Tag: inequality

How Alphabet and Google Think About AI and The Economy

How Alphabet and Google Think About AI and The Economy

In the past, we’ve heard Alphabet’s Google unit describe itself as an " AI-first company ," as well as the importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning to the products that Google makes. At a workshop on AI and the Future of Work earlier this month, Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt discussed where such technologies are heading, as well as their impact on jobs, income inequality, and American competitiveness.

Schmidt said he has been following AI since the 1970s, and noted that Alphabet CEO Larry Page studied AI at Stanford, but conceded that, until recently, he had been pretty skeptical […]

AI and The Future of Work

AI and The Future of Work

Artificial Intelligence will have a profound effect on the way people work, and will almost certainly also impact the availability of jobs and distribution of income. But a number of leading technologists and economists speaking at a conference on AI and the Future of Work —presented by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and its Initiative on the Digital Economy—earlier this month suggested that the changes may not be as rapid or as unusual as is popularly suggested, which is very different from much of what I hear at typical technology conferences.

MIT President Rafael Reif, who opened […]

What The Digital Revolution Means for Middle-Class Jobs

What The Digital Revolution Means for Middle-Class Jobs

(All graphics courtesy of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings) According to popular narrative, technology’s rapid remake of the U.S. workforce has benefited wealthy coastal metro areas — and their more highly educated residents — and left the rest of the country behind. It’s a force that’s fostered inequality, benefited the already privileged and widened the urban-rural divide.

But as with most popular narratives, that one isn’t entirely true. From nurses who use portable vein finders for blood tests to auto mechanics troubleshooting cars on their laptops, technology is reshaping industries across the board — not just the higher-skilled ones […]

Bill Gates Thinks Tech Could Make Inequality Worse. But He Has Faith in Robots

Bill Gates Thinks Tech Could Make Inequality Worse. But He Has Faith in Robots

Inequality is getting worse and, according to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, technology is only going to exacerbate the situation.

“If we’re not careful, technology will actually accentuate the difference between the well off and the poor because if it’s expensive, if you learn about it only in a rich country school, then you’ll have the difference between the well off and the poor people even worse,” Gates said Tuesday at the Misk Global Forum in Riyadh, according to CNBC .

However, he expressed enthusiasm for the potential of artificial intelligence to help humanity “take on all of the top problems.”Yes, robots […]

Transformative automation is coming. The impact is up to us

“Our MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote an excellent op-ed in the Boston Globe urging that we find ways to use technology to invent and improve the future of work. It serves as a call to action, one I hope we will now take up with gusto at MIT and elsewhere.”

By L. Rafael Reif

First published online in the Boston Globe In a recent Pew study , 72 percent of Americans report feeling either worried or very worried about “a future where robots and computers can do many human jobs.” Seventy-six percent believe that economic inequality will grow […]

CIPD Annual Conference 2017: ‘Better managers and more training are the only routes to good work’

Expert panel says productivity and inequality challenges can be solved by strong HR

The huge rate of technological change is creating a new tranche of winners and losers in the British workforce – but HR can help business become a force for good in society by prioritising investment in managerial competence and L&D.

That was the verdict of an expert panel convened at the CIPD Annual Conference to discuss one of the most pressing issues facing policymakers and business leaders: how we create ‘good work’ in a rapidly changing economy.By some measures, the prognosis is bleak. Stefan Baskerville, principal director […]

Crises and Automation

(The Artificial Fabrication of Arbitrary Value, Price, and Wage Across Post-Industrial, Post-Modern Capitalism)

According to Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring , “the only value known in economics is the value of commodities”. 1 Commodities are products produced, not for individual consumption by their producers, but products produced for general public consumption. The value of a commodity, according to Engels, is determined via comparison with other commodities, namely, “they can be…said to be equal or unequal [with other commodities], according to the quantity of [general human] labor embodied in each”. 2

As a result, for Engels, “social conditions remaining the same, two equal […]

Schmidt: Deporting international students ‘literally insane’

Schmidt: Deporting international students 'literally insane'

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt took aim at the Trump administration’s immigration policies last week, saying any policy that threatens international college students with deportation is “literally insane.”

The comment came as Schmidt, who now leads the Google parent company Alphabet, was asked at an MIT conference how the U.S. should retain top young talent in fields like computer science and artificial intelligence (AI).

“The first and most obvious thing to do is: Don’t kick them out,” Schmidt said, to a round of applause. He added, “I would much rather have them be in America … I’d rather […]

Robots no threat to jobs and taxing them may harm economy

Robots no threat to jobs and taxing them may harm economy

The UK already has fewer robots than other leading economies Robots do not pose a threat to UK workers’ jobs, and proposals to tax them risk damaging the economy, a new report has found.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has warned of the danger of the rewards from automation going only to a few bosses of tech firms and argued for them instead to be “publicly managed to share the benefits”, though aides stressed he has not proposed a robot tax.

The new paper from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank warns that restraints on investment in robots […]

The Future Of Work: New Underclass, Dystopian Reality? – Analysis

The Future Of Work: New Underclass, Dystopian Reality? – Analysis

The dust will take decades to settle on the key issue of precisely how much technology and artificial intelligence (AI) will displace human labour. It is clear the near future will see a sizeable proportion of jobs worldwide threatened and substituted by automation, machine learning, or both. What does this mean for national security?

By Shashi Jayakumar and Eugene Goh*

It is increasingly apparent that jobs commonly reckoned to be “safe” may in fact be candidates for an AI – Artificial Intelligence – takeover, with many knowledge workers themselves candidates for displacement. Research by McKinsey from 2015 suggests that current technologies […]