Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

Obama Thinks AI Will Create Jobs

Obama Thinks AI Will Create Jobs

The recently released White House report on "Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy" takes a surprisingly positive stance on the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. According to the report, "a strong case can be made in favor of increasing federal funding for research in AI."

"As we look at AI, our biggest economic concern is that we wont have enough of it," says Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. "AI will help make the pie bigger. We want to make sure that everyone benefits from that pie, and that includes steps like modernizing the social safety net, […]

What can governments do when jobs run out?

What can governments do when jobs run out?

As automation makes more jobs redundant, policymakers cannot put off discussing universal basic income as an option. (Shutterstock image) Martin Ford writes in the Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future that around 47% of total employment in the US, around 64 million jobs, have the potential to be automated perhaps within a decade or two. Europe is already facing a crisis of jobs. Youth unemployment in Italy stands around 36% while it is nearly 44% in Spain. Thanks to offshoring and automation, we are seeing a polarisation in the labour market that is […]

We're Frogs and Automation is Boiling Water

We're Frogs and Automation is Boiling Water

If you put water on the stove and heat it up, it will at first just get hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results only in hotter water. But at some point everything changes – the water starts to boil, turning from hot liquid into steam. Physicists call this a “phase transition.”

Automation , driven by technological progress, has been increasing inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economic thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human activity: will new […]

Semi Automated Weapons.

Machines want your job! Well, they would if they could feel desire. [1] I guess I really mean that your employer wants your job. Not for him/her self, or even for some idiot nephew/niece. S/he wants it for a machine. Liable to get it too. Only about 13 percent (1/8-1/7) of job losses are the result of foreign competition. The rest are the result of automation cutting the need for workers. [2]

Thus, in 1962, about 530,000 people worked in the American steel industry. In 2005, about 130,000 people worked in the American steel industry. That’s a 75 percent […]

Productivity And The Minimum Wage – Higher Productivity Does Mean Fewer Jobs

One of the arguments that is used in the minimum wage debate is that a higher minimum wage will drive productivity higher. This is true, it will, because only those jobs where the labour is productive enough to cover the higher minimum will survive. We don’t in fact measure the productivity of unemployed people. Thus, if one of the adaptation mechanisms to a higher minimum wage is that businesses increase labour productivity then by definition there will be fewer jobs : Sir Charlie Mayfield, chairman of the John Lewis Partnership and a government adviser on productivity, told the Guardian […]

How technology will destroy low-wage and middle class jobs the world over

How technology will destroy low-wage and middle class jobs the world over

Rise of the Robots underlines that we have to rethink the assumption that education and reskilling on the job will lead to better prospects. (Shutterstock) It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century – not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine.” – Gary Marcus, professor at New York University

There is an ongoing crisis of jobs in India and the world that does not provoke as much discussion as it should. The Labour Bureau revealed this year that India added […]

Fast-food technology

Fast-food technology

Associated Press
McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook demonstrates an order kiosk during a presentation at a McDonald’s restaurant in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood.

Changes on way, but not just to save labor costs
NEW YORK – It’s a scenario often invoked by critics of minimum wage increases: fast-food workers replaced with burger-flipping robots.The imagery resurfaced when President-elect Donald Trump named Andrew Puzder to head the Labor Department. Puzder, CEO of the company that owns Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, is known for saying significant wage increases would lead to job losses and the automation of some tasks.But the sentiment does […]

Robots Could Destroy Millions of Jobs Globally

Robots Could Destroy Millions of Jobs Globally

It’s difficult to predict exactly how robots and other AI might change the economy. A Nobel Prize-winning economist has warned that the rise in robotics and automation could destroy millions of jobs across the world.

Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize last year for his work on health, wealth and inequality, said he believes robots are a much greater threat to employment in the US than globalization, Business Insider reported.

Addressing the theory that Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections was fueled by a backlash against globalization, Deaton told the Financial Times: “Globalization for me seems to be […]

Thread: More on job loss due to automation

Thread: More on job loss due to automation

> Rep Power Perhaps your points aren’t as convincing as you imagine.

For example, I can’t think of a reason why if I had a factory with 20 high skilled workers making widgets and I invented a machine that would replace all of them with one guy pushing a button, that one guy pushing a button would get paid 20x what those skilled workers got paid. My bet is he’d make less than one of them made. Regardless of the productivity. As far as productivity and wealth to the particular nation (in our case the US), it really […]

Could universal basic income ease job loss problems with automation?

From Peter Diamandis at Pulse ,

… the most compelling study demonstrating how universal basic income could work comes from a small town in Canada.

From 1974 to 1979, the Canadian government partnered with the province of Manitoba to run an experiment on the idea of providing a minimum income to residents called MINCOME.MINCOME was a guaranteed annual income offered to every eligible family in Dauphin, a prairie town of about 10,000, and smaller numbers of residents in Winnipeg and some rural communities throughout the province.So what happened to families receiving MINCOME? They had fewer hospitalizations They had fewer accidents and […]