inequality Archives - Page 40 of 116

How Trump, Biden see automation and AI

President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden both believe automation and AI will take jobs. The issue may come up at tonight’s debate, as the candidates talk about the economy.

In discussing automation, Biden has pointed to self-driving trucks, their threat to millions of trucking jobs and the need for more job training.

Trump hasn’t tweeted once about automation and robots, but when asked in 2017 by The New York Times whether factory jobs will be replaced by robots, he said, "They will, and we’ll make the robots, too."When it comes to automation and AI, the candidates aren’t as far […]

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Trump hails ‘manufacturing miracle’ as factories bleed jobs

Four years after he won the Midwest by vowing to revitalize the U.S. manufacturing workforce, President Donald Trump is campaigning for reelection on a job well done. The numbers tell a different story.

Trump’s anti-trade agenda and a pandemic-induced recession have combined to shutter factories and accelerate decades-old trends toward automation, eliminating hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, many for good, including in the Rust Belt states he needs to win in November.

The president’s path to the Oval Office was paved by his victory in this factory-intense region, where a downturn in manufacturing that began in 2015 opened the door […]

Full Post at www.politico.com

Future is Now: How COVID-19 is Propelling Automation and Pushing Us to a World Without Work

What will be the future of employment be like with the world racing toward automation? | Image credit: Reuters In Meno , Plato wrote about a gifted sculptor, Daedalus, who made such lifelike statues, that they had to be tied up so that they don’t run away. This story perturbed his disciple Aristotle a lot as it made him wonder what would happen to human employment if ‘every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need’. In 2020, however, this is not a novel prospect. Most tools we own can, in […]

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The Great Services Illusion

In the wake of COVID-19, some economists are calling for developing countries to shift from industrialization to services, or even to bypass the manufacturing stage of development altogether. But blind faith in services-led growth is a dangerous illusion, and the arguments supporting it are deeply flawed.

CAMBRIDGE – As the world prepares for the post-pandemic era, the quest for sustainable economic growth is becoming ever more intense – especially for developing countries. It is tempting to call for these countries – the main engine of global growth in recent decades – to shift their development strategies from industrialization to services. […]

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Strong Links Between Automation and Inequality: Job-Replacing Tech Has Directly Driven the Income Gap Since the Late 1980s

New research by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu shows that since 1987, automation has taken away jobs from lower-skill workers without being replaced by an equivalent number of labor-market opportunities. Modern technology affects different workers in different ways. In some white-collar jobs — designer, engineer — people become more productive with sophisticated software at their side. In other cases, forms of automation, from robots to phone-answering systems, have simply replaced factory workers, receptionists, and many other kinds of employees.

Now a new study co-authored by an MIT economist suggests automation has a bigger impact on the labor market and income inequality […]

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Think a Robot Couldn’t Take Your Job? Think Again

Robots and automation have moved far beyond the factory floor and threaten to change the work of 60 per cent of British Columbians. As well as grilling burgers and soaking up the last of the summer sun, Labour Day is a time to think about working people and the future of work. In 2020, that inevitably means thinking about pandemic-driven working from home. But there’s another trend that deserves at least as much attention: automation.

If you think automation has nothing to do with you and your job, you may want to think again. According to a new BC Federation […]

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Three in five BC workers jobs face “medium to high likelihood” of automation impact: new BCFED report

Posted September 4th, 2020 for British Columbia Federation of Labour (Unceded Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam territories — Vancouver, BC) Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people think about the future of work, they think about the trend toward working from home. But a research report released today by the BC Federation of Labour suggests the increasing trend toward automation deserves urgent attention.

“ Anyone who thinks they’re immune to automation should think twice,” BCFED president Laird Cronk said. “This report finds that three out of five BC workers are at medium-to-high likelihood of having their jobs affected in the […]

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Pandemic-fueled automation is gobbling up jobs that will never return

The COVID-19 pandemic has had massive economic impacts in the United States, and one of the problems many companies have been facing as a result is how to keep business moving along without putting employees at risk of being infected. As you might expect, one of the ways many businesses are staying operational is by automating tasks that would otherwise be done by humans. Robots, after all, aren’t at risk of dying from COVID-19.

By Thor Benson August 26, 2020 6:00AM PST

Since the pandemic began, we’ve seen efforts to automate jobs increase significantly in the food service industry , manufacturing […]

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Pandemic-fueled automation is gobbling up jobs, and we’ll never get them back

Getty Images/Digital Trends Graphic The COVID-19 pandemic has had massive economic impacts in the United States, and one of the problems many companies have been facing as a result is how to keep business moving along without putting employees at risk of being infected. As you might expect, one of the ways many businesses are staying operational is by automating tasks that would otherwise be done by humans. Robots, after all, aren’t at risk of dying from COVID-19.

Since the pandemic began, we’ve seen efforts to automate jobs increase significantly in the food service industry , manufacturing , meatpacking , […]

Full Post at www.digitaltrends.com

In COVID-19 era, US workers see tech as either savior or destroyer

Trump promises tax credits for companies to bring back jobs from China For many professionals , technology has been a lifeline during the pandemic , enabling them to be productive while stuck at home. For many other workers , it is a new dividing line, corralling them further into the stagnant corners of the economy .

The pandemic has led to unemployment of workers in the service sector, retail and other fields at a scale and with a swiftness unprecedented in the historical record. They are cashiers and janitors, construction laborers and secretaries.

For many, their prospects were already diminished by […]

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