Tag: manufactur

Startups spy an opportunity in the power of AI and automation

Startups spy an opportunity in the power of AI and automation

Emily Foges, chief executive, says Luminance allows junior and trainee lawyers get back to more interesting work analysing the data as they did before contracts were drawn up digitally Have you heard the one about the Chinese mobile phone factory that made one change and increased productivity by 250 per cent?

In news that won’t have been very funny to employees, the Changying Precision Technology replaced 90 per cent of its human workforce with machines.

The workforce at the factory in Dongguan City shrank from 650 people to just 60 after the company invested in 60 robot arms that can work […]

Grover Norquist: Bill Gates’ robot tax is ‘stupid’

Grover Norquist: Bill Gates' robot tax is 'stupid'

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist is not a fan of the "robot tax" recently proposed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

"A robot tax is a particularly stupid tax. It is a tax on productivity — a tax on growth," Grover told the Washington Examiner in an email exchange.

Gates made the suggestion during an interview with Quartz in February, in response to the number of jobs being lost to automation. "If a human worker does $50,000 of work in a factory, that income is taxed," he said. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax […]

Man vs Machine: Just How Soon Will Automation Reshape The Global Workforce?

Man vs Machine: Just How Soon Will Automation Reshape The Global Workforce?

MODERN computers can learn, they can listen, they can understand, and more importantly, they can create— a task they are performing at an extraordinary rate unseen by any human to date. Rather than relying mostly on physical labor and human presence to drive production, many industries are implementing technology that can perform the work of humans at lower costs and with less effort.

Defined as “the information processing in physical systems”, intelligence is arguably humanity’s most valuable resource. It is what drives the creation of new ideas and stimulates the growth of any successful economy. With that in mind, it […]

Taxing Robots Is a Terrible Idea

Taxing Robots Is a Terrible Idea

Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates is much smarter—and richer!—than I will ever be, but even smart, rich men can have bad ideas.

During a February interview with the digital news outlet Quartz, Gates suggested that robots should be taxed as a way to compensate factory workers displaced by automation. Since factory workers pay Social Security and income taxes, he reasoned, if those workers are replaced by robots, then the robots should be similarly taxed to restore the lost government revenue. Gates worried that the rate at which factories are implementing robotics and automation is outpacing the economy’s ability to reallocate […]

Trump Can’t Bring Back All Those Jobs From China. Here’s What He Can Do

Trump Can't Bring Back All Those Jobs From China. Here's What He Can Do

This picture taken on Dec. 14, 2016, at a news stand in Shanghai shows an advertisement for a magazine featuring Donald Trump, who would soon take office as president, on the cover. Donald Trump’s rhetoric on China and trade has been blunt, to say the least.

"We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country — and that’s what they’re doing," he said at a May 2016 campaign rally . "It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world."

His tone was a bit more measured leading up to his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping , though the […]

Have No Fear, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau Has A Plan For When The Robots Take Our Jobs

Have No Fear, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau Has A Plan For When The Robots Take Our Jobs

If you ask experts robots are going to be claiming a lot of human jobs in the future. However, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau believes he has a plan to deal with this eventuality, in a way that doesn’t leave hordes of people lining up at the unemployment office. According to guys like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking, everything from factories to taxis to even some office jobs will eventually be fully automated, putting a lot of people out of business. Each has their own idea of a solution — Bill gates even suggested taxing factory robots […]

Don’t worry about the robots, Canada

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets Honda Robot Asimo as he visits Honda Motor Co. headquaters in Tokyo, Japan on Tuesday, May 24, 2016. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

The robots are coming! No job is safe! We’ve been hearing this refrain for a while now, describing the latest wave of the technological revolution that has transformed economies everywhere. But is there truly nothing a machine can’t do better than a person?

With all that current technology can accomplish, it’s easy for people to assume that robots will be replacing humans in all corners of the workplace. Our latest research for the […]

GM hooking 30,000 robots to Internet to keep factories humming

GM hooking 30,000 robots to Internet to keep factories humming

(Bloomberg) — General Motors Co. has connected about a quarter of its 30,000 factory robots to the internet, and the largest U.S. automaker already is reaping the benefits of less down time.

In the last two years, GM has avoided 100 potential failures of vehicle-assembling robots by analyzing data they sent to external servers in the cloud, Mark Franks, director of global automation, said at a conference in Chicago on Monday. Connectivity is preventing assembly line interruptions and robot replacements that can take as long as eight hours. “If we can avoid a disruption in our manufacturing, we can save […]

Urgent legal reform needed ahead of the fourth industrial revolution

Urgent legal reform needed ahead of the fourth industrial revolution

Gerlind Wisskirchen New labour and employment legislation is “urgently needed” before the impending AI revolution, including in the area of liability for autonomous cars, according to a report by the International Bar Association (IBA).

The present wave of automation, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) – the development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence – is creating a gap between current legislation and new laws necessary for an emerging workplace reality, states the 120-page report by the IBA Global Employment Institute (IBA GEI), entitled Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and Their Impact on the Workplace .

The report […]

The Challenge of Automation: Finding Our Place Amongst the Machines

The Challenge of Automation: Finding Our Place Amongst the Machines

The automation revolution underway now is profoundly different from previous technological revolutions, with job losses likely to far exceed job creation and no clear solutions in sight. This is an uncomfortable reality for many of us. We are used to cheering all technological advances and the conveniences they bring. The progress of technology has always seemed both inevitable and exciting in its unpredictability, but never a choice that we have had to make as a society. This may be about to change in the coming years and decades as we struggle find a place for human beings amongst all […]