Tag: inequality

Magazine excerpt: The fourth industrial revolution

Magazine excerpt: The fourth industrial revolution

Will any of today’s jobs still exist in 20 years? Will automation rewrite all our futures? The so-called fourth industrial revolution has profound implications for the world of work – and therefore the role of learning and development. We’re already used to robots undertaking repetitive manufacturing tasks, and smart applications determining our credit ratings, autopiloting planes and delivering functionality to our mobile devices. The next waves of development will see the combination of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, big data, and cloud services.

The combined effect of these technologies creates the opportunity for machines to interact with humans by providing services […]

News Analysis: Robots to possibly bring severe repercussions to U.S. society

WASHINGTON, July 10 (Xinhua) — While industrial robots are predicted to replace millions of U.S. workers and suppress wage growth in the next decade, reforms in education and social safety net largely lag behind, said a renowned U.S. economist.

"There’s a real mismatch between our institutions and the technologies coming on board," Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Axios Media, an American news website, in an interview published on Sunday night.

Industrial robots have taken over routine work from human hands in the past several decades. A paper published in March by Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, […]

OPINION: Kendall Stanley — Machines, machines and more machines

Get ready for robocalypse.

The word doesn’t really trip easily off your tongue, but you’re probably going to be hearing plenty of it in the coming years and it’s getting the attention of bankers from around the world.

While the bankers at a recent conference weren’t looking at a dystopian future, they were worried that the economic upheaval of artificial intelligence may be more substantial than they’ve been thinking — way more substantial.“In the past, technical advances caused temporary disruptions but ultimately improved living standards, creating new categories of employment along the way,” noted the article on the bankers in The […]

The digital divide: why the skills gap must be addressed to tackle inequality

Automation anxiety: the role technology is playing in rising inequality has become a hot topic

In 1821, the eminent political economist David Ricardo remarked: “The substitution of machinery for human labour is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers… [it] may render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition of the labourer.” Little over a century later, John Maynard Keynes identified a similar predicament: “Technological unemployment… [is an issue born of] our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses of labour.”

Fast-forward another century and […]

How can Britain solve its productivity ‘puzzle’?

How can Britain solve its productivity 'puzzle'?

When analysts and business commentators talk about economic productivity the understandable reaction of most people is to switch off.

As obscure, abstruse economic concepts go, productivity is right up there. No one really – not even economists – really understands why it goes up and down, but all are convinced it’s very important indeed.

But maybe we should all be taking more interest in the concept. Leaving aside debates about inequality and relative poverty, the real determinant of the prosperity of a population over time is probably its productivityThe UK’s comparatively poor productivity rate, which according to the latest figures has […]

My Say: The future of inequality and what we can do about it

My Say: The future of inequality and what we can do about it

As we think of the future in a world of Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) — where machines are created to “think” the way a human brain does — the question of jobs is a crucial one. Machines have been making routine jobs obsolete for scores of years, now they are capable of making even non-routine jobs obsolete. I have, in a previous column, discussed what the future of education should look like in a world such as this, arguing that our ability to be human is our strongest defence against the rising tide that is to come.

In this […]

Rage against the machines: is automation a threat to prosperity?

Numerous commentators have raised concerns about the effect of automation on jobs. In 2015, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andrew Haldane, suggested that as many as one third of jobs in the UK – 15 million – could be lost to automation. Examples could include drivers replaced by autonomous vehicles and administrative staff replaced by intelligent assistants like Amazon’s Alexa. Moreover, where automation in the past affected low-skill jobs, smarter machines and artificial intelligence automation could affect a much broader range of jobs in the future, including many high-paid, high-skilled positions.

Fears about automation have been around ever since […]

As Men Make Way For Machines, Many A Jobs May Vanish

As Men Make Way For Machines, Many A Jobs May Vanish

The speed with which the idea of a Universal Basic Income is gaining adherents in the West should be a giveaway: a lot of jobs are simply not coming back, and there will be those who are permanently unemployable.

On a May trip to Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the things that startled me is the virtual extinction of various categories of jobs. Technology could well be the culprit, although I read somewhere that only a single official job classification has explicitly disappeared in the United States in the last 60 years: elevator (lift) operator. But […]

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp: New divisions will run deeper than left or right

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp: New divisions will run deeper than left or right

Deliveroo riders holding a protest over pay outside the company HQ in London. Could protests like this become more common as our economic model grows increasingly unstable? POLITICS and economics have been going through rapid evolutionary change in the last few years. Future historians may refer to it as a revolution. Political and economic thinking are deeply intertwined and while the economic order of our lifetime has failed and shows no sign of recovery, our politicians have failed to realise the new reality and are still arguing in terms of left and right, because that’s all they understand.

Left and […]

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp: New divisions will run deeper than left or right

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp: New divisions will run deeper than left or right

Deliveroo riders holding a protest over pay outside the company HQ in London. Could protests like this become more common as our economic model grows increasingly unstable? POLITICS and economics have been going through rapid evolutionary change in the last few years. Future historians may refer to it as a revolution. Political and economic thinking are deeply intertwined and while the economic order of our lifetime has failed and shows no sign of recovery, our politicians have failed to realise the new reality and are still arguing in terms of left and right, because that’s all they understand.

Left and […]