Tag: consumer

Axios Future

Axios Future

Welcome to a special edition of Future. Six years ago, two little-known researchers from Oxford University came out with a startling and controversial paper : By their calculations, 47% of American jobs were vulnerable to automation. With their frightening outlook, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne ignited everything from robot hysteria to outraged denunciation, the latest in a cycle of visceral emotion that has accompanied every wave of new technology since before the Industrial Revolution.

Frey’s new book: " The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation " pivots off of the now-famous 2013 paper to […]

Lure of the long-shot

Lure of the long-shot

A few days ago, the Washington Post ran a feature cleverly titled “Random Man Runs for President” quite literally describing Andrew Yang, one of the 20-something candidates running for the Presidential Elections of the United States in 2020—against one Donald Trump. Except he isn’t random anymore. His campaign is powered by young, neoliberal-leaning, meme-ready, predominantly online supporters calling themselves the ‘yang gang’. Pitching himself as the data guy, Yang hails modest success in business. Like Trump, he is an outsider but unlike him, he comes with no baggage, or public notoriety. And though his candidacy is a long-shot, in […]

In the future, will acquiring relevant skills matter more than earning a degree?

In the future, will acquiring relevant skills matter more than earning a degree?

There is much debate over whether the acquisition of skills will be more important than a degree in the future. Source: Unsplash There has been alot of talk about the need for graduates to acquire certain ‘soft skills’ if they are to survive in a future fueled by technologies such as automation and robotics.

These include critical thinking, collaborative thinking, innovation, relationship-building, communication, and more.

This has prompted discussions over whether college degrees will even be relevant for the next generation. An article by BigThink speculated that the traditional university setting will eventually become extinct.“With antiquated systems still in place, a […]

Is Jeff Bezos Proving the Fed’s De-linking of Unemployment and Inflation?

Is Jeff Bezos Proving the Fed’s De-linking of Unemployment and Inflation?

I’ve written a couple of times over the years about the threat to jobs by technological automation and several pieces of news this week feels make now feel like an appropriate juncture to pick up the thread again. For a primer on the relationship between interest rates, job automation and inflation, have a read of this piece where I discussed some of the considerations facing the Fed. Of importance will be the basic understanding of the traditional interpretation of the Phillips Curve. An economic idea which fairly effectively conceptualised the basic principle that the level of unemployment within an […]

Top Four Business Process Outsourcing Trends To Expect In 2019

Top Four Business Process Outsourcing Trends To Expect In 2019

Every business is looking to cut their operating costs, and for many, that means outsourcing their non-primary functions to other companies, or even other countries. However, with the rise of certain new technologies, the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry could be at risk of losing a large portion of its market share.

As it turns out, it’s not just retailers that need to work hard to stay competitive, and BPO companies may find that 2019 could be a painful year for them if they are not keeping up with the industry’s latest trends. As the founder of an outsourced provider […]

Fact Check: Actually, the Trump Economy is Benefitting the Very People Democrats Claim It Isn’t

Fact Check: Actually, the Trump Economy is Benefitting the Very People Democrats Claim It Isn't

One of the trickier bits of political positioning facing Democrats this cycle is how to talk about the American economy. By nearly every metric, it’s performing quite well. Unemployment is low, growth is pretty strong, wages are rising, the stock market is up — and we’re in the midst of the longest overall US economic expansion in recorded history. Roughly 70 percent of voters are optimistic about both their personal financial situation and the national picture , and a relatively unpopular president consistently earns his highest marks on this issue, which happens to be at the top of the […]

Are Intelligent Machines Coming for Your Job and Your Wages?

Are Intelligent Machines Coming for Your Job and Your Wages?

This probably isn’t the next Megan Rapinoe. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer) photo credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS A specter haunts Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world: the specter of massive technological unemployment and, therefore, widespread immiseration.

Or at least we keep hearing it does, and we’ve been hearing it for centuries.

We keep hearing. And we keep waiting. And the specter never shows up.I doubt that it ever will. It’s certainly possible, and improving technology will continue to creatively destroy certain sectors. To use one example, the days of long-haul truck drivers might be numbered. In a recent paper in […]

Randy Johnson: He helped you find a job

Randy Johnson: He helped you find a job

Randy Johnson is retiring after three decades with Workforce Development Inc. His efforts helped thousands of people find jobs. For more than three decades, Randy Johnson’s job has been helping others find a job.

During a three-decade career at Workforce Development, the last 22 as executive director, Johnson stood at the nexus between people looking for work and employers looking for workers, using education and training to align the two.

Johnson, 66, retired earlier this month after 34 years at the employment nonprofit.During his tenure, more than 60,000 adults found living wage jobs and another 37,000 people on public assistance found […]

Unpleasant consequences of technological changes

Unpleasant consequences of technological changes

Santosh Kumar Dash

Change is good. At least that is what we believe when it comes to technology which makes yesterday’s technology obsolete. If you have Ola/Uber, Swiggy/Zomato, Paytm/FreeCharge/PhonePe, and Flipkart/Amazon in your smartphone, life becomes easy. But such disruptive technological changes too have unpleasant effects.

First, it leads to rise in unemployment. Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph E Stiglitz believes that rapid technological changes pose bigger challenges to employment creation in short to medium-run. Low-skilled workers face biggest risks in future as firms around the globe adopt new-age technologies like automation, artificial intelligence, robots and e-commerce firms. They challenged brick […]

Technology, Automation, and Employment: Will this Time be Different?

Technology, Automation, and Employment: Will this Time be Different?

Technology, Automation, and Employment Western societies have exhibited a continuing worry that automation, particularly automation associated with artificial intelligence, will lead to massive unemployment and the impoverishment of large segments of society. In different epochs, technological change has triggered concerns and social protests. Those concerns date back to the early stages of the industrial revolution and the use of coal-fired weaving machines to automate textile manufacturing, and they continue through to the present-day and adoption of computerized algorithms that “learn” how to automate tasks through the use of data-driven “machine learning.”

In fact, the history of automation affirms that concerns […]