Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Artificial intelligence: friend or foe to employees?

Artificial intelligence: friend or foe to employees?

Source: Depositphotos To some degree, humans are quite predictable.

When faced with a change, our amygdala, the region of our brain that triggers a fight or flight response, will predictably influence human behavior. For example, when your company announces a change like consolidation or layoffs, people will react with either resistance, enthusiasm or worse, ambivalence.

Over the course of American history, we have faced many changes that were initially feared. When Henry Ford released the Model T car, fears from the loss of employment in the horse and buggy “industry” were palpable. Over time, however, enthusiasm replaced fear. Ford had created […]

The Great Myth of the AI Skills Gap

The Great Myth of the AI Skills Gap

One of the most contentious debates in technology is around the question of automation and jobs . At issue is whether advances in automation, specifically with regards to artificial intelligence and robotics, will spell trouble for today’s workers. This debate is played out in the media daily, and passions run deep on both sides of the issue. In the past, however, automation has created jobs and increased real wages.

A widespread concern with the current scenario is that the workers most likely to be displaced by technology lack the skills needed to do the new jobs that same technology will […]

Easynomics: Who are the robots really coming for?

Easynomics: Who are the robots really coming for?

Over the last few years, articles on the robots, algorithms and automation, taking away human jobs, have been regularly making it to the media. Usually, most of these articles paint a picture of a very bleak future, where human beings won’t find jobs that easily.

In this scenario, a large part of our lives will be devoid of meaning, given that human beings do find a lot of meaning in their work. And of course, they will have a problem of not earning enough money.
Having said this, the fear of being roboed, for the lack of a better […]

The misunderstood impact of automation on work

The misunderstood impact of automation on work

Automation’s impact on jobs is one of the most talked-about issues in financial services right now. It’s also one of the most misunderstood.

Augmentation or elimination?

The conversation most of the world is having about the impact of intelligent machines on the workplace has its roots in a paper published in 2013 by two researchers at the University of Oxford. “Technology at Work: the Future of Innovation and Employment,” by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, analyzed hundreds of different jobs for their susceptibility to automation. Alarmingly, the authors concluded that roughly one in two jobs in America is at […]

Emerging Tech Divides Workforce

Emerging Tech Divides Workforce

Technology is spreading throughout the workforce, leaving many people without jobs. Getty Images967522166 Companies are adopting emerging technologies wildly throughout the industry, but for Arizona, it is hard to ignore how much it is growing.

Intel’s $7 billion chip plant is going up in Chandler and Axon is bringing talent from Silicon Valley to Scottsdale to keep up with growing demand. Meanwhile, startups are also flocking to the area as well, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Even though innovation is taking place throughout the state, the vast majority jobs are still in workaday service industries, such as health care, hospitality, retail […]

Automation threatens more than half of all formal jobs in Brazil

Automation threatens more than half of all formal jobs in Brazil

Automation technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) could make more than half of all formal employment vacancies irrelevant in Brazil, according to new research.

The study by University of Brasília (UnB) employed data from a government database used to inform policies around the Brazilian labor market. The database covers 97 percent of formal employment in Brazil and includes information such as workers’ income, educational level and age.

Some 1122 occupations were split into in five groups according to the level of knowledge required to perform the various tasks. According to the research , which also incorporated evaluations from 69 local researchers […]

Everyone is ignoring the most interesting result from Finland’s basic income experiment

Everyone is ignoring the most interesting result from Finland's basic income experiment

© lovelyday12/Shutterstock Giving out money revealed something that flew in the face of a common American philosophy.

Finland recently came out with preliminary results for its universal basic income experiment, and everyone’s talking about them. I’ve been waiting for people to bring up a certain insight found in this study, but as far as I’ve seen, no one has.

The Finnish government gave 2,000 unemployed people each a check for 560 euros a month. The Finns weren’t just being nice: the government wanted to see if giving unemployed people monthly checks, regardless of employment (universal basic income) would make […]

Automation and Jobs: When Technology Boosts Employment

47 Pages Posted: 18 Mar 2017 Last revised: 28 Mar 2018 Abstract

Do industries shed jobs when they adopt new labor-saving technologies? Sometimes productivity-enhancing technology increases industry employment instead. In manufacturing, jobs grew along with productivity for a century or more; only later did productivity gains bring declining employment. What changed? Markets became saturated. While the literature on structural change provides reasons for the decline in the manufacturing share of employment, few papers can explain both the rise and subsequent fall. Using two centuries of data, a simple model of demand accurately explains the rise and fall of employment […]

Super Bowl Ads Suggest Unwarranted Fear of Emerging Technologies

Sunday’s Super Bowl ads showcased many emerging technologies , including artificial intelligence (AI) and robots. The Pringles ad featured a speaker reminiscent of Amazon’s Alexa, and showed that while a digital assistant may accurately list flavor combinations, it cannot actually physically taste the chips. Michelob Ultra narrated the story of an athletic robot that can golf, bike run, but can’t drink alcohol. TurboTax ’s ad showed a robot child saying it wanted to be a TurboTax CPA when it grows up, but a woman rejects that dream and says, “all TurboTax Live CPAs are human beings with real emotions. […]

Slaughter & Rees Report: Whither Globalization and Work?

Slaughter & Rees Report: Whither Globalization and Work?

The world’s two largest economies are engaged in a trade war without clear end. Britain is in the midst of a messy exit from the European Union.

Germany wants to block foreign takeovers of German companies. And worldwide there were more than three times as many restrictive trade measures implemented in 2017–18 as liberalizing ones, according to Global Trade Alert. All of this prompts the question: Is globalization going in reverse?

Not quite. Yes, trade in goods is growing more slowly amidst rising trade barriers in many places. But trade in goods is still growing, and trade in information and other […]