machine learning engineers. AI does some things well and some things […]

Technology Creates More Jobs Than It Destroys

Technology Creates More Jobs Than It Destroys

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash American presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Bill de Blasio are very concerned about robots taking people’s jobs. Yang has been touting his $1,000 per month "Freedom Dividend" for every American adult since the beginning of his primary run to offset the potential job losses due to automation. De Blasio, on September 5th, published an op-ed published in tech magazine Wired proposing not only a "robot tax" but also the creation of a new federal agency to "oversee" automation and issue permits to businesses who want to increase their automation levels.

Machines will replace humans. […]

The Technology Trap and the Future of Automation

The Technology Trap and the Future of Automation

Several years ago, an economic study drew attention everywhere from The Economist to Last Week Tonight . Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne’s 2013 paper “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” tried to calculate how many different careers will be automated away in the near future. It concluded that 47 percent of American jobs are in danger. Now, six years later, Frey’s back with a book following up on the groundbreaking study.

The Technology Trap isn’t a direct successor to “The Future of Employment;” more like a prequel. It’s a study of how technology […]

Autonomy and Automation: Work in the 21st Century (Book Series)

The labour market has been hollowed out and the future of work lies in the shadow of political crises. Many have argued that this growing social polarisation is driven by technological change. However, research has not kept up with the speed at which these changes are occurring. Social protections for workers are being eroded across the globe and technology is arguably catalysing this trend. Historically, the loss of employment in one industry has been more than offset by the expansion of employment in other industries. Yet, this employment tends to emerge under different social conditions. Research has often neglected […]

Lifelong learning is the future of work

Lifelong learning is the future of work

As working environments around the world become overwhelmed by technology, a lifelong learning mindset is imperative to close skills gaps that emerge as work evolves. In the year 2030, you may be working in a job that doesn’t even exist yet. We’re not talking about flying cars or developing the world’s first time machine. The requirements, levels and styles of all kinds of work are evolving very fast, which means you need to understand how you can prepare for future roles that may emerge.

There’s no guaranteed way to tell exactly what skills will be needed in the future, and […]

Presidential hopeful Bill de Blasio wants a tax on robots

Presidential hopeful Bill de Blasio wants a tax on robots

Mayor Bill De Blasio wants to hold robots accountable. New York Mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio says American workers need to be protected from automation . In an opinion article published last week on Wired, he said as president he would issue a robot tax for corporations displacing humans and would create a federal agency to oversee automation.

"The scale of automation in our economy is increasing far faster than most people realize, and its impact on working people in America and across the world, unless corralled, will be devastating," de Blasio wrote.

De Blasio would call […]

Keep your job options open and don’t ditch science when choosing next year’s school subjects

Keep your job options open and don’t ditch science when choosing next year’s school subjects

Thousands of Year 10 students are in the process of choosing subjects for their final years of school and half will probably choose to ditch science .

For someone like me who thinks science is one of the most worthwhile things I’ve ever studied, that decision is bewildering.

The downward trend in science enrolments has been watched with concern for decades and is the subject of much research . Read more: Curious Kids: how was maths discovered? Who made up the numbers and rules? But still science continues to be out of favour with teens despite its potential use in a […]

Bill de Blasio’s Proposed ‘Robot Tax’ Is Completely Unnecessary, Just Like His Candidacy

Bill de Blasio's Proposed 'Robot Tax' Is Completely Unnecessary, Just Like His Candidacy

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s latest attempt to jump-start his inert presidential campaign includes a call for a new federal tax on robots. This unnecessary burden on businesses would expand the federal bureaucracy and fund boondoggle projects, and it is based on a faulty understanding of the relationship between jobs and automation.

In an column published last week by Wired , de Blasio outlines how his "robot tax" (his words) would work. Businesses that "eliminate jobs through increased automation" would be required to pay five years of payroll taxes, up front, for every employee replaced by a robot, de […]

Will 2020 be a breakout year for scaling intelligent automation?

Will 2020 be a breakout year for scaling intelligent automation?

A new study suggests that the scaling of intelligent automation may be coming of age, so is RPA finally becoming mainstream? According to a study from Deloitte, 2019 saw a doubling in the number of companies applying intelligent automation — that’s technologies such as robotics process automation, natural language processing and AI — although there is a big overlap with these technologies. (How can you separate AI and natural language processing, how can you process language without AI?). The report also found that executives expect intelligent automation to increase workforce capacity by 30%. Delve deeper into the report, and […]