Tag: inequality

Manufacturing jobs return to US during election year – but not quite like before

Manufacturing jobs return to US during election year – but not quite like before

An employee works on an assembly line producing automobiles at a factory in China. Photograph: China Stringer Network / Reut/Reuters When Fred Robinson moved to his cottage in 1960, it was on little more than a dirt lane surrounded by cotton fields. For 42 years, like so many others in Cleveland County, North Carolina, Robinson made his living turning that cotton into cloth, manning a weaving machine at the local Dover mill. His starting salary, in 1949, was 97 cents an hour.

In a familiar story, nearby textile mills closed – and with them went the jobs. From when Robinson’s […]

The Wrong Inequality Solution: No One Has Anything

The Wrong Inequality Solution: No One Has Anything

Robots are presented at the Robotics event Innorobo in La Plaine Saint-Denis on May 26, 2016. / AFP / ERIC PIERMONT (Photo credit should read ERIC PIERMONT/AFP/Getty Images) The approach to the inequality question has typically been how to either create or redistribute wealth so that those at the bottom of the economic ladder have more. Inherent in that approach is an assumption that societies have the time and choice to lift up those without, compressing the difference between haves and have-nots.

But there’s another approach, one that we seem blindly headed for, that could largely reach a reduction in […]

Relax, a robot might not take you job after all

Relax, a robot might not take you job after all

Worried about being replaced by a robot? According to some recent forecasts many workers should be. There are gloomy predictions that even high-wage, knowledge jobs in finance, law and medicine won’t be spared amid the relentless rise of smart machines.

A striking 2013 study by Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne said 47 per cent of all employment in America is "at risk" of being replaced by computers and algorithms in the next 10 to 20 years. Earlier this year a CSIRO put the proportion of Australian jobs vulnerable to automation at a worrying 44 per cent.

But now […]

Living in a bubble: Y Combinator’s basic income study is merely a result of white unemployment

Living in a bubble: Y Combinator’s basic income study is merely a result of white unemployment

Workers arrive for a shift at the reopened Chrysler Warren Truck Assembly plant in Warren, Michigan, U.S., on Monday, June 29, 2009. Photo credit: Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Silicon Valley’s interest in basic income is based on a false prophecy of tech destroying jobs and wouldn’t be explored if those affected weren’t mostly white

Y Combinator made an announcement last Wednesday that it would pursue a short-term, exploratory study into the concept of a ‘ basic income ,’ a no-strings-attached form of welfare that would be allotted to every citizen of a given city or country. Residents of increasingly […]

The Race Between Machine and Man: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares and Employment

5 By: Daron Acemoglu ; Pascual Restrepo The advent of automation and the simultaneous decline in the labor share and employment among advanced economies raise concerns that labor will be marginalized and made redundant by new technologies. We examine this proposition using a task-based framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and more complex versions of existing tasks, in which labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. We characterize the equilibrium in this model and establish how the available technologies and the choices of firms between producing with capital or labor determine factor prices […]

Will A Robot Take Your Job?

Will A Robot Take Your Job?

A new estimate says that robots will perform more than half of all jobs by 2045. But don’t panic. (AP) A new estimate says that robots will perform more than half of all jobs by 2045, leaving the frightening prospect that millions of once solidly middle-class people will be left idle and jobless.

“If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?” is the alarming question asked by Rice University professor Moshe Vardi , who is the source of the new estimate.

It’s a legitimate question. And Vardi answers it, claiming that the advent […]

Weird Science: Robots Poised to Take Half the World’s Jobs in 30 Years

Weird Science: Robots Poised to Take Half the World’s Jobs in 30 Years

This picture taken on November 24, 2015 shows visitors watching a robot (C) demonstration during the World Robot Conference in Beijing Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University in Houston, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that, "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task." He added, "I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?" ‘I’m Not Just Any AI’: Meet the World’s […]