Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Road to robo-car future filled with costly potholes

Road to robo-car future filled with costly potholes

QNX (BlackBerry) concept vehicle. (Handout) Every week it seems another news item heralds the imminent demise of the human-operated automobile. Latest to the party is Canada’s BlackBerry, which aims to recast itself as a maker of software for autonomous cars. That’s fine.

But why the rush to robo-cars? Surely it can’t be consumer demand. Surely it can’t be economic or political necessity. Surely it can’t be driver and pedestrian safety. Oh wait: Maybe it’s corporate greed.

I enjoy driving. I can’t imagine feeling anything but terrified in an autonomous bubble car, piloted through rush-hour traffic by circuitry, a sensor array and […]

Automation: The Real Job Killer of American Manufacturing, Part Two.

Automation: The Real Job Killer of American Manufacturing, Part Two.

In Part 1 , I stated that the real job killer of American manufacturing is robots, not the Chinese or Hispanics. Manufacturing is a good starting point to look at the impact of technology because manufacturing accounts for 12.5 percent of total U.S. GDP and nearly 9 percent of U.S. employment according to the most recent report from the Economic Policy Institute.

As innovation in automation and technology continues to develop, robotics will become cheaper, artificial intelligence will improve, and more sectors of our economy will experience similar transformations to those in manufacturing. A well-cited study from Oxford University analyzed […]

‘Routine’ jobs in U.S. are disappearing, hurting middle class: report

'Routine' jobs in U.S. are disappearing, hurting middle class: report

"Routine" jobs that have been the backbone of the middle class, such as welding, are disappearing. (File)

"Routine" jobs — those based on a relatively narrow set of repeated tasks — have long been a driver of middle-class employment. Think bank teller, factory worker or welding-machine operator.

Those jobs, according to research from a trio of economists, have been disappearing over the past few decades , prompting many displaced workers to either accept lower-paying low-skill manual work or simply drop out of the workforce. It’s one of the country’s most worrying economic trends, writes The Wall Street Journal , and […]

OPINION: Robots could put most humans out of work. What then?

OPINION: Robots could put most humans out of work. What then?

By Sean Welsh, researcher in robot ethics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Robots will replace many humans: perhaps most humans in the workplace.

Automation has been eliminating human jobs since the Industrial Revolution. Human drivers will soon become obsolete, along with human bricklayers. Indeed even high-status “cognitive” jobs in law and medicine are threatened by robotic replacements.Oxford Business School writers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne predict massive technological unemployment over the next 20 to 30 years. Something like half to three-quarters of existing human jobs are “vulnerable to automation” they say.The question is: will new jobs be created […]

The real reason Ford abandoned its plant in Mexico has little to do with Trump

The real reason Ford abandoned its plant in Mexico has little to do with Trump

The frame of a 2015 Ford Mustang vehicle moves down the production line at the Ford Motor Flat Rock Assembly Plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, U.S. August 20, 2015. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook/File Photo Ford chief executive Mark Fields announced Tuesday the automaker was ditching its plans to open a factory in Mexico and instead expanding a Michigan plant, creating 700 more local jobs.

The next wave of workers in Flat Rock will build mostly self-driving and electric cars, including a hybrid Mustang. Unlike manufacturing roles of decades past, though, the jobs will likely require computer literacy and more than a high […]

English is a life skill

English is a life skill

The advent of society can be traced back to the formation of groups of human beings who had common ways of expressing themselves.Whether through commonality of expression, through the sounds they made, or gestures, or in their behaviour while chasing down prey or resolving conflicts, human beings found a way to communicate successfully with one […]

The evolution of functional societies came about through the evolution of languages through which messages could be communicated by one and interpreted by another. The advent of society can be traced back to the formation of groups of human beings who had common […]

Who Will Be Left Behind From The Factory Of The Future?

Who Will Be Left Behind From The Factory Of The Future?

Who will the future factory not need?

Most production workers and virtually all administrative, office and managerial personnel.

Automation takes out the production worker jobs, as has been the case over the last 40 years. Artificial Intelligence will take care of the rest.What will be different from the onslaught of automation which has progressively and at an increasing rate eliminated many jobs during the last 200 years is that new types of jobs will not be created in sufficient numbers to employ the unemployed. Nor will the unemployment occur spread by occupation in such a way as to distribute the pain […]

Routine jobs vanishing and it’s all technology’s fault? Hold it there, sport

Routine jobs vanishing and it's all technology's fault? Hold it there, sport

We’re being encouraged to do different work and not everyone can keep up, study shows

Routine jobs are disappearing, pushing less educated workers toward either lower-paying non-routine jobs, unemployment, or non-participation in the labor market.

The automation of routine work by technology is partially responsible, though its role is relatively small, according to a paper [paywalled] published last month through the US National Bureau of Economic Research.The paper, "Disappearing Routine Jobs: Who, How, and Why?", coauthored by Guido Matias Cortes, Nir Jaimovich, and Henry E Siu, attributes about one third of the decline in routine employment over the past four […]

Solution to automation and the unemployment and wealth disparity it creates (VIDEO)

Many fear automation. Here is the truth, automation is the result of a knowledge base created and paid for by us all. As such we should not fear it but benefit from it. Automation is a good thing we should all benefit from

Automation is a good thing. But we need to ensure that our government passes the appropriate laws to ensure that it does not become the next competitor to labor.

The subject of the last Politics Done Right show of 2016 was supposed to be about why Republicans had to kill Obamacare quickly. It evolved into the discussion […]

Digital Technologies for the Greater Good | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #DigitalTransformation

Digital Technologies for the Greater Good | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #DigitalTransformation

Adam Smith wrote about rational self-interest, which posits we work together for the greater good when it benefits ourselves. Does this concept translate to robots, automation and employment? I think it does.

I believe most of us would agree that replacing large numbers of humans with machines that result in wide scale unemployment and suffering is not in our rational self-interest. Having massive numbers of jobs terminated by the Terminator does not result in a safer, healthier civilization or vibrant economy; therefore, it is not in our best interest.

Just because something is possible, does not mean it is good. A […]