Tag: manufactur

There is a huge hole in Trump’s promise to bring back US manufacturing jobs

There is a huge hole in Trump's promise to bring back US manufacturing jobs

YouTube/iPhone-Fan When Donald Trump was running for president, he said companies should "buy American and hire American."

But in manufacturing these days, buying American often means creating jobs for robots, not humans.

The story of SoftWear, a sewing-automation company in Atlanta, should throw some cold water on Trump’s dreams of returning thousands of Americans to manufacturing jobs.SoftWear started with a group of Georgia Tech professors playing around with robots and became a company because of an earlier "Buy American" push.Since 2002, a rule known as the Berry Amendment has prohibited the Defense Department from procuring "food, clothing, fabrics, fibers, yarns, other […]

Can President Trump rescue the Rust Belt?

Can President Trump rescue the Rust Belt?

President Trump promised to reverse the decades-long decline of manufacturing jobs. Can it be done? Here’s everything you need to know:

Why is the Rust Belt hurting?
Once the booming heart of America’s manufacturing industry, the Rust Belt is now dotted with derelict factory buildings, empty warehouses, and struggling downtowns filled with pawnshops and boarded-up stores. The region, which stretches from western New York to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, has been in serious decline since 1979 — the year that U.S. manufacturing employment peaked. Over the past four decades, manufacturing jobs have plunged by […]

In Pursuit of Profession: Jobs of Future Past?

In Pursuit of Profession: Jobs of Future Past?

The hot topic in education these days is science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM classes. Both public and private school districts have even dedicated entire campuses where the focus is on the STEM subjects. In addition, short-term coding programs – called coding boot camps – have popped up in cities across the nation that promise to teach students from all walks of life how to code in as little as twelve weeks. These programs not only profess a graduation rate of more than 90-percent, graduates can also expect to earn a six-figure salary with several companies competing […]

How to survive the robot-fueled jobs apocalypse

How to survive the robot-fueled jobs apocalypse

Credit: REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch If rumors that James Cameron is interested in picking up Terminator 6 prove true, perhaps Bill Gates will be in the running for a cameo.

Gates recently cautioned that robots are replacing humans in a wide range of jobs, and he proposed implementing a robot tax as a way to temporarily slow the spread of automation. He was promptly — and predictably — trashed by a bevy of economists . [ Roundup: TensorFlow, Spark MLlib, Scikit-learn, MXNet, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, and Caffe machine learning and deep learning frameworks. | Get a digest of the day’s top tech […]

Automation, not foreign trade, kills American jobs

Donald Trump boasts that his "America First" trade and economic policies are bringing well-paid manufacturing jobs back to America. That’s probably his biggest "deliverable" to Trump voters. But is this claim true?

Trump won the presidency partly because he voiced the anger of American workers about lost jobs and stagnant wages. But in the process, he fundamentally misled the country by claiming that trade is the major cause of job losses, and that renegotiating trade agreements would save the middle class.

What Trump is offering is a palliative that has raised false hopes. He implies that a few good trade deals […]

Automation Takes Hold, But Humans Still Needed

A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute — A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity — highlights trends in automation technologies — including robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning — and their effects on businesses and economies worldwide. Some of the key findings of the report are highlighted below: Automating activities can reduce errors and improve quality, while improving productivity and, thereby, business performance.

Although less than 5 percent of all occupations can be fully automated, about 60 percent of occupations are comprised of at least 30 percent of activities that can be automated. Importantly, more occupations […]

Making George Jetson pay taxes on Rosie robot

Making George Jetson pay taxes on Rosie robot

In-Shape Health Clubs Bet you George and Jane Jetson are wishing they hired an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper instead of hiring Rosie the robot maid.
The Jetsons — the space age cartoon family Hanna-Baebera created that lives in 2154 — may have to cut back on some luxuries if San Francisco County Supervisor Jane Kim succeeds in imposing a tax on robots and automation.
Taking a cue from musings from Microsoft founder Bill Gates — who became one of the world’s wealthiest men through software programs that reduced labor needed to perform a wide array of office work […]

CEOs: Changing technology landscape is impacting people strategy

CEOs: Changing technology landscape is impacting people strategy

Technology has the potential to create considerable disruption to employment across a range of industries. A new report considers the current trend, as well as the kinds of skills that employers cannot automate. Many of those skills themselves remain difficult to find, pointing out that considerable social transformations may be on the horizon, with people strategies likely to adapt to the new normal.

In PwC ’s latest edition of its ‘Global CEO Survey’, the 20th edition, the firm considers a range of factors affecting businesses across the globe. One key area of concern, from both the public as well […]

The Robots are Coming, your Job is at Risk

The Robots are Coming, your Job is at Risk

Development & Aid , Featured , Global , Globalisation , Headlines , Labour | Opinion

Martin Khor is Executive Director of the South Centre, a think tank for developing countries, based in Geneva. Credit: John Greenfield/Flickr PENANG, Mar 15 2017 (IPS) – Last year Uber started testing driver-less cars, with humans inside to make corrections in case something goes wrong. If the tests go well, Uber will presumably replace their present army of drivers with fleets of the new cars.

Some personally owned cars can already do automatic parking. Is it a matter of time before Uber, taxi and personal […]

America may miss out on the next industrial revolution

America may miss out on the next industrial revolution

A robotic arm manufactured by KUKA, a German industrial robotics company, installing the cockpit section of a Mercedes Benz S-Class. Robots are inevitably going to automate millions of jobs in the US and around the world, but there’s an even more complex scenario on the horizon, said roboticist Matt Rendall. In a talk Tuesday at SXSW, Rendall painted a picture of the future of robotic job displacement that focused less on automation and more on the realistic ways in which the robotics industry will reshape global manufacturing.

The takeaway was that America, which has outsourced much of its manufacturing and […]