Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Protecting unorganised labour

Protecting unorganised labour

THE HANS INDIA | Jul 23,2018 , 04:20 AM IST Jobs in the organised sector are shrinking. Automation in the manufacturing sector and use of Artificial Intelligence in the services sector is reducing the demand for labour. This makes it necessary for us to think of ways to increase the incomes of the large number of our citizens working in the unorganised sectors. The government is considering instituting a scheme for providing retirement benefits, health, old-age pension, disability, unemployment and maternity benefits to the workers in the unorganised sectors.

The difficulty in this proposal is that the government will have […]

Future-Proof Your Career?

Future-Proof Your Career?

“Robots are coming for our jobs,” writes GQ ’s John Naughton. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” in the words of Forbes’ Insights Team, “will upend how all of us work, from interns to top executives.” “But there may be a way to future-proof your career,” says Rebecca Searles of Quartz . With the growing trends of automation, globalization, and robotics, many thought leaders around the internet are pushing some serious doom and gloom. The reasoning goes like this: the job force is changing, your job might get fazed out, you don’t want to get fazed out, adopt these X steps […]

Robot Bartenders and the Future of Work

Robot Bartenders and the Future of Work

Higher ed seems to be a hotbed of worry about a robot-driven jobless future. This is at least true of the edtech people with which I hang around.

Go to any conference that is supposed to be about online learning and educational technology, and you will hear a good deal of conversation about robots.

Worries will be expressed about driverless cars taking all the driving jobs. A recent MIT Technology Review article pointed out that 3.8 million Americans make their living driving, including 1.7 million who drive trucks. Goldman Sachs estimates that self-driving vehicles will eliminate 300,000 jobs a year, once […]

Artificial intelligence: Relax, Flippy the robot is not about to steal your job

Artificial intelligence: Relax, Flippy the robot is not about to steal your job

‘Sophia the Robot’ is seen on stage before a discussion by Hanson Robotics about Sophia’s multiple intelligences and artificial intelligence at the RISE Technology Conference in Hong Kong. Photo: AFP It is debatable whether Ned Ludd ever existed. But the movement he gave his name to certainly did. In the early 19th century, Luddite mobs of English weavers took to smashing the new automated looms they blamed for threatening their livelihoods.

Today, Luddite fears are seeing a resurgence. Admittedly, no one is yet torching factories full of industrial robots or taking their baseball bats to banks of computers running “artificial […]

Will robots take this job? Not bleepin’ likely

Will robots take this job? Not bleepin’ likely

Jared Nelson I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired in one direction or another, so I thought I’d see if I could find an online robot to handle my column-writing duty this week.

Unfortunately, there weren’t that many bots lined up to handle the task.

Sure, there were a few that seemed sort of promising, if I needed a story to just explain a bunch of numbers or compile some basic info on something that happened.But that’s not what this is about. This is about thinking, and feeling, and speculating, and dreaming, and putting all that into some kind of coherent form and […]

Obama: Tech Is Biggest Challenge To Employment But Also Africa’s Biggest Entrepreneurial Enabler

Obama: Tech Is Biggest Challenge To Employment But Also Africa's Biggest Entrepreneurial Enabler

Despite the advances it has enabled, technology is the biggest threat to employment, says former President Barack Obama.

Speaking at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg, he said economic forces and globalisation “powered by new technologies” helped the world in the last few decades prosper and “unleashed entrepreneurial talents”. He has previously praised how Africa has used technology, especially mobile, to be more innovative.

Giving his highest profile speech since he left politics, Obama used the occasion to its fullest in a stirring talk exemplifying the power of economic growth and globalisation to uplift people’s lives. But warned about the […]

Why automation is more than just a job killer

A new study by PwC suggests that AI and related technologies could result in minimal net job losses. But isn’t technology supposed to eliminate the need for human labour? How can automation occur and yet not make a dent in overall job numbers?

The answer is that automation comes in many guises. While the media is fixated on machines that substitute for humans, less attention is paid to those that augment labour. And seldom is it recognised that machines might in effect create tasks, doing work that was never done by a human previously.

At least four types of automation can […]

Is The Job Market As Good As It Was At The End Of The Clinton Administration?

Is The Job Market As Good As It Was At The End Of The Clinton Administration?

The U.S. economy is going strong nearly a decade after the Great Recession. The unemployment rate was 4.0 percent in June 2018, and fell even lower earlier in the year (3.8 percent in May 2018) before ticking up as new job seekers entered the labor force.

In fact, the job market is now better by numerous measures than it was before the Great Recession. Unemployment has only been at or below 4.0 percent twice since 1960: from 1966 to 1969, and during the economic boom at the end of the Clinton administration in 1999-2000.

Back then, on Jan. 7, 2000, Marketplace […]

No Robo-Apocalypse

No Robo-Apocalypse

It is now conventional wisdom to think that rapid automation and advances in artificial intelligence will eventually render most professions obsolete, ushering in an age of mass unemployment. But there is no economic law that says workers must lose out when new innovations are introduced.

DURHAM – The new Gilded Age is here. As the rich and powerful collect the most advanced technological gadgets, average workers are increasingly concerned about the “ rising tide of automation .”

There is plenty of fodder for a narrative about the inevitable large-scale displacement of workers by robots. Proliferating reports assert that technological unemployment will […]

Building an AI safety net

Artificial intelligence and related technologies will create as many jobs as they destroy in the UK over the next 20 years, according to PwC. The consultancy says its current forecasts suggest that the overall net effect of AI on UK jobs may be broadly neutral.

The economic sectors set to see the largest net increase in jobs due to AI over the coming two decades include health (+22%), professional, scientific and technical services (+16%) and education (+6%), according to PwC forecasts .

However, there’s bad employment news for others. The largest net long-term decreases in jobs will be in manufacturing (-25%), […]