Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Tech Guru Breaks From The Pack, Says Automation Will Create MORE Jobs

Tech Guru Breaks From The Pack, Says Automation Will Create MORE Jobs

By Eric Lieberman

Tech guru and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said Tuesday that automation, like the technology embedded in self-driving cars, will not take away available jobs but will actually create more.

“It’s a Luddite fallacy. It’s a recurring panic,” Andreessen said during a conference hosted by Recode, specifically referring to the oft-professed concern that automation is bad for the country and the world. “This happens every 25 or 50 years — people get all amped up about ‘machines are going to take all the jobs’ and it never happens.”Andreessen used particular historical references to help corroborate his contentions.People, especially horse […]

The Future Is Here: Time for States to Lead

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” — William Gibson

Gibson, a science fiction writer, is right. The “future”— the automated, integrated, global economy — now unevenly distributes advantages and disadvantages. Those with power and wealth have benefited to a disproportionate extent. Americans who started with less wealth and less power are often burdened by the changes and reap fewer benefits.

To some extent this tale of the haves and have-nots has always been the case (think the emperors of Rome, Louis XIV, and the aristocracies of the Old World). But historically, America was different. It […]

The Talent Paradox

Phil Fersht wrote a cheerful (not) post this weekend where he asks Is our sole purpose now simply to eliminate people? We spend a couple of decades displacing “expensive” workers because we could find less expensive able ones to do the job. Now we’re getting rid of them altogether just to keep the Buffetts and Elliotts happy? In contrast, I recently wrote about Mike Rowe who points out we have countless unfilled jobs “We’ve got millions of people looking for work and millions of jobs that nobody wants. College graduates are a trillion dollars in debt and struggling to […]

This chart spells out in black and white just how many jobs will be lost to robots

This chart spells out in black and white just how many jobs will be lost to robots

How job predictions apply to 2016 U.S. employment statistics. Black fields are jobs likely to be automated and white fields are jobs that are likely to remain. When robots come for our jobs, the first people to fall will be those working in retail and fast food restaurants as well as the ubiquitous secretaries who are an indispensable part of the corporate world.

It may not happen overnight but slowly, machines are gaining on man’s turf and in a decade or two, about 50% of jobs in existence today will have gone the way of dinosaurs, or in this case, […]

So, Where Are All Those Robots?

So, Where Are All Those Robots?

Jason Lee / Reuters Lots of people think that the robots are coming to steal everybody’s jobs . I even wrote a whole thing about what would happen if they did.

But another story is emerging from several recent papers and columns by economists and economic writers. Instead of a world without work , they say, there is currently more evidence for a world with too much work—and not enough humans to do it all. Rather than high-flying investment in machines and similarly high unemployment, there is strangely low investment and happily low joblessness. How can anybody say robots are […]

Why AI will force businesses to rethink balance between the work of humans and machines

Why AI will force businesses to rethink balance between the work of humans and machines

In their groundbreaking book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee pointed to employment trends to illustrate a workforce that is inarguably affected by automation—and how companies must transform in order to remain relevant.

Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and McAfee, principal research scientist and co-director at the MIT IDE, have follow-up book out in June. And this one pinpoints specific qualities of the "second machine age," which the authors argue is maturing to a point at which technologies are now replacing workplace tasks once considered routine. We are now, they write […]

Will a robot take your job? This website provides an answer (that you probably won’t like)

Will a robot take your job? This website provides an answer (that you probably won't like)

Image: Shutterstock / posteriori Here’s what we know about robots: Robots have taken jobs. Robots are taking jobs. Robots will take jobs.

The question remains, though: How many jobs? Hard to say.

Analysts, futurists, and academics vary in their assessment of just how many jobs (and perhaps more importantly which jobs) are at risk, but they generally all agree: things are going to change.So, with automation and artificial intelligence threatening to eliminate millions of jobs in the coming decades, should you be worried about the impending robot job revolution? There’s a website that will try to answer that question.Aptly titled " […]

Good News, Designers: The Robots Are Not Taking Your Jobs

Good News, Designers: The Robots Are Not Taking Your Jobs

As robots get more and more advanced, the panicked sci-fi claim “the robots are coming for your job!” seems less hyperbolic by the day. According to a 2013 study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, two researchers at University of Oxford, the robots are indeed coming—specifically, for about 47% of jobs in the U.S.

The academic paper, titled The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?, is a bit dense, but thanks to an interactive website built by Mubashar Iqbar and designed by Dimitar Raykov , the results are now easy to explore. The site simplifies […]

Will Robots Take Your Job? Calculate the Risk Online

Will Robots Take Your Job? Calculate the Risk Online

No one is safe from the robot revolution (via Fox) On the surface, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence seems cool . But bubbling underneath is a frightening future, in which grinning robots hand out pink slips to human workers.

Just how likely are you to lose your job to an automated machine? Ask Web-based tool “ Will Robots Take My Job? “—at your own peril.

Developed by Mubashar Iqbal and designed by Dimitar Raykov, the site is based on a 2013 report examining how susceptible 702 occupations are to computerization.“According to our estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at […]

“We Will See Large Job Losses”

Photo: Nilotpal Baruah How serious is the impact of automation on human jobs? Which jobs will be affected first? How is the automation revolution different from the industrial revolution? Business Today’s Rajeev Dubey posed these and other such questions to Paul Raleigh, Global Leader, Growth and Advisory Services, Grant Thornton. Excerpts from the interview:

Q. Where all is automation hurting?

It’s hurting people. It’s going to hurt jobs. There are some big shocks coming which we can see. Automation will provide a shock. It will provide a shock to the middle class, the professional class, which were unscathed by […]