Tag: employment

The Great Truck Driver Shortage

The Great Truck Driver Shortage

The Alabama legislature lowered the minimum age for a truck driver’s (CDL) license to 18 for within-state transport (the minimum age remains 21 in interstate trucking) to help alleviate a driver shortage the American Trucking Associations (ATA) says has existed since 2005. Trucking has long been a major employer in Alabama and Pike County. What are the economics of this shortage and the future of trucking?

Trucking contributes enormously to our economy. Seventy percent of freight, over 10 billion tons annually, ships via trucks. Our modern economy could not exist without reliable truck transportation; any uncertainty would render just-in-time production […]

Automation and jobs: The risks women face

Automation and jobs: The risks women face

The report also states that women could gain 20% more jobs in the wake of technology-driven growth, outperforming men by 1%. (Reuters photo) The inevitability of automation in the workplace has long triggered fears of human redundancy. In its third report on automation and the future of work, McKinsey Global Institute analyses how the march of artificial intelligence and machine learning impacts women’s employment.

Its findings, from studying a mix of ten mature and emerging economies, including India, are rather bleak. The report estimates that an average of 20% of working women in these countries (a total of 107 million) […]

Five Ways To Create And Implement More Ethical AI

Five Ways To Create And Implement More Ethical AI

With more innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), more unexpectedly dangerous uses — like the OpenAI and Amazon cases — are emerging. Each one is a good reminder to consider the ethics and implications surrounding AI and machine learning (ML).

First, it’s important to note that AI does not, on its own, have any intention (good or bad) or the will to misbehave. Even the most sentient-seeming AI lacks intention or motivation; it’s simply interpreting the data it’s given. Ultimately, with any ethical questions that arise from AI, humans are responsible for creating AI within an ethically sound framework.

With that premise […]

Here’s Why You Need To Prepare For The Future Of Work

Here’s Why You Need To Prepare For The Future Of Work

Getting a job has always been the primary point for learning. We all want new skills which we can leverage to get the best paying job to live the best life. But what happens when a machine threatens the job you spend years in school preparing for? Well, that is the future of work. Automation is the new trend in the labor sector

The reality of the battle between intelligent machines and humans for routine jobs is that humans will lose in the long run. It is quite an uncertain period for the labor market as employers are pondering […]

Automation to push 40-160 m women for occupational transition by 2030: Study

Automation to push 40-160 m women for occupational transition by 2030: Study

The estimate presented in the Women Deliver Conference 2019 today at Vancouver, Canada; is based on the study of six mature economies (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and four emerging economies (China, India, Mexico, and South Africa), which together account for around half of the world’s population and about 60 percent of global GDP.

Image Credit: @WomenDeliver The age of automation, and on the near horizon, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offer new job opportunities and avenues for economic advancement, but women face new challenges overlaid on long-established ones. Between 40 million and […]

Automation to disproportionately affect women in healthcare

Automation to disproportionately affect women in healthcare

An emergency department in 2030 is poised to look much different as automation takes hold, and those changes are likely to disproportionately affect women in healthcare, according to a new report.

Automation will displace as many as 1 in 4 female workers across all sectors, or 160 million women, but that will be offset by an increase in demand and productivity, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute. That does not account for "frontier" jobs that one could not even imagine today, said Kweilin Ellingrud, a senior partner at McKinsey and co-author of the report.

"It is scary […]

Forty Percent of Elementary School Teachers’ Work Could Be Automated By 2030, McKinsey Global Institute Predicts

The impact of automation will vary for male and female workers, with women likely being more susceptible to partial automation of their current occupations, according to new projections from the McKinsey Global Institute.

One big example: elementary school teachers, roughly 80 percent of whom are female. In the coming decade, McKinsey Global predicts, more than 40 percent of what these educators do during a current workday could be automated, resulting in the need to develop new skills and become more comfortable collaborating with algorithmic systems.

And teachers could be the lucky ones: Overall, as many as many as one-fourth of U.S. […]

What is the fifth industrial revolution and how will it change the world?

What is the fifth industrial revolution and how will it change the world?

New technology is just the tip of the fifth industrial revolution iceberg (Picture: Brittany Hosea-Small/AFP/Getty Images) There were nearly two centuries between the first and second industrial revolutions.

We’re now living in either the third or fourth industrial revolution (also known as Industry 4.0), depending on who you talk to, and we’re ‘on the cusp’ of the fifth one.

With the third only fully getting underway in 2012, according to the Economist , that’s a lot of industrial revolutions for a decade.The first mechanised the textile industry, the second created the means for mass production and the third is around the […]

“Is it unethical to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?”

“Is it unethical to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?”

Roughly two years ago, a post on workforce question-and-answer site Workplace StackExchange generated a lively debate. The post, which has since been viewed nearly a half-million times, was by a user named Etherable, who designed an algorithm that transformed the substance of a 40-hour workweek into a two-hour project. The poster was using the remaining time to tend to personal issues and spend more time with their son. Etherable asked, “Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?”

The question seems to be a straightforward yes/no question. But the responses were often qualified. Some […]

High Oxford researcher talks the chance of automation on employment

If you’ve been following the conversation about technological unemployment and the threat of robots and A.I. stealing jobs, you may have come across the prediction that 47% of current jobs in the U.S. are at risk of automation. That figure comes from a widely cited 2013 paper, titled “The Future of Employment.”

One of that paper’s co-authors, Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey, has now expanded on the thesis in a new book. Frey is co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment at the U.K.’s prestigious Oxford University. His new book, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in […]