Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Humans likely to revolt over robot job loses

Humans likely to revolt over robot job loses

Revolution cries Virgin

A senior director for Virgin Australia has warned business leaders that humans might revolt over moves to replace their jobs with robots.

Virgin Australia chairwoman Elizabeth Bryan, speaking at the Australian Institute of Company Directors’ governance summit in Melbourne said that while businesses were rushing to automate labour with robots and artificial intelligence they are likely to find humans revolting.She acknowledged that service sector jobs – representing the biggest employment demographic in Australia – are now losing their immunity from globalisation and automation, but that companies embracing the prospect have hard political and social roadblocks ahead.“Don’t […]

Will you lose your job to a robot? Not if you keep up, NJ experts say

Will you lose your job to a robot? Not if you keep up, NJ experts say

ThinkStock Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not, automation, artificial intelligence and robotics are changing the employment landscape in New Jersey, across the country and around the world.

But it’s not going to happen overnight.

According to Katy George, a senior partner at McKinsey and Co., and a co-author of a new McKinsey Global Institute report, “we already see many examples of companies in New Jersey and beyond accelerating purchases of new robotics that are cheaper, more flexible and safer than ever before, but this will be a decades-long process.”“Many of the promises that this technology […]

Automation is Taking Over One of the Most Popular Professions

Automation is Taking Over One of the Most Popular Professions

Truck driving is the most popular job for people in most US states and the advent of the self-driving truck is going to completely disrupt that profession.

Universal Basic Income is one way to address the upcoming worker displacement that’s coming from automation.

Late last year, I took a road trip with my partner from our home in New Orleans, Louisiana to Orlando, Florida and as we drove by town after town, we got to talking about the potential effects self-driving vehicle technology would have not only on truckers themselves, but on all the local economies dependent on trucker […]

Think your job, your career, is secure? Think again!

Think your job, your career, is secure? Think again!

It’s not just repetitive labour jobs that are losing out to technology.Experts say Canadian workers could be in for some major upheaval over the next decade as increasingly intelligent software, robotics and artificial intelligence perform more sophisticated tasks in the economy. “There will be huge carnage and it is going to happen quickly” . Frank Graves

We’ve seen it in forestry; one machine can replace a hundred lumberjacks. We’ve seen it in construction where one worker with a nail gun can replace a dozen carpenters with hammers. In manufacturing, a dozen robots replace 200 or so assembly line workers. […]

Automation, then and now

Automation, then and now

In the just-released March issue of the Brooklyn Rail , Jason E. Smith compares twentieth-century waves of automation to the new wave of automation that seems to be engulfing the global economy now. In the process, Smith questions some widespread assumptions about automation, including the notion that it necessarily leads to greater unemployment, as well as the idea espoused by some leftists that automation will eventually free us from work entirely. Read an excerpt from Smith’s piece below, of the full text here13 . It may be that the history of capitalism is the history of automation. Warnings about […]

Matt Nolan presents his Top 10 links on the economics of automation

Matt Nolan presents his Top 10 links on the economics of automation

Today’s Top 10 is a guest post from Matt Nolan, an economist at Infometrics , and an author at the blog site TVHE .

As always, we welcome your additions in the comment stream below or via email to david.chaston@interest.co.nz.

And if you’re interested in contributing the occasional Top 10 yourself, contact gareth.vaughan@interest.co.nz.Before writing this I had a search of interest.co.nz for “automation”. I found the following articles as the first 5 links: A top ten by Lena Hesselgrave , an article by Nigel Pinkerton (a colleague of mine), an article from NZIER , and two Top Tens from myself. Finally, […]

Automation and the prospects of economic development

Automation and the prospects of economic development

By Joselito T. Sescon

Technological anxiety has been with us since the first modern industries appeared. The angst toward new technologies is mainly about the fear of widespread substitution and displacement of human labor by machines. Historical experiences in early industrialization have shown that new technologies used in production initially had disruptive effects to labor and existing production assets. However, new technologies also ushered in the birth of new industries, created new jobs, becoming the source of productivity, economic growth and development.

Automation, like most new labor-saving technologies, has an effect of raising the comparative advantage and value of jobs that […]

HR’s Evolving Role In A Robotised Corporate World

HR’s Evolving Role In A Robotised Corporate World

The world is either forever enamoured or worried by the term ‘robot’, which now is also referred to software bots other than the traditional mechanical forms. Studies are predicting that almost 50 per cent of present jobs will vanish over the next couple of decades because of the development in the field of robotics or artificial intelligence. In 2013, researchers at Oxford predicted that nearly half of all jobs in the United States are at high risk of being computerized in the next decade or two. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center finds that 65 per cent […]

Taxation of robots

Taxation of robots

On February 17, Bill Gates set the news agenda around the world by declaring that a so-called "robot tax" should be introduced in order to counteract job losses caused by automation. "Right now," he told online publication Quartz , "the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory has that income taxed. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level."

There is no doubting that Gates’ vision of job displacement is not of a distant dystopian future, but today’s reality: in 2015 expenditure […]

The rise of automated labour calls for a new approach to welfare

The rise of automated labour calls for a new approach to welfare

In January 2017, Finland launched a nation-wide experiment in which 2,000 unemployed Finns will receive €560 per month and will continue to do so even if they find a job. The same month, councils in Fife and Glasgow expressed an interest in creating pilot schemes to test the viability of a universal basic income. The ideal of a universal income is that every adult, whether they are employed or not, should be paid a basic monthly payment from the state. It cannot come soon enough.

Part of the rationale behind such schemes is the looming prospect of job losses due […]