Tag: consumer

Rhetoric over: Drive to ease NAFTA impact on workers begins

Rhetoric over: Drive to ease NAFTA impact on workers begins

WASHINGTON (AP) — Of all the trade deals he lambasted on the campaign trail as threats to American workers, President Donald Trump reserved particular scorn for one: The North American Free Trade Agreement.

The NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada was "the worst trade deal in history," candidate Trump declared. He accused NAFTA of having swollen America’s trade deficit with Mexico, pulled factories south of the border and killed jobs across the United States.

Trump promised to renegotiate the 23-year-old deal — or walk away from it. Now the time has come. Five days of talks aimed at overhauling NAFTA […]

Supercuts and the Future of (Too Many) Jobs

Supercuts and the Future of (Too Many) Jobs

Last week I got my hair cut at Supercuts. The wonderful old-fashioned barber shop that I always go to was closed for their annual vacation week, and I desperately needed a haircut for a big talk I was about to give. So Supercuts it was.

The haircut that I got a Supercuts was fine. The price was low, and the stylist was professional efficient.

The problem was the experience. There was a big line of people wanting to their hair cut, and not enough stylists to do the cutting. This was not due to a lack of barber chairs. There were […]

The Four Challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Four Challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The evolution of global industries to Industry 4.0 (Rev 4.0) is both exciting and scary. Industry 4.0 is the designated code name for a combination of traditional manufacturing practices and industrial processes with technological capabilities, from automation to AI. From factories becoming self-monitoring to delivery vehicles becoming self-driving. Whilst there are many benefits of Industry 4.0, there are several key challenges that lie ahead. Cybersecurity

Having everything attached to everything else in the Internet of things (IoT) is going to monumentally increase the vulnerabilities present in any given network. With more nodes, connections and burden of connectivity, systems are […]

Legal automation spells relief for lower-income Americans, hard times for lawyers

Legal automation spells relief for lower-income Americans, hard times for lawyers

Robots that help contest small fines could signal a move towards ‘fewer lawyers’ and ‘more justice.’

“Here’s the dirty little secret about automation: it’s easier to build a robot to replace a junior attorney than to replace a journeyman electrician.”

That’s Mark Mills, noting that it’s white-collar jobs that may be the next casualties of automation . “Instead of creative destruction coming to factories and farms, it’s sweeping through city centers and taking white-collar jobs.” White-collar workers used to think they were safe from automation while lesser breeds suffered unemployment. But now they’re on the front lines.That’s certainly the case […]

The pill-popping future of work looks terrifying

The pill-popping future of work looks terrifying

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopia rules mankind in a way that renders the masses compliant consumers. The apex of medical mind control in the book is soma: a tranquilliser offering ‘a holiday from reality’. Huxley describes how its users’ ‘eyes shone (and)…the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles’.

Huxley’s vision was intended as a nightmare but PricewaterhouseCoopers appear to have taken it as an inspiration. Their new report, Workforce of the Future , predicts what the labour market could look like in 2030. As you might expect, automation takes […]

Robots Making Humans More Efficient, Opening Up New Jobs

Robots Making Humans More Efficient, Opening Up New Jobs

SAM, the Semi-Automated Mason, can be seen on YouTube laying bricks alongside human masons. While SAM can, according to contractors, lay around 2,000 bricks a day compared to an average of 600 to 700 for a human mason, the video illustrates a key point missed by many: It shows human workers programmming SAM and providing it the bricks and mud and following behind cleaning up after it. In other words, SAM, produced by Construction Robotics, isn’t replacing masons, it is making them more efficient and saving their backs.

A year ago, Rick Cohen, the founder of Symbotic LLC, which develops […]

What you should know about AI

What you should know about AI

Artificial intelligence seems to be nearly everywhere these days, yet most people have little understanding of AI technology, its capabilities and its limitations.

Despite evocative names like “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning” and “neural networks,” such technologies have little to do with human thought or intelligence. Rather, they are alternative ways of programming computers, using vast amounts of data to train computers to perform a task. The power of these methods is that they are increasingly proving useful for tasks that have been challenging for conventional software development approaches.

The commercial use of AI had a bit of a false start nearly […]

Driverless cars and trucks don’t mean mass unemployment—they mean new kinds of jobs

Driverless cars and trucks don’t mean mass unemployment—they mean new kinds of jobs

As business leaders who work with scores of senior leaders across the private and public sectors, the topic of automation and its implications for workers is inescapable—and often anxiety-inducing. Understandably so. Technology and social changes are poised to reshape nearly every aspect of what and how work gets done, and by whom. When we speak and write on this topic , the audience response is usually intense and ranges from excitement to deep anxiety.

Our response to these fears is two-fold.

First, the details matter—a lot. While every industry will likely be impacted, the nature of those impacts may vary considerably. […]

What You Can Do to Prepare for the AI-Powered, Robot-Driven Work Revolution

What You Can Do to Prepare for the AI-Powered, Robot-Driven Work Revolution

In this episode of Motley Fool Answers , Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp are joined by senior Motley Fool analyst Simon Erickson to talk about the disruptive trends of artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation. Recent studies conclude that huge numbers of U.S. workers will see their jobs — or parts of them — delegated to machines in the next few decades. That will mean great things for efficiency and possibly even society, but how can an individual prepare for the rise of the robots? What jobs are safe? And where should a Foolish investor put his or her money […]

Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian future has come to pass

Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian future has come to pass

Author foresaw the threat to civilisation and the crisis of meaning created by automation

’We could soon reach a point at which our smartest machines become more intelligent than we are and accelerate away from us on an exponential learning curve.’ The self-driving car has become the poster gadget for the next wave of automation powered by artificial intelligence. It is a terrifying idea.

Turning basic transportation over to robots will, almost certainly, cause the greatest job extinction event in labour history, wiping out the already dwindling earning potential for taxi drivers, truckers, delivery people and many more.Tech giants like […]