Tag: employment

“Basic Income”: A Solution To Unemployment In The Era Of Automation?

“Basic Income”: A Solution To Unemployment In The Era Of Automation?

The online buzz about the concept of “basic income” is getting stronger and stronger, even within just the last two weeks. What is this all about, and how might this impact you in the future?

Well, let’s say that increasing innovations in AI and robotics start putting more and more of the population out of a job. For example, suppose the self-driving vehicle thing really becomes a thing . That’s millions and millions of people out of work, who will have to learn a new skill in order to get employment—seeking employment in the greatly decreased job pool because automation […]

John McDonnell thinks the chance of a robot stealing your job is so high we need a universal basic income – but he’s wrong

John McDonnell thinks the chance of a robot stealing your job is so high we need a universal basic income – but he's wrong

We live not so much in the age of the robots as in the age of worrying about the robots.

New books and think pieces proliferate about the threat to the world’s workers from the twin forces of digitisation and automation. Read more McDonnell pledges £10-an-hour minimum wage and backs universal income Labour’s Chancellor John McDonnell this week has cited new technology as a reason why his party is looking closely at a Universal Basic Income.

The Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, last year suggested that 15m British jobs could be automated.Such is the buzz around the subject that […]

Fewer Routine Jobs But More Routine Work

Fewer Routine Jobs But More Routine Work

Martina Bisello In the digital age, there are fewer routine jobs because of a higher risk of automation. But a great paradox of this age is this: workers in most types of jobs, including high-skilled ones, are reporting higher levels of routine at work. This emerges from a new study of the task content of occupations in Europe .

The concept of routine tasks has become prominent in research and policy debates on the future of employment. An influential 2003 MIT paper argued that computerization facilitates the automation of tasks and jobs involving a high degree of routine. Many researchers […]

What to study to prevent robots stealing your job

What to study to prevent robots stealing your job

Up to one-third of our jobs are at risk of computerisation over the next 20 years

Some 44 per cent of companies that reduced their number of employees since the global financial crash in 2008 did so by means of automation. Photograph: Getty Images Beware of the robots – they are on the rise and could be after your job. It might sounds like something from an outlandish sci-fi movie, but the figures are all too real.

A report by McKinsey Global Institute shows that 44 per cent of companies that reduced their number of employees since the global […]

Betweet the Lines: E-ZPass and the Impending Robot Takeover

Betweet the Lines: E-ZPass and the Impending Robot Takeover

I’m soon going to have to decide if a pull towards convenience outweighs my fear of a total robot takeover of the world as we know it.

I may get an E-ZPass transponder.

The decision should be made simpler by the fact that the state of Massachusetts isn’t giving any of us much choice . Anyone who uses the Mass Pike without one will pay close to double what E-ZPass subscribers pay when new toll system goes live in late October.Most of the people I’ve talked to about this haven’t seemed all that perturbed, and most of them have E-ZPass already. […]

Deckle McLain: Rise of bots can’t be ignored in economy

Deckle McLain: Rise of bots can't be ignored in economy

Zoom Robots and software bots are poised to dominate routine work; thus, steps to keep jobs in the United States may not improve the availability of work as much as hoped, the claims of 2016 presidential contenders notwithstanding. Some experts say bots are now shrinking the total number of jobs for all time. Two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, have concluded that since 2000 productivity has increased while employment has declined, reaching a significant gap by 2011. Nevertheless, sanguine experts believe that after painful adjustments automation will create as many jobs as […]

Why we must embrace digital disruption and ensure no worker is left behind

Why we must embrace digital disruption and ensure no worker is left behind

An industrial robot holds a sports car at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago. The jobs of the future are likely to be in areas where machine thinking and robotics imitate human thought. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images Disruption in the workforce is hardly a new phenomenon. Mechanisation of manufacturing, mass production and the advent of the internet and computers have all changed the way that work is done.

Earlier waves of industrialisation have primarily affected low-skilled manual labour and past improvements in technology have typically made jobs at the lower end of the skills spectrum obsolete – for […]

Investing in robotics and automation: Why bother?

Investing in robotics and automation: Why bother?

In the second of our new series of articles about investing in robotics and automation, Brian Gahsman, managing partner and chief investment officer at GBSfunds.com , explains why his company, Gahsman Branton, is interested in investing in the robotics and automation market

Organovo (ONVO)PTC Inc. (PTC)Keyence (6861 JP)04080120160

Source: Gahsman Branton Check out realtime stock prices for companies in the robotics, automation and relating computing sectors Robotics and Automation News: What is it about investing in the robotics and automation sector you find attractive? Brian Gahsman: Years ago, one of my main focuses of investment was […]

In the future, everyone will be self-employed – but society is failing to adapt

In the future, everyone will be self-employed – but society is failing to adapt

The rise of Uber is just the first step in an economy dictated by self-employment The question is an old one, but it has a new twist. The question is this: how do you prepare for the jobs of tomorrow when you don’t know what those jobs will be? And the twist? It is that most of the new jobs in the past have been jobs created by employers, while many (maybe most) of the jobs of the future will be in self-employment.

Forrester Research has estimated that 6 per cent of the jobs in the US will be eliminated […]

The human omission

It’s hard to conceive of a more fundamental topic than the future of work. Economists have grappled with it for centuries. Now slow growth, rising inequality and rapid technological change have raised a new, urgent question. Will robots free us from boring labour, or will they leave many workers permanently redundant?

Ryan Avent’s “The Wealth of Humans” manages to be both optimistic about innovation and gloomy about its consequences. This wide-ranging and highly readable book echoes famous tracts by tackling the biggest challenges facing the human race. The title is a nod to Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” – […]