Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Axios Future

Axios Future

Welcome to Future. Have your neighbors signed up ?

Situational awareness: We are going dark for vacation. Starting Sept. 9, Future will shift back to 2 days a week — where we were in 2018, a response to readers who told us overwhelmingly that, when it comes to the future, less is more.

This is my last day at Axios and my last edition of Future. I’ve received a humbling flood of email from you saying gratifyingly nice things about what Kaveh, Erica and I have done over the last couple of years. Unhesitatingly, the most satisfying part […]

The robots are here, but creativity can fend them off

The robots are here, but creativity can fend them off

There’s no doubt data and artificial intelligence are changing the face of employment. According to a recent study, 45% of American jobs are at risk of being automated within 20 years.

For evidence, look no further than the autonomous vehicle — a technology we already see on our roads. Is it implausible to imagine a world without taxi and ride-sharing drivers, truck and delivery drivers, or ship and airline captains?

Few debate the impact that analytics, machine learning and related technologies will have on nearly every facet of our economy and, as a result, the way we work. Many argue the […]

Labour pains: our rapidly changing workplace

Labour pains: our rapidly changing workplace

While Australian manufacturing never fully recovered from that tumult, the US, at least, had Apple and Microsoft leading the charge as its manufacturing base atrophied, with “Silicon Valley” now a byword for the digital economy. Australia continued, largely, to live off the back of a mining boom driven by China’s historic economic expansion, while investment in innovation lagged, and today is half that of countries like the US and Germany.

We hear a lot about the jobs of the future, usually from American media outlets gushing out a range of blue-sky predictions. What’s the next big thing? What will […]

It’s time to embrace a global revolution in automation

It’s time to embrace a global revolution in automation

WELL PREPARED: The media and gatekeepers of new digital technologies must work together to educate the public. With many finding the rise of automation and artificial intelligence unnerving, it’s important to make education key in alleviating fears

THE concept of widespread automation can seem frightening, somewhat dystopian even, bringing out our internal luddites to protest against something that is seen to be harmful to our future.
The truth is that automation is here and has been for many years; the difference is in how it is approached and is informed by lessons of past industrial revolutions.
“We can call automation […]

Are Adorable Robots Coming For Your Job? ‘It’s Never Happened In The Past’

Are Adorable Robots Coming For Your Job? 'It's Never Happened In The Past'

Jason Margolis/WGBH News About 15,000 robots named “Pepper” are used in Japanese and European banks, fast service restaurants and health care settings. Pepper is now in U.S. bank branches, too — HSBC has them in select locations to help answer basic customer questions and skip the line for the teller. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang is sounding the alarm: the robots are coming for your job.

“Technology is now automating away millions of American jobs. It’s why Donald trump is our president today,” Yang said at the first Democratic primary debate in June. “We automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs […]

‘American Factory’: Obamas’ fly-on-the-wall documentary at Ohio plant addresses challenges of intercultural working environments

'American Factory': Obamas' fly-on-the-wall documentary at Ohio plant addresses challenges of intercultural working environments

On December 23, 2008, a General Motors factory in Dayton Ohio shut shop, rendering thousands of workers unemployed. As the freshly laid-off workers struggled to get employment in the aftermath, a Chinese billionaire brought hope to the town in the form of Fuyao Glass.

The same factory was reopened in 2010 as an automative glass manufacturing factory with Founder and CEO of Fuyao, Chairman Cao Dewang, employing 2,000 of the former GM workers and integrating 300 Chinese workers as supervisors.

Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Grounds Productions’ first venture ‘American Factory’ is an impactful fly-on-the-wall documentary, which begins with a sense […]

Thought travel

Thought travel

Let me begin with an excerpt from the latest book of a great thinker in our time, Yuval Noah Harari:

“On December 7, 2017, a critical milestone was reached, not when a computer defeated a human at chess—that’s old news—but when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 was the world’s computer chess champion for 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. It was able to calculate seventy million chess positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero performed only eighty thousand such calculations per second, and […]

Chan Chun Sing: Gov’t recognizes cost pressures of planned CPF increases on businesses

Chan Chun Sing: Gov’t recognizes cost pressures of planned CPF increases on businesses

Facebook screengrab/ Chan Chun Sing Singapore — At a visit to a local seafood distributor, Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing said that the Government recognizes the cost pressures of the planned increases in the ages for re-employment and retirement, as well as Central Provident Fund (CPF) contribution rates for older workers, announced by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in his National Day Rally speech on August 18, Sunday.

Moreover, he said that the Government will collaborate with the Singapore National Employers Federation and unions in order to aid companies to make adjustments for the changes, as well as […]

History Predicts the Consequences of Today’s Digital Revolution

History Predicts the Consequences of Today’s Digital Revolution

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation In The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation , Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping history of automation from the Industrial Revolution to the current digital age. The Oxford University economist argues that while labor-replacing technologies generate progress in the long run, these advances often have devastating consequences for much of the working population during their lifetimes.

Economists, he proposes, tend to analyze technological history by the fruits it bears us now, rather than the pain it caused in the past. This penchant […]

Advanced Manufacturing Disrupts the Location Process

Advanced Manufacturing Disrupts the Location Process

Broadly speaking, advanced manufacturing can be defined as the inclusion of new, more efficient manufacturing methods enabled by technological innovation. The adoption of technology-driven automation in manufacturing has been omnipresent since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, but the rapid pace of advancements — especially around robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and 3-D printing/additive manufacturing — is changing the industrial landscape faster than ever before. When the time comes to select a physical location for a new advanced manufacturing facility, these technological shifts are manifesting themselves in an updated approach to location strategy, specifically when it comes to hiring profiles, […]