Tag: conservative

Don’t West Virginia my Texas

Don’t West Virginia my Texas

West Virginia is in crisis.

The once proud and mighty United Mine Workers of America is now a shadow of itself, these days raging less against the boss and more against federal regulations designed to protect their communities. It has the highest rate of opioid-related deaths in the nation, and 17.9 percent of its population lives below the poverty line . In West Virginia, there is no need to fear a bleak dystopia; for many, it has already arrived. If West Texas oil field workers do not organize themselves to demand a fair transition from an extractive energy model to […]

The robots are coming – and Labour is right to tax them

The robots are coming – and Labour is right to tax them

My son has just been given a new toy car. It’s small, blue and remarkably cute-looking for something that threatens one day to cost a lot of people their jobs. For what’s unusual about this car is that it wasn’t made in a distant Chinese factory before being shipped back to a warehouse here, then trucked to a shop, or dumped on a doorstep by an overworked Amazon driver with no time to ring the doorbell.

This one came straight off a 3D printer , one of those faintly space age-sounding gizmos that works a bit like a normal printer […]

Robo-pocalypse not-quite-Now

Robo-pocalypse not-quite-Now

Another day, another apocalyptic story about robots stealing human jobs. This time, the headlines shout that over four million UK private sector jobs will be seized by machines, AKA 15% of the total workforce.

Unusually, the story is sourced from YouGov statistics, which are quoted in a new report, The Age of Automation , published by the RSA. However, closer reading of the 83-page document reveals the mainstream media headlines to be sensationalist and inaccurate.

That’s no surprise, but it does little to help organizations locate the signal in the constant media noise about a machine apocalypse.What the statistics actually say […]

John Phelan: Wage mandates drive investment toward machines, away from labor

For the last few years there’s been a pretty brutal meme circulating online. You might have seen it. It shows a customer-operated ordering machine in a restaurant with the caption “This is a fast food worker on $15 minimum wage.” New research suggests that those meme makers might have been right.

In a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (“People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages On Automobile Jobs”), economists Grace Lordan and David Neumark examine whether minimum-wage laws prompt employers to switch to using machines instead of labor. Their research focuses particularly on “automatable jobs […]

AI Uber alles?

AI Uber alles?

Rise of Machines debate Robotics is about much more than just industrial hardware – the subject of the first part of this two part special report . The “wave of creative destruction” (to quote Sean Culey) also includes AI, chatbots, and the challenge of creating robots to care for humans, rather than simply replace them with cheap, smart labour. And it should be about entirely new business processes.

Avida Hancock is COO of UCL spinout Satalia, which – despite Hancock’s job title – operates without managers or administrators. Founded in 2008, the company is positioned at the new sweet spot […]

Guarantee every American a basic income? The U.S. can’t afford it

Guarantee every American a basic income? The U.S. can’t afford it

Concerns have been raised about the technological revolution now underway, particularly the potential for jobs to be replaced by automation. We now have robots in warehouses and factories, self-checkout cashier stations in stores and ordering kiosks in fast-food restaurants.

Some tech luminaries are predicting this will lead to massive layoffs, and they want government to provide a universal basic income as compensation.

Silicon Valley billionaires have become the most vocal proponents of a universal basic income. Elon Musk, founder of Space X and Tesla, predicts millions of workers will be replaced by automation in the next 30 years. “I think we’ll […]

The radical future has to become a radical present. Interview with Nick Srnicek

The radical future has to become a radical present. Interview with Nick Srnicek

Jakub Dymek: What’s behind the idea of a ‘radical future’ on which you and Alex Williams just wrote a book?

Nick Srnicek*: The core argument is the idea that the left has given up on the idea of the future and we have to reclaim it. With changes to the labour market, through automation, we can start building towards something like a post-work society. We have to get rid of the centrality of work to our lives. We have to build alternatives. There are four demands. One, to push for automation – let’s automate all the drudgery and […]

Driverless lorries could mean 600,000 lost jobs. It’s time we took a universal basic income seriously.

Driverless lorries could mean 600,000 lost jobs. It’s time we took a universal basic income seriously.

With trials for self-driving commercial lorries to take place in the UK within the next twelve months, the work days of thousands of Britain’s long-haul drivers may soon be numbered.

Of course, these are only preliminary tests – it may well be a decade or more before driverless deliveries and long-distance haulage are an everyday reality. However, with the beginnings already upon us, a boom in automated jobs is surely coming sooner rather than later.

Driverless haulage lorries are just the latest in a range of technological upgrades to manual jobs. From driverless taxis , and Amazon’s long-awaited drone deliveries, to […]

Driverless lorries could mean 600,000 lost jobs. It’s time we took a universal basic income seriously.

Driverless lorries could mean 600,000 lost jobs. It’s time we took a universal basic income seriously.

With trials for self-driving commercial lorries to take place in the UK within the next twelve months, the work days of thousands of Britain’s long-haul drivers may soon be numbered.

Of course, these are only preliminary tests – it may well be a decade or more before driverless deliveries and long-distance haulage are an everyday reality. However, with the beginnings already upon us, a boom in automated jobs is surely coming sooner rather than later.

Driverless haulage lorries are just the latest in a range of technological upgrades to manual jobs. From driverless taxis , and Amazon’s long-awaited drone deliveries, to […]

Thread: Automation: What Will Happen When All the Jobs Are Gone?

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/06…-are-gone.html
No need to read anymore of this – it’s simple. As automation continues to shrink the job market, people will starve.

For most people, no job means no money, no money means no food. There will never be any basic guaranteed income because the wealthy will not allow it. There is no Star Trek future for humanity. Here’s what will actually happen.
This is going to start when driverless trucks hit the road and 5 million drivers are put out of work in the near future. 100,000 new tech job openings will come from […]