Tag: employment

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” – […]

63% of Indian Employees Believe That Automation Will Take Over Process-Based Work

63% of Indian Employees Believe That Automation Will Take Over Process-Based Work

Automation has been a big talk in India for a couple of years. It would not be wrong to say that this will bring revolution to the economy and profits to the businesses. But, Indian workplaces are most likely to be replaced by automation resulting in a loss in number of jobs. ADP, a US based HR firm researched and took a survey in Indian offices and found that 63% people believe that automation and artificial intelligence is going to take over jobs based on process and repetitive work.

But, it did not deter them as 61% of them welcome […]

Disappearing factory jobs driving Iowa voter angst

Disappearing factory jobs driving Iowa voter angst

Small business owners and former employees say they continue to struggle to get by after hundreds of manufacturing jobs left Mason City, but city officials insist the jobs are there. Buy Photo MASON CITY, Ia. — It used to be hard to find a seat at the Kozy Korner.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the bar opened its doors at 6 a.m. to serve overnight workers as they finished their shifts in factories on the city’s north end. On Thursdays and Fridays, the Kozy kept piles of money on hand to cash workers’ paychecks. People lined up to play pool, […]

Humans today, robots tomorrow

Humans today, robots tomorrow

Photo by William Harvey On Sept. 19 the College of Architecture hosted Nick Srnicek, author of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Srnicek spoke about the future of automation and its economic impact upon modern capitalistic systems as a part of the Department of Architecture fall lecture series.

Over the next 20 years, general purpose automation will likely be integrated into every field of industry. Srnicek said a world like this would inhibit high unemployment rates.

“Various establishments have said 47 percent of present U.S. jobs could be automated over the next two decades…A similar study for the […]

Basic Income Might Be The Answer To Society’s Productivity Crisis

Basic Income Might Be The Answer To Society's Productivity Crisis

With the decline of manufacturing jobs, and the onset of automation to take over almost all kinds of work, society is on the hunt for a long-term, scalable solution to our future productivity.

What will happen to displaced workers? How will mass unemployment hurt our increasingly globalized economy?

One concept, a universal basic income, has been debated by thinkers as far back as the 16th century . The theory suggests that a flat income, given to every citizen regardless of employment or societal status, will allow society to pursue the work it really believes in. Can a monthly universal stipend help […]

Does automation destroy jobs? It doesn’t.

The trouble with this argument is that it poses a question – Will automation affect employment in the future ? & attempts to answer it purely by looking at historical data – but that is entirely missing the point.

The central question to answer (& in all my time spent with Futurology – I’ve never even once heard anyone come up with an answer) is – in a future where AI & Robots can do most jobs, how can humans compete with then in an economy that has free market capitalism as its guiding economic principle.

In the past displaced workers […]

Why the Job Market will Continue to Stink

“A few people here, a few people there. But it all adds up.”

By James Murray:

Anyone who pays any attention knows that something unusual is happening to employment. Good full time jobs are disappearing, being replaced by lower paying and part time jobs. Experts and especially politicians have explanations and excuses: Offshoring to lower labor countries, excessive rules and regulations, illegal aliens, lack of education in the workforce…. The list goes on and on.What I rarely hear: automation. When most people hear “automation,” they think “robots.” Most robots are dedicated and expensive and don’t replace that many […]

How computer automation affects occupations: Technology, jobs, and skills

How computer automation affects occupations: Technology, jobs, and skills

A popular notion is that computer automation leads to major job losses. However, this ignores the dynamic economic responses that involve both changing demand and inter-occupation substitution. Using US data, this column explores the effect of automation on employment growth for detailed occupational categories. Computer-using occupations have had greater job growth to date, while those using few computers suffer greater computer-related losses. The real challenge posed by automation is developing a workforce with the skills to use new technologies.

Automation has become a concern not just for blue-collar manufacturing workers, but also for white-collar workers and even professionals. New computer […]

Automation: It’s All About the Workflow

10 Surprising Ways Automation Can Simplify IT

The enterprise is quickly heading into the era of workflow automation with dreams of placing all the mundane, routine tasks of running a business in the hands of intelligent software while humans get to do the fun, creative stuff.

While the effects of this on employment are hotly debated, the fact remains that the technology is quickly coming of age and the enterprise needs to prepare for it or risk losing out to automated rivals.According to Marlon Miller, director of workflow automation at Xerox Corp., the first challenge is to determine the kind […]

How to Protect Workers From Job-Stealing Robots

How to Protect Workers From Job-Stealing Robots

A robot and a human work side by side. There is a lively debate happening across various corners of the internet and the hallways of academia: In the coming decades, will advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) render human labor unnecessary?

At first blush, economic data suggest little reason to worry. American businesses in recent years have needed more and more humans: 15 million new private-sector jobs have been created since early 2010. At the same time, what economists refer to as labor productivity (economic output per human hour worked) has grown disappointingly slowly. If robots were on track to replace […]