Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

WVU professor: NAFTA renegotiations ‘might even make things worse’ for state

WVU professor: NAFTA renegotiations 'might even make things worse' for state

MORGANTOWN – The devil might be in the details of a Trump administration-renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that could end up hurting West Virginia even if it benefits the rest of the nation, a West Virginia University law professor said during a recent interview.

"West Virginia needs jobs, and NAFTA isn’t the problem," WVU Law Professor Alison Peck said during a The West Virginia Record email interview. "If we focus on fighting NAFTA we will lose our opportunity to demand that the federal government provide real support for business innovation here in West Virginia that will move our […]

Meet tech industry headwinds with the right skillset engines

Meet tech industry headwinds with the right skillset engines

Workers are seen at their workstations on the floor of an outsourcing centre in Bangalore, in this file photo. Reuters File

A technology hawk which bulks up India’s foreign exchange could be slowing down, but a hawk is still a hawk even if it flies low. The fact remains that growth rates have moderated for most IT services companies globally. Each company has a different painpoint (manufacturing, utilities, energy, healthcare and retail, among others) but at an aggregate level this has meant lower growth rate for India’s tech services titans TCS, HCL, Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant.

IT industry body Nasscom’s constant […]

Jack Ma Predicts People Will Work Just 16 Hours Per Week By 2047

Jack Ma Predicts People Will Work Just 16 Hours Per Week By 2047

Jack Ma, the billionaire businessman and chairman of the Alibaba Group, believes that automation will help workers of the future enjoy more leisure time. In fact, he sees a future where people will be working just 16 hours per week by 2047.

Donald Trump and Jack Ma, Chairman of Alibaba Group, speak to reporters following their meeting at Trump Tower, January 9, 2017 in New York City (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

"I think in the next 30 years, people only work four hours a day and maybe four days a week," Ma said this week at a conference in Detroit […]

Bad News: Automation Will Terminate Many Millennial Jobs

Bad News: Automation Will Terminate Many Millennial Jobs

Terminator Genisys Millennials supporting the minimum wage hike trends better rethink themselves, because a new report from Gallup shows that many of those entry-level jobs will be terminated by robots. No telling if they’ll be back. A Gallup study said that 37 percent of millennials are at “high risk” of being replaced by either artificial intelligence (AI) or automation. The news is slightly better at 32 percent for Generation X and Baby Boomers. The five percent divergence rate is because millennials lack work experience, where older generations are more likely to hold higher-ranking positions. The study said that only […]

The World’s Workers Have Bigger Problems Than a Robot Apocalypse

The World’s Workers Have Bigger Problems Than a Robot Apocalypse

The world’s workers seem to be in a bad spot: A recent study found that each new industrial robot displaces six employees. Automation is on the rise in fields from radiology to volleyball coaching . Workers in poorer manufacturing-reliant nations are especially vulnerable, it’s said, because their jobs could soon be done by robots. Yuval Noah Harari, author of the new book Homo Deus , speculates in a recent Bloomberg View column about the rise of a huge, embittered “useless class” living on the dole.

But if work is being automated out of existence, how do you explain a 2.8 […]

The changing business world completely passed me by

The changing business world completely passed me by

Workplace automation is advancing at an ever faster pace With the last few of years of my life spent running a barely-surviving business, I was so busy firefighting there was little time left over to register anything outside the company.

When I finally put my head up, I immediately saw the incredible number of modifications that had happened in virtually every area of our changing business world over the last decade – the world had been transforming fast, for both good and bad. It is already a dramatically different world than it was at the start of this millennium. Video […]

These College Students Are About To See How Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs

These College Students Are About To See How Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs

Much of the discourse about public education revolves around the idea of teaching kids “ 21st century skills ” and prepping them for the jobs of the future. Well, students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will soon get a personal look at the kind of technology that is likely to disrupt their post-graduation employment opportunities.

On Wednesday, the university announced that when students come back to campus in the fall, they’ll be able to ride automated shuttles around its North Campus. Instead of a shuttle with a human driver, students will ride on “two fully-automated, 15-passenger, all-electric shuttles,” […]

Disappearance of Work: QuickTake

Thirteen years ago, two prominent U.S. economists wrote that driverless cars couldn’t execute a left turn against oncoming traffic because too many factors were involved. Six years later, Google proved it could make fully autonomous cars, threatening the livelihoods of millions of truck and taxi drivers. Throughout much of the developed world, gainful employment is seen as almost a fundamental right. But what if, in the not-too-distant future, there won’t be enough jobs to go around? That’s what some economists think will happen as robots and artificial intelligence increasingly become capable of performing human tasks. Of course, past technological […]

Automation’s Destruction Of Jobs: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet…

Automation's Destruction Of Jobs: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet...

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Employers have no choice: it’s innovate/automate or die.

Automation–networked robotics, software and processes–has already had a major impact on jobs. As this chart from my colleague Gordon T. Long illustrates, the rise of Internet technologies is reflected in the steady, long-term decline of the labor force participation rate– the percentage of the populace that is actively in the labor market. The oft-repeated fantasy is that every new wave of technological innovation creates more jobs than it destroys. Not this time: the total number of full-time jobs has stagnated for […]

New Bells and Whistles in Manufacturing Ring up Near Record Output

New Bells and Whistles in Manufacturing Ring up Near Record Output

Ignore the drumbeat for the need to rescue the U.S. manufacturing sector. Manufacturing is not dead; far from it. Manufacturing has long buttressed the U.S. economy in myriad ways, and it seems poised to continue.

What’s changed about manufacturing is not output, but employment. It’s true, the industry has lost millions of jobs, but manufacturing output has surged at the same time and is approaching record levels, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

How does that happen? With thanks to automation, technology, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and robotics. And yes, that […]