Tag: consumer

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 […]

Ethics and automation: What to do when workers are displaced

Ethics and automation: What to do when workers are displaced

As companies embrace automation and artificial intelligence, some jobs will be created or enhanced, but many more are likely to go away. What obligation do organizations have to displaced workers in such situations? Is there an ethical way for business leaders to usher their workforces through digital disruption?

Researchers wrestled with those questions recently at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Next conference . Their conclusion: Company leaders need to better understand the negative repercussions of the technologies they adopt and commit to building systems that drive economic growth and social cohesion.

Pramod Khargonekar, vice chancellor for research at University of California, Irvine, […]

10 facts about expansion

10 facts about expansion

A man walks in downtown Miami. Ten-straight years of growth. Unemployment at a five-decade low. Higher wages for the poorest workers. The economic expansion that just became America’s longest on record didn’t produce an especially fast pace of growth. It didn’t narrow the vast gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else. AP

Ten straight years of growth. Unemployment at a five-decade low. Higher wages for the poorest workers.

The economic expansion that just became America’s longest on record didn’t produce an especially fast pace of growth. It didn’t narrow the vast gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone […]

Plentiful jobs but slow growth: 10 facts about the expansion

Plentiful jobs but slow growth: 10 facts about the expansion

Ten straight years of growth. Unemployment at a five-decade low. Higher wages for the poorest workers.

The economic expansion that just became America’s longest on record didn’t produce an especially fast pace of growth. It didn’t narrow the vast gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else.

But the expansion has lasted so long and it followed such a disastrous recession that it would be easy to overlook how much healthier the economy has become.We’re giving away 4 tickets to The Magic of Taylor Reed , 4 tickets to the Main Street Lake Cruises , and a two night stay at […]

Plentiful jobs but slow growth: 10 facts about the expansion

FILE- In this June 12, 2019, file photo a man walks in downtown Miami. Ten straight years of growth. Unemployment at a five-decade low. Higher wages for the poorest workers. The economic expansion that just became America’s longest on record didn’t produce an especially fast pace of growth. It didn’t narrow the vast gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else. (Brynn Anderson, File/Associated Press) WASHINGTON — Ten straight years of growth. Unemployment at a five-decade low. Higher wages for the poorest workers.

The economic expansion that just became America’s longest on record didn’t produce an especially fast pace of […]

‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ Author Has a Big Problem With Lettuce

'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' Author Has a Big Problem With Lettuce

Is lettuce slowly killing the planet? For Aaron Bastani, it’s emblematic of humanity’s cavalier approach to markets and the environment.

“Flying a lettuce from North America to Europe, which has zero calories, burning hydrocarbons to do so is really stupid,” Bastani author of the recent Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto , said during a Virtual Futures event about his new book.

The author, known among the British left for co-founding Novara Media , caused a stir this month when he penned a New York Times article outlining his post-capitalist vision. New technologies like robots and automation could provide a rich […]

How digital technology could redefine Canada’s economy

How digital technology could redefine Canada’s economy

With foresight, perhaps we can better understand the challenges and opportunities digital technologies present and play a role in shaping our futures.

Digital technologies are changing not only what happens in our economy, they are also changing its fundamental character. At this moment, a 3D printer is producing a human replacement organ using a digital model and the patient’s own cells. As you read this, iron ore is being extracted from a mine in Australia by autonomous machines supervised by a small crew of people more than a thousand kilometres away. While you slept last night, an architectural engineer […]