Tag: consumption

Is AI Coming for Your Job?

Is AI Coming for Your Job?

Since the beginning of large-scale industrialization, automation has led to massive, widespread job losses. Whole cities like Detroit fell victim to this when the car industry replaced large numbers of humans with robots. Today, many of the hardest-hit places are barely a shadow of their bustling and blossoming past selves.

Adding robots to the economy displaces workers. A study from the University of Chicago found that adding just one machine per 1,000 workers to the economy causes the employment rate to decrease by at least 0.18 percent. This may not sound like much, but in a country the size of […]

Post-Capitalist Futures? Work After Automation

Post-Capitalist Futures? Work After Automation

Widespread social concern about potentially negative consequences of technological automation for workers is nothing new. Since the era of early industrialism, commentators and economists have mused about the potentially damaging effects of technological change that augments and displaces human with machine labour. Mid-19th century theorists like Charles Babbage, John Adoplhus Etzler and, and Andrew Ure envisioned the coming of fully automated industrial factories, where human labour would be reduced to a supervisory and maintenance role. Marx believed automation had the potential to de-skill and permanently replace human labour. In one memorable passage, Marx highlights the destructive potential of the […]

China’s basket of challenges: The country faces a disadvantageous demographic shift

China’s basket of challenges: The country faces a disadvantageous demographic shift

In its frenzied pursuits of wealth and power China perhaps is causing too much damage to its own economy and the global trade ecosystem. (Representative image) China is possibly going to encounter a series of social and economic challenges in the near future. First is the social menace that is unravelling behind the garb of China’s economic miracle: its ageing population. Dealing with ageing is first and foremost a quality-of-life issue, but it also has economic implications. Current statistics suggests more than 17.5% of its people are already 60 years of age in 2021 (bit.ly/37FB3n1), and will surpass 25% […]

Why We Need To Reassess the Sustainability of Aging Populations

Why We Need To Reassess the Sustainability of Aging Populations

By Prof Kozo Torasan Mayumi

Modern societies have largely been able to grow and develop due to fossil fuels and monetary systems. However, with more aging populations around the world, questions are starting to be asked about the sustainability of this paradigm. Professor Kozo Torasan Mayumi of the Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics in Japan reassesses the double-edged nature of fossil fuels and money.

In modern society, sustainability is a topic often linked to climate change. The well-known damage of global warming has intensified the debate around the use of non-renewable energy sources such as fossil […]

Driverless Cars – How Do They Function and Pros and Cons

Driverless Cars – How Do They Function and Pros and Cons

What are driverless cars?

Transportation has always been one of the biggest human concerns to perform any task. For that matter the introduction of Driverless cars was revolutionary. Driverless cars are also known as autonomous cars are cars that run without drivers. They have built-in sensors and a navigation system for driving on their own.

They come up with modern technology of self automation to work on their own. In that way, they cater to the needs of modern technology and provide rides without the need of any driver.Driverless cars have a proper system installed in them, which makes them […]

Is India’s policy negligence hurtling its agriculture down the MSME route?

Satya Sheel

Satya Sheel Khosla is a former MD and JV partner of Suzuki Motorcycles. He now develops sustainable solutions for high-density cities.

The parable of ‘blind men and an elephant’ increasingly seems to represent India’s agriculture policies, just as it previously did for India’s Industrialization.Planning in silos coupled with tenured postings has denied India policy continuity, accountability and efficacy. Despite overwhelming precedence, Indian policy makers have failed to recognise that ensuring rural growth demands a multipronged policy thrust. Over 55% India resides in villages. Shifting rural youth to industrial or construction jobs; innovation in sustainable farm technologies, finance and […]

Disruptive technologies in mining industry: opportunities, risk mitigation and resolving disputes

Technological innovation continues to disrupt the status quo in established industries. While new technologies offer many opportunities within the mining industry, the corresponding risks and potential disputes are not far off. This article focuses on these opportunities, risks and disputes that might arise from changes in the mining industry and emerging avenues for avoiding and resolving such disputes.

Opportunities

New technology can increase the efficiency and productivity of mining operations. The industrial Internet of Things automatically connects machines and people using intelligent sensors and radio frequency identification devices to create an extensive network of interactions which can enable computers […]

Why You Should Read “The Rise of The Robots” by Martin Ford

Why You Should Read “The Rise of The Robots” by Martin Ford

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash At General Motor’s peak in 1979, GM earned $11 billion and employed 850,000 workers. In 2012, Google earned $14 billion (1979 value) with 38,000 employees. Although technology creates new jobs, we can all agree that the employment prospects are not that bright for the labor force. Simply stated, the future is full of robots, but there are very few jobs for humans. This is surely unsettling.

As employees, we are all understandably anxious about the upcoming automation and AI revolution. As robots, machines, and algorithms do our jobs quicker and better than us, will […]

BOOKS Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation

BOOKS Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation

SHAPING THINGS TO COME: A 3-D printer Photo: Bre Pettis/CC “THE robots are coming” is the clarion call from organisations such as the European Central Bank and the World Trade Organisation, as well as in business media generally.

But it also being heeded in the university sector, chiefly in its business schools where the managerial class is incubated.

Hope and fear divide responses to the vista of robots marching over the horizon.Warnings of mass unemployment jostle with tidings of new-job bonanzas in the tech industry.Universal basic income is fantasised for the leisured masses, enjoying their day in the sun on the […]

Rethinking the World of Work

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The pandemic is accelerating a shift toward more informal and precarious work

With millions of jobs lost, robots on the rise, and white-collar workers toiling largely at home, COVID-19 appears to have ushered in a new normal in the global workplace.But many of these developments stem from failed policy responses to megatrends already in motion long before the pandemic struck. For at least two decades, shifting demographics and technological upheaval have been upending labor markets, exacerbating inequality, making jobs increasingly precarious, and deepening economic insecurity.The new normal, in other words, isn’t really new. A deadly virus has simply […]