Tag: employment

Why aren’t robots boosting economic productivity?

Why aren’t robots boosting economic productivity?

Robots are making inroads in the modern workplace, but the promised benefits aren’t materializing. The robot revolution is real, but the effects are doubly disappointing. Not only are they displacing workers and taking manufacturing jobs, somehow robots are failing to boost output or make the economy more productive.

When, for instance, an auto manufacturer installs cutting-edge robotic arms, two things are supposed to happen. First, the company becomes more efficient, allowing consumers everywhere to reap the benefit of less-expensive, robot-welded cars. Second, while they might lay off some assembly line workers, in theory those workers could move into high-demand jobs […]

Robot city, Philly: How will low-wage workers survive?

Robot city, Philly: How will low-wage workers survive?

Shopping Cart icon Buy Photo Jean Kendrick attended a Philly Tech Week panel discussion titled "Robot City: Automation and Low-Wage Workers" on May 4. She is the director of career services at the Urban League of Philadelphia. (Staff/Jane M. Von Bergen) It’s fine to talk about labor theory and the workforce of the future. Meanwhile, though, what’s going to happen to the parking garage attendant who loses her job when the garage installs an automatic ticket-taker?

That was on Jean Kendrick’s mind Thursday as she listened to panelists at a Philly Tech Week event titled "Robot City: Automation and Low […]

Do You Live On The Front Lines Of Automation?

Do You Live On The Front Lines Of Automation?

If you live in Las Vegas, El Paso, or Louisville, there’s a particularly good chance that your job could be taken by a robot in the next two decades.

Using data from a 2013 Oxford study that found that nearly half of American jobs are at risk from automation–from truck driving and telemarketing to legal assistants–a new study maps out which cities are likely to lose the most jobs. (The next phase of the research will look at how the risk affects people differently based on age, race, educational level, and other demographic factors, and will break down data further […]

The RBA is flagging a new challenge for Australia – growth, with less jobs

The RBA is flagging a new challenge for Australia - growth, with less jobs

Youth unemployment. Photo: Getty Images The Reserve Bank of Australia lifted its economic growth and inflation expectations but left jobs growth forecast pretty much intact, pointing to an emerging challenge for the the nation: jobless growth.

The central bank in its quarterly statement on monetary policy (SoMP) forecasts gross domestic product to rise between 2.75% to 3.75% in 2018, up from 2.5% to 3.5% previously and the underlying inflation to be around 2% in early 2018. It, however, continues to see the unemployment rate to continue to tread at 5%-6%.

Australia’s unemployment rate held at a one-year high of 5.9% in […]

Column: Robots changing employment patterns across America

Column: Robots changing employment patterns across America

AS IF there were not enough uncertainty surrounding the slow-growth economy in the United States, robots now threaten to replace four in 10 jobs within the next 15 years or so.

At least, that is, according to the latest estimate by Price Waterhouse Coopers consulting. Asked about robots’ impact on the workforce, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he isn’t worried, and that the problem isn’t even on his radar, at least for now.

Will we be displaced by robots? The short answer is: yes and no.According to the Association for Advancing Automation, 136,748 robots were shipped to U.S. customers between […]

Should we intentionally slow the pace of technological change to help workers?

So another, shall we say, “soft” productivity report. Hourly output per worker decreased at a 0.6% annualized rate in the first quarter. Nothing new there. Productivity has been increasing at just a 0.6% annual pace over the past five years vs. 2.2% from 1947 through 2007. Yet at the same time, many people are worried robots will soon make humans so productive that we will need far fewer carbon-based workers in the future. (“It’s No Myth: Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Erase Jobs in Nearly Every Industry.”)

Of course maybe one day the worriers will be proven correct, and […]

Job-Stealing Robots? Millennials See Hope, Fear in Automation

Job-Stealing Robots? Millennials See Hope, Fear in Automation

As workplace automation enters the mainstream, Cathy Engelbert, CEO of Deloitte, shares her perspective on millennials, automation, and preparing the next generation of employees for the work of the future. Cathy Engelbert As the old French adage goes, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”—the more things change, the more they stay the same. But that was before the physical, biological, and digital worlds began merging to give us what I refer to as the “Fusion Revolution,” disrupting whole industries and giving rise to a new mantra—the more things change, the faster they change.

Take life sciences. When I […]

Google Exec: I Am A ‘Job Elimination Denier’ When It Comes To Robots

Google Exec: I Am A ‘Job Elimination Denier’ When It Comes To Robots

A man waiting in line with a robot for a job interview. [Shutterstock – petrmalinak] The chairman of Google parent company Alphabet said Wednesday he is a “job elimination denier” when it comes to robots and their integration into the workplace.

Eric Schmidt, who used to be the CEO of Google, asserted during a speech at an MIT research institute that occupation displacement from automation in certain areas is being balanced out by other additional jobs, Business Insider reports .

“The economic folks would say that you can see the job that’s lost, but you very seldom can see the job […]

Artificial Intelligence and the Role of Workers

Artificial Intelligence and the Role of Workers

While the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for some 60 years , it’s now finally a part of our daily lives — including how we work, bank, shop, interact, invest, drive and get insured. The term AI means different things to different people, but at PwC we think about it on a continuum, moving from assisted to augmented and, finally, autonomous intelligence.

Here, I am primarily focusing on assisted intelligence — applications that help us better perform tasks we’re already doing today. This includes things like email filtering, automated processing of insurance claims and customer service chatbots, […]

We need to track more than GDP to understand how automation is transforming work

We need to track more than GDP to understand how automation is transforming work

A new report by the US-based National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine suggests that not only has the automation of work barely begun but that the ways in which we measure the effects of technology on employment are inadequate to the task.

The authors argue that to understand how automation is transforming our workplaces, we need better ways of tracking technological change. Put simply, they are saying that if we are what we measure – that is, if policy is driven by the information we collect – then we are collecting the wrong information.

“Data on many of these trends […]