Tag: inequality

CEOs: Changing technology landscape is impacting people strategy

CEOs: Changing technology landscape is impacting people strategy

Technology has the potential to create considerable disruption to employment across a range of industries. A new report considers the current trend, as well as the kinds of skills that employers cannot automate. Many of those skills themselves remain difficult to find, pointing out that considerable social transformations may be on the horizon, with people strategies likely to adapt to the new normal.

In PwC ’s latest edition of its ‘Global CEO Survey’, the 20th edition, the firm considers a range of factors affecting businesses across the globe. One key area of concern, from both the public as well […]

The Robots are Coming, your Job is at Risk

The Robots are Coming, your Job is at Risk

Development & Aid , Featured , Global , Globalisation , Headlines , Labour | Opinion

Martin Khor is Executive Director of the South Centre, a think tank for developing countries, based in Geneva. Credit: John Greenfield/Flickr PENANG, Mar 15 2017 (IPS) – Last year Uber started testing driver-less cars, with humans inside to make corrections in case something goes wrong. If the tests go well, Uber will presumably replace their present army of drivers with fleets of the new cars.

Some personally owned cars can already do automatic parking. Is it a matter of time before Uber, taxi and personal […]

Bill Gates thinks robots should be taxed. Is he right?

Bill Gates thinks robots should be taxed. Is he right?

Robots are taking your kids’ jobs too. (Photo: Central Press/Getty Images) Bill Gates, the techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, is worried about the rise of the robots. What people will do when all the jobs disappear? When he was interviewed by Kevin Delaney of Quartz , he had this to say about it: “You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues. That’s because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it’s important to be able to manage […]

Automation in Transportation

Automation in Transportation

Working people are living in a time when it is more and more difficult to make ends meet. Wages are stagnant, and the jobs created during the slow economic recovery are doing little to reduce inequality in the workplace. Meanwhile, attacks on unionization, offshoring, employee misclassification, convoluted corporate structures and technological change are threatening the nature of work for millions of Americans. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven automation in transportation poses risks to both jobs and safety and creates challenges for how existing government structures regulate transportation and respond to job impacts.

Clearly, technological changes in transportation threaten to […]

Automation and the prospects of economic development

Automation and the prospects of economic development

Technological anxiety has been with us since the first modern industries appeared. The angst toward new technologies is mainly about the fear of widespread substitution and displacement of human labor by machines. Historical experiences in early industrialization have shown that new technologies used in production initially had disruptive effects to labor and existing production assets. However, new technologies also ushered in the birth of new industries, created new jobs, becoming the source of productivity, economic growth and development.

Automation, like most new labor-saving technologies, has an effect of raising the comparative advantage and value of jobs that only humans can […]

The optimist’s guide to the robot apocalypse

The optimist’s guide to the robot apocalypse

Machines, you may have heard, are coming for all the jobs.

Robots flip burgers and work warehouses . Artificial intelligence handles insurance claims and basic bookkeeping , manages investment portfolios , does legal research , and performs basic HR tasks . Human labor doesn’t stand a chance against them—after the “ automation apocalypse ,” only those with spectacular abilities and the owners of the robots will thrive.

Or at least, that’s one plausible and completely valid theory. But before you start campaigning for a universal basic income and set up a bunker , you might want to also familiarize yourself with […]

How Robots Could Help Close The Gender Gap

How Robots Could Help Close The Gender Gap

It seems like AI and robotics have become the favourite industries of venture capitalists, with some $5bn invested across 658 deals in 2016 alone. This is a huge growth from what was just a nascent industry in 2012 (which had less than $600m in investments across 160 deals).

It also seems that politicians have begun to pay attention, with the UK government having recently announced an investment of £20m in artificial intelligence research, including robots and driverless cars. The European Union has also been eyeing the topic, outlining the possible issues and therefore the need for EU-wide rules to enforce […]

Automation isn’t the problem, capitalism is

Automation isn’t the problem, capitalism is

This robot is coming to steal your job. Graphic by Kelly Campbell. When it comes to depictions of futuristic societies in film and literature, science fiction nigh unanimously errs on the side of dystopia. So too do pundits – and nearly half of young people in developed industrial economies, according to a 2016 poll by Future Foundation – when the topic of automation of the labour force is discussed. Indeed, headlines often blare job losses to technological innovation in numbers that seem impossible: one 2016 report by the Mowat Centre, a public policy think tank, declared that a little […]

Labour augmenting or job destroying?

Labour augmenting or job destroying?

Credit: Pixabay. This post highlights some of the possible economic implications of the so-called “ Fourth Industrial Revolution ” — whereby the use of new technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to transform entire industries and sectors.

Some economists have argued that, like past technical change, this will not create large-scale unemployment, as labour gets reallocated.

However, many technologists are less optimistic about the employment implications of AI. In this blog post we argue that the potential for simultaneous and rapid disruption, coupled with the breadth of human functions that AI might replicate, may have profound implications for labour markets.We conclude […]

“The robots are coming”: How will automation affect London’s economy?

“The robots are coming”: How will automation affect London’s economy?

A robot on its way to work on Regent Street. Image: Getty. Labour assembly member Fiona Twycross on the rise of the robots.

The vision of the world of work being run by robots and machines is familiar from futuristic sci-fi films, but advances in technology could mean that a new post-industrial revolution is closer than we think.

Automation – the application of new technology to produce and deliver products and services – is not a new phenomenon: in London, for example, the tube and DLR already have driverless technology. However, the pace at which further automation is expected could […]