Tag: academic

Automation, Robots, and Job Losses Could Make Universal Income a Reality

Automation, Robots, and Job Losses Could Make Universal Income a Reality

The rise of automation and resulting job losses those issues incur could force the federal government to guarantee some income for everyone, but that won’t happen for years or even decades, according to some academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This sort of payment, usually referred to as Universal Basic Income (UBI), has been embraced by much of Silicon Valley and other tech enclaves, in part to offset anxiety that the technology built in these places is killing off people’s livelihoods.

UBI, if enacted, would be a flat payment to every citizen that would, in theory, act as a basic […]

Robots are taking our jobs

Robots are taking our jobs

Innovation & Technology

| June 2017 issue

0 Rita Lobo is a Brazilian journalist in London. She specialises in politics and economics. She’s an avid traveller always on the lookout for a cheap flight to an exciting destination.Once a scenario fit only for a science fiction thriller, today many workers are seeing their jobs being taken by robots. Factories in Korea already have 4.78 robots per every 100 workers. The global average is around 0.66, but as this number grows the cost of implementing robot workers shrinks, making them a viable and cheaper alternative to human workers.According […]

Impact of AI, Robots, and Automation on Jobs: Tracking the “Hyperbole Cycle”

Impact of AI, Robots, and Automation on Jobs: Tracking the “Hyperbole Cycle”

I’ve been noticing how articles about how AI, robots, or automation will impact the future job outlook all seem to reuse the same terms, like “disrupt”, “steal”, or “threaten”. The thesaurus has only so many terms to go around I suppose. I got to wondering which terms were most popular, and then how they’ve changed over time.

So I ran some queries on Factiva. Factiva is a business information and research tool owned by Dow Jones & Company. My goal was not as much sentiment tracking as it was hyperbole tracking. By hyperbole I mean the breathless, panicky articles that […]

The Robot Economy: Ready or Not, Here It Comes

The Robot Economy: Ready or Not, Here It Comes

Duc Tran, an automation engineer, observes the fully autonomous robotic truck loader during a test at the Wynright Robotics facility in Arlington, Texas, July 18, 2012. (Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux / The New York Times) September 17 changed everything.

On that day in 2013, Oxford University published an innocuously titled academic paper by two mostly unknown economists. But " The Future of Employment " wasn’t just another number-crunching exercise in opacity by a couple of dreary scientists. No, their bombshell report portended a coming robot apocalypse that could change the nature of human civilization, and perhaps even human beings themselves.

Thankfully, the […]

Robots eat our brains!

Robots eat our brains!

Don’t fear – humankind will adapt, this here Pew report says

The Pew Research Center’s latest report, The Future of Jobs and Jobs Training , warns that machines are eating our brains.

"Brains" here refers to the contents of our brains, our skills, rather than actual gray matter. "Machines are eating humans’ jobs talents," the report declares as a prelude to its exploration of the consequences of automation on education and employment. It’s an awkwardly phrased conceit, but you get the idea.The prospect of widespread joblessness as a consequence of clever software and nimble hardware is a bit less alarming […]

Automation and Jobs – The Atlantic

Automation and Jobs – The Atlantic

Economists expect that millions of American jobs are going to be replaced by automation in the coming decades. But where will those job losses take place? Which areas will be hardest hit?

Much of the focus regarding automation has been on the Rust Belt. There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored. While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable […]

The Parts of America Most Susceptible to Automation

The Parts of America Most Susceptible to Automation

Isaac Brekken / AP Economists expect that millions of American jobs are going to be replaced by automation in the coming decades. But where will those job losses take place? Which areas will be hardest hit?

Much of the focus regarding automation has been on the Rust Belt. There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored. While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing […]

How San Francisco Plans to Fight ‘Job-Killing’ Robots

How San Francisco Plans to Fight 'Job-Killing' Robots

AddImage

CREDIT: Getty Images The tech industry collectively face-palmed when Trump’s treasury secretary said earlier this year that the threat of robots taking human jobs was "not even on our radar screen."

There is a growing evidence that robots and artificial intelligence could displace huge swaths of the American workforce in the next couple of decades, much sooner than the "50 to 100 more years away" timeline that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he expects.In San Francisco, where robots already run food deliveries for Yelp’s Eat24 and make lattés at a mall coffee kiosk , one politician is working […]

‘Ensure minimum income for those losing jobs due to automation’

'Ensure minimum income for those losing jobs due to automation'

NEW DELHI: With increasing concerns over loss of jobs, arising out of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, an Assocham-PwC study has asked to ensure a minimum income to those displaced, along with basic health facilities for the families in stress.

“In light of technology advances, certain sectors are expected to experience shrinkage of employment demand as robotic systems and algorithms take up several tasks. It can be expected that IT, manufacturing, agriculture, forestry etc will experience such a demand shift,” the study noted.

Quoting Oxford University researchers Carl Frety and Michael Osborne, based on 702 occupational groupings, workers in tele-marketing, hand […]

Automation: Will the robots ruin us?

Automation: Will the robots ruin us?

Once one combines the advances in computing, big data mining, artificial intelligence, speech recognition, driverless vehicles and robotics it’s not too hard to foresee that the impacts of the digital technology revolution may have, to date, been simply a clearing of the throat.

Don’t just take my word for it, A 2016 report titled Technology at Work v2.0: The Future Is Not What It Used To Be , prepared for global finance giant Citi, stated that "a job is considered to be ‘exposed to automation’ or ‘automatable’ if the tasks it entails allows the work to be performed by a […]