Tag: employment

The Biggest Worry We Have About Our Jobs Is Not Immigration, It’s Irrelevance

The Biggest Worry We Have About Our Jobs Is Not Immigration, It's Irrelevance

The biggest worry Americans have about their jobs isn’t immigration; it’s irrelevance.

In a new Pew Research report , 80 percent of survey respondents said outsourcing hurts American workers, and 54 percent said continual training will be "essential" to advancing their careers, including more than 60 percent of the youngest workers.

"It’s a positive story on the impact of skills and up-skilling on the American workforce," said Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce chief economist, Nicole Smith. The report found that employment growth is most rapid in high-skill jobs and in ones where continued training is imperative, in fields […]

The Missing Political Debate Over the Digital Economy

The Missing Political Debate Over the Digital Economy

This U.S. presidential election season is leading us to rethink a lot of norms. But while it feels like a lot of our political conventional wisdom is getting turned on its head, one thing that hasn’t appeared to move forward is how we talk about the economy. We’re focused on jobs, but we’re skipping a necessary discussion of how the digital economy is shaping those jobs. The content of the campaigns still seems largely rooted in the 20th century while much of our work is rushing to meet the demands of the 21st.

The candidates are talking about cybersecurity (indeed […]

Debate: will robots fuel inequality?

Gerald Huff and Jerry Kaplan debate whether robots will leave us all worse off Automation is coming. No: Jerry Kaplan

Computer scientist, entrepreneur and author of Humans Need Not Apply

First and foremost, robots are a form of automation, and automation is the substitution of capital for labour. Historically, automation first advances the interests of the people who invest in it, before the positive impact is felt more broadly across society. In other words, with any new technologies there are winners and losers, even if in the long run we are better off on average.Just as mechanical looms […]

Yes, Machines Will Take Over Your Jobs

Yes, Machines Will Take Over Your Jobs

“What do you do?”

Humans have been asking this question since the beginning of time. For some, it’s a moment of pride and an opportunity to list their achievements, and for some, it’s a dreadful question that haunts their life. For the rest, it doesn’t matter for they look towards it just as a mean of getting a sustainable life; they do or not is a different story altogether. And soon it wouldn’t matter to you as well because you probably wouldn’t have one.

A job or whatever it is that you do for a living is placed so high […]

Lack of Demand Is the Economy’s Problem, Not Automation

Dean Baker is an economist and the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research . He is on Twitter .

While we hear endless tales of driverless cars and robots displacing human workers, in the real world we are seeing the exact opposite. The last decade has been a period of extraordinarily low productivity growth. Productivity growth has averaged less than 1.1 percent annually from 2006 to 2016. This compares to almost 3.0 percent in the decade from 1995 to 2005 and also in the quarter century boom from 1947 to 1973. If we generated more demand through […]

Will a Robot Take My Job?

Will a Robot Take My Job?

Automation is replacing low-skilled jobs but creating higher-skilled — and higher-paying — opportunities

United Parcel Service has 155 miles of conveyor belts at its Worldport hub in Louisville. If you believe the hype, a robot might one day steal your job. That’s according to some of the mythology perpetuated by futurists about the coming automation boom.

For example, in October 2015 “60 Minutes” ran a piece on a driverless Mercedes that responded to eye movements and gestures. If you carry this technology to its logical conclusion, could we one day have driverless freight trucks that in one fell swoop eliminate […]

Invest in Technology With Social Benefits

Arun Sundararajan is a professor of business at New York University, and the author of " The Sharing Economy : The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism." He is on Twitter , @digitalarun.

Fears of widespread automation and an imminent “ world without work ” have risen as advances in digital technology herald the emergence of increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence. A distinct air of technological determinism – that the technology by itself dictates its broader economic and societal impacts – surrounds these dire predictions , while ignoring the political and organizational factors that often shape the nature […]

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, And Status In The Twenty-first Century

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, And Status In The Twenty-first Century

Ryan Avent Ryan Avent, thank you very much for joining us today. You’ve got a new book out entitled ‘ The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century ’, and it addresses one of the hottest topics around at the moment – the digital revolution, and what it means for the future of work.

So, what do you think? What does it mean?

Well, I think it means big change. I think the starting point of the book is that the digital revolution actually is probably going to be as transformative as the industrial […]

HBO Helps America Prep for the Automation Revolution

HBO Helps America Prep for the Automation Revolution

HBO’s new show Westworld encourages a specific type of suspicion. Unlike Quantico or Homeland , it’s not about a witch hunt, yet watching it requires participating in one. When, in the pilot episode, the security guard responsible for maintaining the peace, armors up to face automatons incapable of harming living creatures, it’s natural to wonder if his concern emerges from savvy suspicion or clever programming. If there’s no risk, why the over-preparation? If there’s a risk, why doesn’t the park just 3D-print a goon squad? Jeopardizing human employees would be inefficient and we know that the park’s sharply dressed […]

Will new technologies destroy jobs?

Will new technologies destroy jobs?

At TM Forum Live! Asia (December 7-8, Singapore), Andrew Milroy, SVP ICT Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan, will take part in a panel on the future of digital services and the Internet of Everything across APAC . Here, he looks at the impact of automation on employment.

There has been much discussion recently around the impact of automation on employment, particularly the use of robotics. Advances in machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are steadily eliminating routine and repetitive types of jobs. Some studies state that half of manufacturing jobs will be […]