Tag: consumption

Artificial Intelligence Will Widen The Gap Between Rich And Poor

Artificial Intelligence Will Widen The Gap Between Rich And Poor

BEIJING, CHINA – APRIL 14: An Ultraman-shaped robot makes shaved noodles in 10 seconds. It’s been working at the restaurant for over two years with no failure. Globally, the economic divide is growing. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. In Australia, more than a quarter of households have recently experienced a decrease in income. The reasons for the growing economic divide are many and complex. They include factors such as job insecurity, wage cuts and underemployment.

Underemployment and unemployment are being affected by growing use of artificial intelligence in the workplace. As technology rapidly progresses, […]

Robots in Transportation

Robots in Transportation

Fear of robots taking away jobs is spreading, but is that really the case? Or will increasing automation bring new types of jobs to control and use their productivity? Maybe a little of both, but we don’t need to have a Luddite mentality. The benefits of automation can be sizeable, including performance, quality and speed improvement; error reduction; boosting economic growth and offsetting the declining working-age population.

Think about how robots are already being used today. The military employs them to transport soldiers, allow observations in situations where it would be too dangerous for a soldier to maneuver and defuse […]

My Say: The future of inequality and what we can do about it

My Say: The future of inequality and what we can do about it

As we think of the future in a world of Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) — where machines are created to “think” the way a human brain does — the question of jobs is a crucial one. Machines have been making routine jobs obsolete for scores of years, now they are capable of making even non-routine jobs obsolete. I have, in a previous column, discussed what the future of education should look like in a world such as this, arguing that our ability to be human is our strongest defence against the rising tide that is to come.

In this […]

RISE of the ROBOT

RISE of the ROBOT

A four-part look at how robots are changing the way we work. First up, robots aren’t killing jobs, they’re creating new ones and more of them
— at least at a GE Aviation plant in Quebec

By Drew Hasselback in Bromont, Que.
About 180 robots here are doing work that humans used to do at a GE Aviation plant that makes parts for jet engines. But they haven’t replaced the humans. Indeed, the opposite is true. Since a new, automated section of the plant ramped up at the start of the decade, the number of people working here […]

Labour and Artificial Intelligence: Visions of despair, hope, and liberation

Labour and Artificial Intelligence: Visions of despair, hope, and liberation

Science-fiction scenarios of rampant AI are interesting thought-experiments but already-existing AI is here, and requires well-crafted policy

A conventional delivery truck of Germany’s biggest retailer Metro AG stands behind the world’s first commercial delivery robot of Starship Technologies during a demonstration at Metro’s headquarter in Duesseldorf, Germany, June 7, 2016.(REUTERS) In the United States, job demographic data from censuses since the 1900s reveal a startling fact. Despite the two post-Industrial revolutions of electricity and computers, the occupations with the largest employment numbers are still jobs for drivers, retail, cashiers, secretaries, janitors etc, i.e. old professions needing simple skills and […]

If automation destroys jobs then why countries that use automation the most…

Automation doesn’t destroy jobs; it merely replaces certain manual labor tasks to be maintenance tasks and, as Marx already said back in the day, the modernization of technology merely ups the disciplining of labor alongside it.

Because in western europe theres a growing trend of people (being forced to) start their own one-person legal entity and sell their labour under minimum wage and without benefits to others. Theres also a massive growing population of zero hour contract workers.

Both of these groups can work for zero hours a month, without being counted as unemployed. To be counted as unemployed in germany […]

Machine learning systems are a ‘land rush’ of opportunity for CIOs

Machine learning systems are a 'land rush' of opportunity for CIOs

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Machine learning is overtaking big data in Google searches, but the hype around artificial intelligence systems may not be hyped enough. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, co-authors of the forthcoming Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future , said some machine learning algorithms are improving faster than anticipated, thanks to enormous data sets and access to more compute power. And the rapid rate of change is opening up new avenues for machines and new opportunities for CIOs.

Brynjolfsson , director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) , and McAfee , principal scientist and […]

A robot revolution might be coming but don’t believe the doomsday media

A robot revolution might be coming but don’t believe the doomsday media

More general macroeconomic conditions have “swamped any effect of robotic displacement” From apocalypses to zombie coups, humans adore doomsday tales and it’s not completely clear why. While fiction is fine, reality is of course much better so if anyone who’s even remotely credible can make a strong case for the end of the world being nigh – ideally based on “hard” data that conveniently backs up that thesis— then we’ll gobble it up in a flash. The media is perhaps guiltiest of all.

This is what appears to have happened in the curious case of the robots.

Hundreds of plausible news […]

Ignore the jobs doomsayers

Ignore the jobs doomsayers

The jobs doomsday prediction is ahistorical because it suffers from the “presentism” disease identified by historians as a belief that the times we live in are unique. (Representational) Einstein said that if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its life believing it is stupid. Only 0.7 per cent and 11 per cent of India’s labour force work in information technology (IT) and manufacturing and yet, many pundits predict that India’s IT and manufacturing employment has peaked — let’s call it the jobs doomsday prediction — because of automation, robots, the immigration […]

Tax wealth and consumption rather than income: automation is killing jobs

, by Alan Kohler. Underemployment has been rising steadily for 40 years and is now the highest it has ever been. And it’s a global trend — not confined to Australia. This is why real wages are now falling, which is to say that average wage growth is below the rate of inflation (1.9 per cent versus 2.1 per cent). … The economics profession is struggling to account for this, and officialdom isn’t even trying. … Automation is creating a steady tide of unemployment: Here’s a guess about what’s going on: in thousands of ways, every day, technology and […]