Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Beware the Universal Basic Income

Beware the Universal Basic Income

Some people just don’t know when to quit.

Despite the historic failures of Communism, and recent rebukes to socialism such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, the far left has concocted yet another harebrained scheme aimed at ensuring that society remains forever dependent on the meager allowances of government.

This latest leftist incarnation, known as Universal Basic Income, is little more than socialism on steroids — it grants every citizen, regardless of employment status, social status, or income the same government stipend on which to (supposedly) live.The collectivists’ boogeyman this time around is technology, specifically the idea that automation […]

IT firms will have to automate low-end jobs to tide over US visa gag

IT firms will have to automate low-end jobs to tide over US visa gag

Donald Trump It will see domestic IT firms hiring more Americans, increasing offshoring, automating low-end jobs to save margins; It will crimp their margins by 2%-3%.

US President Donald Trump’s administration tightening the H-1B visa programme rules on Tuesday is likely to push domestic information technology (IT) services firms to hire more Americarease offshoring and automate low-end jobs as they try to protect their margins while adapting to the new US immigration regime.

Trump Tuesday signed an executive order for making the H-1B visa programme more stringent to stop "visa abuses"."Right now, widespread abuse in our immigration system is allowing American […]

Why CIOs should care about robots stealing jobs

Why CIOs should care about robots stealing jobs

Credit: Thinkstock There’s a lot of talk these days about how robots, software, and artificial intelligence will (or won’t) steal jobs. On one side of the debate you find denialists, like U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who believes that widespread impact on jobs is “50 or 100 years” away. On the other side, you find steadfast pessimists: Analysts who believe that robots will replace as many as half the jobs in the economy, like Oxford scholars Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, or Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots.

Each of these views holds elements of truth, but both […]

Why Getting A Head Start on Automation Is Necessary

Why Getting A Head Start on Automation Is Necessary

There’s been a lot of talk recently about Donald Trump’s lack of concern with artificial intelligence. Trump has ignored mentioning AI in any economic context, instead focusing on protecting American workers from foreign competition . Tactical decisions like this, in my opinion, could have far-reaching negative consequences for American innovation and the American economy in the long run.

Here are a few reasons why Trump’s stance is troubling:

Self-Driving Cars: Trump gets to choose who heads the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency. This will have a real impact on how self-driving cars are regulated over the next 4 years . […]

Mining for jobs in an automated future

Mining for jobs in an automated future

While politicians clamour to ‘bring jobs home’, automation is increasingly taking those jobs away with the mining industry being the best example.

In 2015, McKinsey looked at the effects of automation in various US industries and found the production component of mining could lose over 80% of its jobs in coming years.

In a piece for Diginomica this week , I looked at a case study featuring Western Australia’s Fortescue Metal Group (FMG) from the recent AWS Summit in Sydney.When Fortescue planned their Solomon groups of iron ore mines in the Pilbara region of North-Western Australia in 2010, they estimated […]

Investment in robotics boosts jobs rather than taking them away

Investment in robotics boosts jobs rather than taking them away

As regular readers of my blogs will know, I’m in the more optimistic camp when it comes to the impact automation will have on both the economy, but also the labor market. Indeed, I wrote recently at Forbes about a recent study that examined the role of technology in so called ‘jobless recoveries’. The aim was to explore whether technology was the main reason behind the apparent lack of new jobs created even as economies recover from slumps.

The paper reveals that whilst economic recoveries in previous decades would usually involve average increases in employment of around 5% per year, […]

Opinion: Can humans compete with technology in the workplace?

Opinion: Can humans compete with technology in the workplace?

Since the Industrial Revolution, the fear of machinery and technology destroying jobs has gripped society.

At the turn of the 20th century, automobiles brought forth a new era of transportation, simultaneously rendering blacksmiths and wainwrights obsolete. The combine harvester, also an invention of the early 20th century, obliterated demand for agricultural human capital in the U.S.

The examples are endless, but these two exhibit a larger point: An underlying dread of technological advancement has persisted throughout centuries, and the sense of panic remains.Robotics and artificial intelligence threaten to render human labor an artifact of some inefficient past — a semblance of […]

Brave New World – How Technological Innovation Will Shape the Next Decade

Brave New World – How Technological Innovation Will Shape the Next Decade

HAVE you ever read an article about a new gadget that is set to take over the world?

If you have but the most tenuous grasp on technology affairs, you’ll have been bombarded with content about Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Internet of Things, Automation and many other topics. You’ll have been left with your fair share of questions.

These are mine: How can I know what tech trend will stick around? Is there a way of knowing how our lives are likely to be affected in the next 10 years? Will our future be a mashup of the Matrix with iRobot? […]

Digital life: We’re clueless about the coming robot job takeover, report says

Robotics and artificial intelligence are retooling the workplace faster than we can make sense of it.

What should we do, for instance, with the taxi drivers and long-haul truckers who could see their livelihoods evaporate with the evolution of self-driving vehicles?

Researchers say not only is the world changing at break-neck speed, but that sociologists and economists can’t keep up with what the fallout will mean for the workplace.“Policymakers are flying blind into what has been called the fourth industrial revolution or the second machine age,” wrote Tom Mitchell and Erik Brynjolfsson in an essay in the journal Nature this month. […]

A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity

A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity

View & Download Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are ushering in a new age of automation, as machines match or outperform human performance in a range of work activities, including ones requiring cognitive capabilities.

In this report, part of our ongoing research into the future of work, we analyze the automation potential of the global economy, the factors that will determine the pace and extent of workplace adoption, and the economic impact associated with its potential. Automation of activities can enable businesses to improve performance, by reducing errors and improving quality and speed, and in some cases […]