Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Inside the hellish workday of an Amazon warehouse employee

Inside the hellish workday of an Amazon warehouse employee

Living

Enlarge Image The labor can be so grueling at Amazon that one worker in Kentucky said she needs four pain meds just to get through the workday. It took just three days of working full time at an Amazon “fulfillment center” outside of Louisville, Kentucky, for Emily Guendelsberger’s body to break down.

She’d been warned by her supervisors that it would be physically demanding. She’d be on her feet for 12-hour shifts, walking a total of 15 to 20 miles through a 25-acre warehouse — as long as seven New York blocks — looking for merchandise to fulfill […]

Is Jeff Bezos Proving the Fed’s De-linking of Unemployment and Inflation?

Is Jeff Bezos Proving the Fed’s De-linking of Unemployment and Inflation?

I’ve written a couple of times over the years about the threat to jobs by technological automation and several pieces of news this week feels make now feel like an appropriate juncture to pick up the thread again. For a primer on the relationship between interest rates, job automation and inflation, have a read of this piece where I discussed some of the considerations facing the Fed. Of importance will be the basic understanding of the traditional interpretation of the Phillips Curve. An economic idea which fairly effectively conceptualised the basic principle that the level of unemployment within an […]

Neo Cab Takes On Uber & Lyft’s Gig Economies Via Near Future Sci-Fi

Neo Cab Takes On Uber & Lyft's Gig Economies Via Near Future Sci-Fi

The gig economy is beginning to define America’s employment system. Uber and Lyft (and others) changed the way people work. There’s the positive – work when you want for as long as you want – and negatives – minimal pay and no benefits. Eventually, that could all be automated. That’s the future Chance Agency’s Neo Cab explores.

“A close friend of mine was a part of the initial Lyft beta (when Uber was still black cars and limos), and we interviewed dozens of drivers, delivery folks and other gig workers to gather ideas about the entire ‘app worker’ space. Driver […]

Artificial Intelligence will kill jobs—and create them

Artificial Intelligence will kill jobs—and create them

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the automation of tasks once done by humans has raised fears about machines putting humans out of work and creating mass poverty. Happily, history has repeatedly proven the doomsayers wrong. While automation has certainly led to declines in entire industries (and employment in those industries), the relationship between automation and overall employment growth has been strongly positive over time.

There are sound explanations for this positive relationship. One, automation increases labour productivity and therefore raises the income levels of workers. Resulting increases in income translate into increased demand for all types of goods and services, […]

Top Four Business Process Outsourcing Trends To Expect In 2019

Top Four Business Process Outsourcing Trends To Expect In 2019

Every business is looking to cut their operating costs, and for many, that means outsourcing their non-primary functions to other companies, or even other countries. However, with the rise of certain new technologies, the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry could be at risk of losing a large portion of its market share.

As it turns out, it’s not just retailers that need to work hard to stay competitive, and BPO companies may find that 2019 could be a painful year for them if they are not keeping up with the industry’s latest trends. As the founder of an outsourced provider […]

3 million women in the UK need to transition to new jobs by 2030

3 million women in the UK need to transition to new jobs by 2030

More than 3 million women working in the UK are forecast to need to transition to new jobs in the coming decade, as digital disruption ramps up amid Britain’s rapidly automating markets. With higher paid, white collar jobs largely still dominated by men, women remain disproportionately concentrated in more repetitive administrative roles, which are particularly in line for automation.

In spite of multiple calls from political, economic and societal experts to promote the inclusion of women in business, the future of many women in the workforce is uncertain. While businesses can benefit significantly from a more diverse workforce, progress […]

Op-Ed: Automation – CEOs love it, but there’s a Catch 22 and 23

Op-Ed: Automation – CEOs love it, but there’s a Catch 22 and 23

A report by The Economist and the world’s major driver of automation, UIPath, has found that CEOs and other C level people love automation. Other surveys tell a very different story of its impact.

Information provided by various sources does generally agree that it’s the top levels of business which are pushing automation , hard and fast. Automation is directly linked to strategic goals and revenue. In short, senior executive around the world are making major commitments to automation as the way forward across a very broad spectrum of major corporations. It’s coming, whether anyone else likes it or not. […]

Will robots take your jobs? Why this is such a hard question to answer

Will robots take your jobs? Why this is such a hard question to answer

In this Thursday, May 25, 2017 photo, an assembly line laborer works alongside a collaborative robot, left, on a chainsaw production line at the Stihl Inc. production plant in Virginia Beach, Va. (John Minchillo/AP Photo) In the past few years, researchers have published report after report after report on how many jobs robots will take over in the future.

Another new report, this one from the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., says that in the next 10 years, more companies could automate the work done by humans now, but that not every place in the United States will be […]

You can’t turn truck drivers into coders, Andrew Yang says of job retraining

You can't turn truck drivers into coders, Andrew Yang says of job retraining

Karen Harris, Bain & Company’s Macro Trends Group managing director, discusses how the growth of automation may eliminate 20-25% of current jobs.

Businessman and 2020 presidential hopeful Andrew Yang is not so optimistic about the future of some workers in a labor force where jobs are being displaced by automation.

While the Silicon Valley insider has warned that as many as 30 percent of all U.S. jobs could be replaced within the next decade, he doesn’t think the U.S. has been focusing on an adequate solution to keep these people from falling behind.In a tweet this week, Yang suggested that job […]

You can’t turn truck drivers into coders, Andrew Yang says of job retraining

You can't turn truck drivers into coders, Andrew Yang says of job retraining

Karen Harris, Bain & Company’s Macro Trends Group managing director, discusses how the growth of automation may eliminate 20-25% of current jobs.

Businessman and 2020 presidential hopeful Andrew Yang is not so optimistic about the future of some workers in a labor force where jobs are being displaced by automation.

While the Silicon Valley insider has warned that as many as 30 percent of all U.S. jobs could be replaced within the next decade, he doesn’t think the U.S. has been focusing on an adequate solution to keep these people from falling behind.In a tweet this week, Yang suggested that job […]