Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Get ready for robolution!

Get ready for robolution!

How industrial robots will shape the work to come

Industry 4.0 is one of the most discussed topic worldwide. All over the world, the race for innovation has become one on the main challenges that nations and companies have to face, working to create new policies able to take into account factors like Big Data, digitization and industrial robots .

According to many, the latter is about to revolutionize every piece of our lives, and is about to transform the world into something where everything is automated and interconnected, where everything is based on digital technologies, and where men and […]

White House: To Prevent AI From Killing Jobs, Educate the Workforce

White House: To Prevent AI From Killing Jobs, Educate the Workforce

Image Credit: jeffedoe/Flickr Earlier this week, a team lead by the Executive Office of the President released a report examining automation’s potential impact on the economy. The findings were far from reassuring, especially for low-skilled workers.

The paper notes that artificial intelligence technologies could lead to economic benefits, but “[t]hose economic benefits, however, will not necessarily be evenly distributed across society.”

The White House said that other researchers have projected potential job losses in the next 20 years at anywhere from 9 percent to 47 percent, and that lower-skilled and lower-paid jobs are likely to be most at risk : Research […]

Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Robots Stealing Your Jobs

Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Robots Stealing Your Jobs

Rogue One , the latest in the Star Wars franchise, has had mixed reviews but features one undisputed star: K-2SO, a gangly robot with the best lines. Movies of the distant future always tap into current anxieties, and the latest alarm is that the robots are coming. Droids may not conquer the world, but they will take over its work—white-collar as well as blue-collar. Could these filmmakers know something we don’t?

Previous scares, such as when TIME magazine reported on "the automation jobless" in the early 1960s, were just that. But many technology gurus insist that this time is different […]

Commentary: Don’t fear the robots; they won’t kill jobs

Commentary: Don’t fear the robots; they won’t kill jobs

A humanoid Urobotby Xiao Yanlin greets visitors at WRC 2016 World Robot Conference in Beijing, China, October 21, 2016. REUTERS/Thomas Peter Rogue One, the latest in the Star Wars franchise, has had mixed reviews but features one undisputed star: K-2SO, a gangly robot with the best lines . Movies of the distant future always tap into current anxieties – and the latest alarm is that the robots are coming. Droids may not conquer the world, but they will take over its work – white-collar as well as blue-collar. Could these filmmakers know something we don’t?

Previous scares, such as when […]

Automation And The Future Of Work

Automation And The Future Of Work

Shutterstock There is a strange dichotomy at the moment surrounding the future of work. In public, political movements throughout the western world have seen populist campaigners railing against the threat to jobs from low-wage migrants entering a country, and outsourcing to low-cost regions by multinationals.

What hasn’t really been touched on is the impact automation might have on jobs in the future. What began with the famous study from Oxford University academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne back in 2013, which highlighted the huge number of white and blue collar jobs that could be disrupted by automation, has progressed […]

White House report is optimistic on the economic impact of AI & automation

White House report is optimistic on the economic impact of AI & automation

Artificial Intelligence and automation have the potential to boost living standards and lead to an increase in people’s leisure hours, but could also lead to increased economic inequality, the White House said in a new report.

The report, titled Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy , is a follow up to an October report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence , which looked at the government’s role in developing and implementing AI. It’s part of the government’s efforts to address what will likely be a massive impact on jobs and employment once AI and automation really takes off.

The report […]

Donald Trump’s Clumsy War on Globalisation is Bound to Fail

During his 2016 election campaign, Donald J Trump spoke consistently of bringing back the United States’ (US) manufacturing jobs. His rhetoric on "declaring America’s economic independence" earned him significant wins in America’s rust belt states of Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Now, being the President-elect, the underlying phenomenon that he plans to take on is Globalisation and the fast approaching "Fourth Industrial Revolution" and he may find his planned policies being unable to combat either.

If the Carrier deal where Trump claims to have saved 800 jobs is an example of how he plans on keeping manufacturing companies in the US, then […]

Offshoring, Not Automation, Is Causing America’s Manufacturing Job Loss

Offshoring, Not Automation, Is Causing America’s Manufacturing Job Loss

Don’t Blame Technology Or Robots

People who say that America is losing its manufacturing jobs because of automation (more robots) are either ignorant, or lying—many are both.

Sadly, these people are about as common as they wrong (very, on both counts).Bad “economists” are everywhere, especially in journalism. For example, Wolfgang Lehmacher wrote a column in Fortune on the subject: …what then explains [manufacturing] job losses? It’s simple: factories don’t need as many workers as they used to, because robots increasingly do the work. Let me be clear: that’s not wrong prima facie —factories are getting more efficient. But that’s […]

America faces catastrophic employment numbers

America faces catastrophic employment numbers

Americans continue to drop out of the labour market as employment numbers reach catastrophic levels, warned a panel of experts. The economy has lost a staggering percentage of its workforce over the decades. The number of people employed or looking for work as a percentage of the population sits at only 62,7 percent. Experts warned during the panel discussion that the numbers show a quiet catastrophe.

“I’m not trying to be hyperbolic in describing this as a quiet catastrophe or calamity,” American Enterprise Institute Economist Nicholas Eberstadt said.

“From 1965 to the present we’ve seen a really wrenching decline in employment […]

Apple, Ireland, the EU and tax

Apple, Ireland, the EU and tax

Sir, – The Government plays a dangerous and not very patriotic game when it challenges EU findings that Apple was afforded special tax avoidance privilege in Ireland for a many years.

Facilitating 0.005 per cent tax payable on multiple billions of profit cannot be easily denied or explained. Some might consider it nothing short of treachery for a Government to side with those who would concentrate wealth and power into a sort of corporate feudalism, rather than with its own citizenry who fear they are are being betrayed into a serfdom of unemployed dependency, inadequate services and festering despair.

For when […]