Tag: academic

Fighting the bots for jobs

Fighting the bots for jobs

There are optimists among entrepreneurs and academicians who have rightly pointed out that every technology-driven ‘revolution’ also has generated new jobs. Photo: iStockphoto Two years ago, I saw something that got me really worried about future job losses. I visited a start-up based in the US that demonstrated an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based platform which automated expense processing for a financial services company. The platform not only increased accuracy but also reduced the employed team of several hundreds by 85%! New jobs added to support the new process were a small fraction of the jobs lost.

Watching the platform at work, […]

Paradox of automation

Automation isn’t just for blue-collar workers anymore. In other words, automation is not causing persistent unemployment. We work with renowned distributors world wide and are present on all The automated machine labor revealed by this project is a symptom of the emergent autonomous production it documents, revealing the paradox of automation, labor, and value production: the cultural, historical, and aesthetic ruptures between automation and the (traditional) conceptual mappings of human society. Humans are less involved, but their involvement becomes more critical. The Air France The Paradox of Automation’s “Last Mile” My collaborator, Siddharth Suri, and I have spent nearly […]

Automation and job loss statistics

Automation and job loss statistics

Mar 24, 2017 Up to around 30% of existing UK jobs are susceptible to automation from robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) by the early 2030s, but in many “The UK employment rate is at its highest level now since comparable records began in 1971, despite all the advances in digital and other labour-saving Dec 2, 2016 The US did indeed lose about 5. Are we facing a future of stagnant income and worsening inequality? Artificial intelligence could dramatically improve the economy and aspects of everyday life, but we need to invent ways to make sure everyone benefits. The topic […]

Robots to take jobs of 800m people by 2030, warns McKinsey report

Robots to take jobs of 800m people by 2030, warns McKinsey report

A humanoid robot named Nina, is displayed at the GIPSA-lab (Grenoble Images Speech Signal and Control), a joint research unit of the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) and the University of Grenoble, in Grenoble (Photo: Getty) Around 800m people will lose their jobs to automation by 2030, as businesses seek to harness a cheaper, more efficient artificially intelligent workforce, a report has cautioned.

Between 75m and 375m workers (up to 14 per cent of the global workforce) will be required to switch roles as automation takes over, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) has claimed.

Additionally, between 400m and 800m […]

Robots coming for our jobs, Sasse warns Iowans

Robots coming for our jobs, Sasse warns Iowans

A sign on a robotic welding machine at East Iowa Machine Company in Farley on Wednesday, June 10, 2015. (Stephen Mally/The Gazette) Sen. Ben Sasse wants to talk about the robots coming to take our jobs.

The Nebraska Republican delivered a speech this month in Iowa to the Family Leader activist group. It would have been a prime opportunity for the rising GOP star to talk about his nuclear family or his anti-abortion credentials in front of our state’s most conservative crowd. Instead, he warned Iowans about the impending labor revolution.

“We’re entering a world where there’s going to be a […]

Many are pessimistic about the consequences of AI

Many are pessimistic about the consequences of AI

Charles Modeas, EU Research Commissioner claims that the development of AI and thinking machines pose a threat to our existence risk confusing science with science fiction. Negative views of AI development predominate In a speech to the European Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment Group Modeas said:“If you do any research on artificial intelligence these days, the results are astonishingly pessimistic. Nine articles out of ten on AI are negative. Not just negative. Alarmist and panicked, sometimes even hysterical. For me, a techno-optimist, it’s shocking. And very disappointing." Commissioner Modeas is betting that AI research will be a positive […]

Meet your new cobot: is a machine coming for your job?

Meet your new cobot: is a machine coming for your job?

John Harris Next to the M56, on the outskirts of Manchester, the future has landed. A cluster of huge distribution centres sits at the heart of Airport City , a new development part-funded by the Beijing Construction Engineering Group (two years ago, it was visited by president Xi Jinping of China). Among the biggest buildings is one of Amazon’s self-styled “fulfilment centres”. Known within the company as MAN1, it opened in September last year, but everything inside, from the chairs to the wall-mounted screens, looks as if it has just come out of a box. Deeper within the centre, […]

Humanities and the Rise of Robots

Humanities and the Rise of Robots

The threat that recent advances in job automation , machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) represent for human workers is becoming more and more relevant in the economic and social debate.

CEOs like John Cryan of Deutsche Bank clearly state that robots can replace thousands of workers. In two different interviews, Cryan said that “in our banks, we have people behaving like robots doing mechanical things. Tomorrow we’re going to have robots behaving like people” and that “we’re too manual, which can make you error-prone and it makes you inefficient. There’s a lot of machine learning and mechanisation that we […]

Westacott on our sleepy future

Westacott on our sleepy future

Jennifer Westacott: ‘Innovation’ focus has been too narrowly focused on geek culture After 26 years of uninterrupted economic growth, Australian business is asleep at the wheel warns Jennifer Westacott, chief executive of the Business Council of Australia.

Unlike other nations which were prodded into reformation by the global financial crisis, Australia has lolled on its laurels. Ms Westacott said the nation was at a “pivot point” and needed to “shake ourselves out of that slumber and get our act together on tax, get our act together on regulation, on the technology infrastructure that our economy needs, and on making our […]

Why the U.S. Fails at Worker Training

Why the U.S. Fails at Worker Training

Lilli CarreĢ When asked about Donald Trump’s June 2017 executive order calling for the expansion of apprenticeships, Anthony Carnevale says it’s just “good PR.”

Carnevale—the research professor and director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce —believes the high costs of apprenticeships and the U.S.’s dark past with job training will stymie the effort, which aims to help people find jobs in an economy that is rapidly changing primarily because of technological advances. According to Carnevale, apprenticeships—in which aspiring workers learn a trade from a skilled employer in exchange for low wages—can be extremely expensive. The high […]