Tag: inequality

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 […]

Factory automation tax unnecessary

Factory automation tax unnecessary

Photo Credit: Creative Commons In a recent interview with news website “Quartz,” Bill Gates offered a rather unconventional approach to the growing use of robots in factories, asserting that robots who replace human workers should incur the same tax rates as the human workers’ income taxes would have incurred.

According to Gates, “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at […]

A ‘robot tax’ is not the way to save jobs

A 'robot tax' is not the way to save jobs

© Getty Images When two diametrically opposed figures such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Benoît Hamon, the Socialist candidate in the French presidential election, both come out in favor of a "robot tax," that should set the alarm bells ringing.

The tax is supposed to restore the balance between man and machine. However, there are better paths we can go down than this.

Unemployment The two gentlemen are right to be concerned. In their famous 2013 study, Michael Osborne and Carl Frey of Oxford University concluded that "about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk from automation."Later […]

How would a ‘robot tax’ work?

How would a 'robot tax' work?

On February 17, Bill Gates set the news agenda around the world by declaring that a so-called "robot tax" should be introduced in order to counteract job losses caused by automation. "Right now," he told online publication Quartz , "the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory has that income taxed. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level."

There is no doubting that Gates’ vision of job displacement is not of a distant dystopian future, but today’s reality: in 2015 expenditure […]

Automation is Taking Over One of the Most Popular Professions

Automation is Taking Over One of the Most Popular Professions

Truck driving is the most popular job for people in most US states and the advent of the self-driving truck is going to completely disrupt that profession.

Universal Basic Income is one way to address the upcoming worker displacement that’s coming from automation.

Late last year, I took a road trip with my partner from our home in New Orleans, Louisiana to Orlando, Florida and as we drove by town after town, we got to talking about the potential effects self-driving vehicle technology would have not only on truckers themselves, but on all the local economies dependent on trucker […]

Think your job, your career, is secure? Think again!

Think your job, your career, is secure? Think again!

It’s not just repetitive labour jobs that are losing out to technology.Experts say Canadian workers could be in for some major upheaval over the next decade as increasingly intelligent software, robotics and artificial intelligence perform more sophisticated tasks in the economy. “There will be huge carnage and it is going to happen quickly” . Frank Graves

We’ve seen it in forestry; one machine can replace a hundred lumberjacks. We’ve seen it in construction where one worker with a nail gun can replace a dozen carpenters with hammers. In manufacturing, a dozen robots replace 200 or so assembly line workers. […]