Main Blog Page

The future of automation and your job

The future of automation and your job

Buy Photo Imagine it’s 2030, and it’s nearing time to eat dinner.

You text a grocery store where your order is taken for a pound of ground beef, a box of Hamburger Helper and maybe some lettuce and tomatoes for a salad. Possibly you want to fancy it up with a bottle of cabernet. The beef was butchered and packaged by a machine. Robots picked and processed the grapes, which where then bottled and shipped to a market by automation.

A driverless car, or possibly a drone aircraft, delivers the goods to your front door. You never see a person from […]

We Need To Talk About Tomorrow’s World

We Need To Talk About Tomorrow’s World

Bloomberg via Getty Images Every time I visit my local supermarket I see a minor change, maybe not noticeable to many, but definitely there. What started with a few automatic tills at one end of the aisles has grown to over half the store in length. This presumably means every time I visit less people are employed at the supermarket.

For me this is the most graphic representation of not just where our economy is changing now but how it will develop over the next 20 years, with the most pessimistic estimates claiming that half of all jobs could be […]

The new technology revolution – impact on SL

The new technology revolution - impact on SL

( Continued from yesterday )

By C.R. de Silva,
Retired World Bank Official
Artificial Intelligence (AI) -The Second Machine Age is Here.The Nobel Prize winner in behavioural economics Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, believes that robots will actually replace CEOs, which is well beyond the limits of manual or physical labour. His view is that there is no concrete evidence that expert human cognition does better than intelligently constructed formulas, meaning algorithms conjoined with artificial intelligence(AI) to create good business judgement. So, what is AI ? It is the invention and deployment to actual situations of intelligent or […]

Chris Christie’s Minimum Wage Veto Was Based On Right-Wing Media Myths

Chris Christie’s Minimum Wage Veto Was Based On Right-Wing Media Myths

Christie Blocks New Jersey From Becoming Third State To Raise Wages To $15 Per Hour

Gov. Christie Vetoes Minimum Wage Increase Claiming It Would Hurt Businesses. Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) announced he would veto legislation raising the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour in an August 30 statement, claiming businesses could not handle the wage increase. New Jersey’s legislature approved a bill in June that would gradually lift the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2021, making it the third state to raise wages to that level after California and neighboring New York: New Jersey Governor Chris […]

The new technology revolution – impact on SL

The new technology revolution - impact on SL

By C.R. de Silva,
Retired World Bank Official

Revolutionary changes in technology, following on the heels of globalization, are changing the world economy as a result of the evolving changes in employment and resulting wage patterns in the industrialized economies. The overriding structural issues facing the advanced economies are creeping job insecurity and the need for providing productive employment and adequate salaries for affected workers to take care of their families, in the wake of progressive use of robots and also ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). This is occurring in diverse sectors of industrialized economies with a wave of robotic machines and […]

Avoiding Workplace Hazards through Ergonomics

Avoiding Workplace Hazards through Ergonomics

Some technology and robots are keeping employees in the workplace by improving productivity, reducing cost, and increasing safety (see " What’s the Difference Between Automation and Employment? ") . Looking at the cost of the production/cost ratio, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2012, injuries caused by jobs that involved lifting, pushing, pulling, holding, and repetitive motions accounted for 28.4% of workplace injuries that cost $16.94 billion. These injuries and costs are driving the need for automation and robotics to reduce injury from tedious, monotonous, or dangerous jobs.

Companies such as Strong Arm are working on soft exoskeletons […]

Trump takes night off from Boeing-Beijing blather

Donald Trump ventured into the beating heart of Boeing country when he staged a rally in Everett Tuesday evening . Oddly enough, the Republican presidential candidate didn’t talk about Boeing.

Some might consider it an act of cowardice, this refusal by the New York billionaire to stand up and explain his facile You’d-Better-Elect-Me-or-Boeing-Is-Going-to-China sound bites, which he’s thrown out like red meat to friendly interviewers. ("They’ll start taking your business away, and you won’t have much of Boeing," Trump told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson on Monday.)

Did Trump shed his backbone by appearing before a company town audience and failing to […]

Does Workplace Automation Destroy Jobs Or Create Unexpected Opportunities? An Optimists’ View

The Robots are Coming… to Take Your Job. That’s the title of a recent article in Knowledge@Wharton, which describes how today’s job losses due to automation are just “the tip of the iceberg.”

Are things really that bad? We’ve been hearing plenty about the impact of machines on what seem to most existing jobs these days — from truck drivers to journalists to computer programmers themselves . However, there are also reasons to be optimistic — automation is delivering opportunities unheard of even a few years ago, both for people and the enterprises in which they work.

That’s the key takeaway […]

The Agile Mindset: Becker College’s Academic Foundation and Ethos

The Agile Mindset: Becker College’s Academic Foundation and Ethos

Six years ago, Becker College began to take a more adaptive, nimble, and entrepreneurial approach to higher education. The results—including growing enrollments and improving institutional and academic rankings, notably in the areas of game design—propelled the College forward on a path of historic growth and transformation.

The Becker community recognized that preparing students for the workplace of the future would mean cultivating global learners with agile mindsets, capable of thriving in a world of growing ambiguity and unpredictability.

This year, Becker College affirms the Agile Mindset as the academic foundation that equips students to navigate change and create value in the […]

When robots and AI come, what jobs will be left?

When robots and AI come, what jobs will be left?

Experts are divided about the jobs that will be left for humans once artificial intelligence, robotics and automation are fully deployed. If you’re prone to fretting about robots eating your job, or the jobs of your kids, get over it.

We will eventually become indistinguishable from robots, says Hiroshi Ishiguro, a professor of robotics at Osaka University. Ishiguro is a pioneer builder of human-like androids and had a cameo role in the 2009 Bruce Willis film Surrogates , in which people lived their lives through remote‑controlled surrogates from the safety of their own homes.

In about 100 years, Ishiguro says, only […]