Category: Automation Impact on Jobs

The Great Unravelling: How Digitalisation will change Society

The Great Unravelling: How Digitalisation will change Society

The digitalisation of industry is a revolution. It will accelerate innovation and drive productivity. It heralds a new era and promises a future of smart manufacturing, customised products and increased coordination between supply and demand.

Some, however, are more cautious about the whole thing. While the Commission presented its strategy to digitise industry and, in essence, support the automation of production, Commissioner for Employment Marianne Thyssen stated that the industrial transition towards a digital revolution entails a “fundamental transformation of the world of work.” How she sees this transformation exactly is not clear. But her statement seems to indicate an […]

How the Gig Economy Profits off Desperation

How the Gig Economy Profits off Desperation

Illustration by Laurent Hrybyk “Children are running the company [Homejoy] and they act like they are still in college. The poor cleaners are being treated like slaves; the children make fun of them behind their backs; this company is a tax-evader and a moral concern to the working class.” While the gig economy promises to free workers from the traditional, drab 9-to-5 work environment, the reality is quite different. Many contractors employed in gig economy–type jobs lack health care and retirement benefits, are at the mercy of their employers’ scheduling needs, and — despite being promised so much freedom […]

Obama warns of the danger of AI wiping out jobs

Obama warns of the danger of AI wiping out jobs

Technology is replacing jobs. Are you ready? President Obama joined a chorus of those warning of the potential downsides of artificial intelligence.

In an interview with Wired Magazine , Obama spoke of redesigning the social compact and starting a conversation around fair wages. He cited teachers as being underpaid, and called for a reexamination of what we value, and what we’ll pay for.

Obama addressed basic income, a proposal for all citizens to receive a government stipend in order to meet their costs of living. The idea has gained recent support among some futurists and economists, given concerns over how […]

Drones Can Deliver Burritos, Blood Supplies — and Bombs

Drones Can Deliver Burritos, Blood Supplies — and Bombs

Arbitragery | Flickr ISIS turns toy drones into killing machines. On the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, ISIS is using hobbyist drones — the kind you can buy on Amazon — to send explosive devices behind enemy lines. Last week they used one to kill two Kurdish fighters ( The Washington Post) . The development is hardly a surprise; from the smelting of bronze to the splitting of atoms, humanity has always turned its technological breakthroughs into war-fighting tools. The U.S., of course, has been deploying relatively large killer drones for a decade. Now we’re seeing this type of […]

Tech Revolution But Few Jobs

Tech Revolution But Few Jobs

The digital and technology revolution has powered up internet searches, social media, smartphone apps and ecommerce over the past decade to the delight of Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple to name but a few. But although the digital world has expanded, the exploding tech industry has not met expectations in the real world and has created surprisingly few jobs.

The giants Google Alphabet and Facebook had only 74,505 employees between them at the end of 2015, which is much less than Microsoft by about one-third, according to the Wall Street Journal.

For a clearer perspective, Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for […]

Automation Angst – The Polarization of the Labor Market in the 21st Century

Automation Angst – The Polarization of the Labor Market in the 21st Century

Success achieving the American Dream of homeownership is, in large part, dependent on the ability to earn a good income. For much of the last century, a job in manufacturing provided a stable and solid income. In fact, after World War II, the United States was the manufacturer to the world, as America’s post-war economic boom changed the way we worked, where we lived and our ability to own a piece of the American Dream.

Now, just as the Industrial Revolution transformed the way we worked at the turn of the 20 th century, the “information revolution” is profoundly re-shaping […]

Gandhi And His Economics

Gandhi And His Economics

Gandhi was not an easy man to comprehend, especially when it came to his economics.

His economic ideas are difficult to slot in the Left-Right-Centre range of ideas, or the Communism-Socialism-Capitalism range of ideologies.

Gandhi’s core ideas—swadeshi, village republics, small businesses, self-employment, dignity of labour, and trusteeship of wealth—are all anachronistic in today’s digital world.Gandhi was not an easy man to comprehend, especially when it came to his economics. One reason for this is that he arrived at his conclusions through a moral understanding of the universe, and not by thinking about growth or investment or demand and supply. This is […]

The Skills Delusion

The Skills Delusion

LONDON – Everybody agrees that better education and improved skills, for as many people as possible, is crucial to increasing productivity and living standards and to tackling rising inequality. But what if everybody is wrong?

Most economists are certain that human capital is as important to productivity growth as physical capital. And to some degree, that’s obviously true. Modern economies would not be possible without widespread literacy and numeracy: many emerging economies are held back by inadequate skills. John Andrews views the country’s civil war in the context of the Middle East’s strategic disarray, assessing how Shlomo Ben-Ami, Christopher Hill, […]

Players For Hire: Games and the Future of Low-Skill Work

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. Summary

In this whitepaper I will use trends from automation and video game revenue models to make the following predictions about the future of low-skill work.
> Within five years, some game companies will be paying players in some way to play their games. This will be in the form of small points-based incentives that can be liquidated in the form of purchasing power. Within […]

Looming threat! Automation threatens 69 per cent jobs in India, says World Bank

Looming threat! Automation threatens 69 per cent jobs in India, says World Bank

Mechanisation and technology have disrupted traditional industrial production, upended manual jobs and call time on the work that has been done by generations of families. WASHINGTON: Automation threatens 69 per cent of the jobs in India , while 77 per cent in China , according to a World Bank research which has said that technology could fundamentally disrupt the pattern of traditional economic path in developing countries.

"As we continue to encourage more investment in infrastructure to promote growth, we also have to think about the kinds of infrastructure that countries will need in the economy of the future. We […]