Tag: consumer

Brand human: why efficient automation will not always be best for business

Brand human: why efficient automation will not always be best for business

As study after study predicts huge swaths of jobs will be wiped out by automation in the coming decades , there’s one factor that might just throw a spanner in the works of the robot workforce takeover: the marketing power of brand human.

Just as Fair Trade and organic branding initiatives have convinced consumers to pay a higher price for products and services that might not be produced in the most coldly efficient way possible, businesses are realising the potential to carve out a niche in the face of growing disenchantment with the rise of the machines.

Marketers have identified a […]

The Economist explainsHow to make robots pay their fair share

The Economist explainsHow to make robots pay their fair share

THE future looks increasingly perilous for the human worker. New robots are no longer flummoxed by staircases and doorknobs; clever software is capable of driving cars and carrying on (rudimentary) conversations. While a workless world remains a distant possibility, a period of automation-driven disruption seems to loom ahead. Many futurists reckon that as machines replace people, governments will need to find ways to redistribute income from the machines (and the people who own them) to displaced workers, to ensure that the benefits of automation-driven growth are shared widely. In a recent interview Bill Gates proposed one method for doing […]

Automation is Taking Over One of the Most Popular Professions

Automation is Taking Over One of the Most Popular Professions

Truck driving is the most popular job for people in most US states and the advent of the self-driving truck is going to completely disrupt that profession.

Universal Basic Income is one way to address the upcoming worker displacement that’s coming from automation.

Late last year, I took a road trip with my partner from our home in New Orleans, Louisiana to Orlando, Florida and as we drove by town after town, we got to talking about the potential effects self-driving vehicle technology would have not only on truckers themselves, but on all the local economies dependent on trucker […]

Matt Nolan presents his Top 10 links on the economics of automation

Matt Nolan presents his Top 10 links on the economics of automation

Today’s Top 10 is a guest post from Matt Nolan, an economist at Infometrics , and an author at the blog site TVHE .

As always, we welcome your additions in the comment stream below or via email to david.chaston@interest.co.nz.

And if you’re interested in contributing the occasional Top 10 yourself, contact gareth.vaughan@interest.co.nz.Before writing this I had a search of interest.co.nz for “automation”. I found the following articles as the first 5 links: A top ten by Lena Hesselgrave , an article by Nigel Pinkerton (a colleague of mine), an article from NZIER , and two Top Tens from myself. Finally, […]

Trade, Automation, Cheap Wages Abroad Conspire to Alter U.S. Economic Landscape

Trade, Automation, Cheap Wages Abroad Conspire to Alter U.S. Economic Landscape

President Trump has blamed countries such as China and Mexico for the erosion of U.S. manufacturing jobs, but the industry has been steadily declining for decades. Photo: Tama66 / Pixabay

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump struck a protectionist, populist tone that appealed to Rust Belt blue-collar workers but instilled fear among multinational companies, foreign governments and free trade advocates. Those fears were apparently well founded.

Since assuming office, Trump has wasted no time railing against the perils of globalization. He’s threatened to slap punitive tariffs on key economic partners such as Mexico and China, named and shamed companies that outsource […]

Nowhere to Go: Automation, Then and Now

Nowhere to Go: Automation, Then and Now

Part One

It is in this serious light that we have to look at the question of the growing army of the unemployed. We have to stop looking for solutions in pump-priming, featherbedding, public works, war contracts, and all the other gimmicks that are always being proposed by labor leaders and well-meaning liberals.

– James Boggs, The American Revolution In 1963, James Boggs, a black autoworker employed for over two decades at a Chrysler plant in Detroit, published a short book focused on the nefarious effects of automation on class struggle in the United States. The story told in The American […]

Sorry, But Amazon Isn’t Actually Annihilating Retail Jobs

Sorry, But Amazon Isn’t Actually Annihilating Retail Jobs

Noah Berger/Reuters Beware the lurking variable. Even if you didn’t suffer through a semester of college statistics, you’re probably familiar with the adage “correlation doesn’t imply causation.” But if you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s a fairly easy concept to grasp.

Take a classic example: When ice cream sales rise significantly, the number of shark attacks escalates as well. But ice cream probably doesn’t cause shark attacks. The two things are correlated because they tend to occur at the same time of year but the relationship is not causal: Summer, in this case, is what’s called a lurking variable . […]

More manufacturing, fewer jobs. Is there a solution?

More manufacturing, fewer jobs. Is there a solution?

Technology and automation have impacted a range of industries, including printing. Manufacturing makes more products than ever before, but not the jobs that once went with them. How can struggling economies resurrect their rust belt regions when factories employ more machines than people?

In a cavernous building on the outskirts of Sydney’s CBD, a lone worker tends to a massive printing machine churning out 70,000 magazines an hour.

Not so long ago, it would have taken six workers to do the job, but advances in technology and automation mean printers at Blue Star Web are able to produce more with less […]

In a crowd of truths, we can discern and reclaim what it means to be human

In a crowd of truths, we can discern and reclaim what it means to be human

This is the second of two responses to an excellent article by Antony Slumbers , the first being this perspective from my mirrored room , in this instance offering that his views offer a far too presumptive picture of how technology will shape our work future. The paragraph headlines are from Antony’s original article. One person’s optimism is another’s pessimism. A decade ago the dream of liberated commute-free teleworking was, to many, the nightmare of enforced seclusion to the soundtrack of the dishwasher. The deployment of robots for the performance of menial tasks creating time and wealth for leisure […]

Herb Van Fleet: The paradox of robotic labor

Herb Van Fleet: The paradox of robotic labor

Amid the shrill and irritating noise of politics these days, there have been a few news stories reporting on the progress of robotics, especially robotic cars. Robots are just one of the engineering outgrowths that are part of artificial intelligence and high-tech automation systems. Besides cars, their applications run the gamut from the military, to manufacturing, to health care, to agriculture, to running the vacuum and cleaning the house. And engineers are hard at work finding and developing other artificial intelligence applications.

For private sector businesses, artificial intelligence and its emergent technology provide a path to higher profits while maintaining […]