Tag: manufactur

Job creation vital for India to escape middle-income trap

Job creation vital for India to escape middle-income trap

The Indian economy has been witnessing a flux of good news lately. The GDP growth for the October-December quarter stood at seven per cent, beating all expectations of the negative impact of demonetisation. Stock markets hit their highest in two years, and the rupee stood at a three-month high. Representational image. Thinkstock However, scepticism over the true reflection of the demonetisation impact in growth figures has been widespread. Japanese financial holding company Nomura rightly pointed out that the figure fails to capture the negative impact on the unorganised sector as it is largely based on organised sector data.

Nevertheless, obsession […]

Automation and robot-proofing your career

Automation and robot-proofing your career

STOCKTON — For more than 40 years, robots have been at work in U.S. factories doing mainly routine, repetitive work. While the number of manufacturing jobs has gone down in this country, productivity has gone up. Here in the Central Valley, automation has been important in distribution centers, such as Amazon.com, where robots often retrieve items from shelves for shipping, for example.

“Everything from wrapping pallets to self-programming robots,” said San Joaquin Partnership CEO Michael Ammann who recently saw the latest in manufacturing and distribution center automation on display at a Southern California trade show.

For example, vision software can now […]

Robots Aren’t Out to Get Us All

Robots Aren’t Out to Get Us All

Editor’s Note: This commentary is part of a bi-monthly column in partnership with South Texas Money Management . Are people in danger of being replaced by robots? Concerns regarding automation and worker displacement, which have been around for centuries, have experienced a recent uptick. Most of these concerns are misplaced, particularly if effective policies are in place.

The real wealth of a country consists of the output of goods and services that its countrymen and women have access to. The fear that automation will destroy jobs rests on the assumption that there is a fixed amount of goods that buyers […]

Primary metals manufacturing has lost 84,000 jobs over last decade

Primary metals manufacturing has lost 84,000 jobs over last decade

Last year, primary metals manufacturing lost 8,600 jobs, a decline of 2.2 percent. The subsector has lost 27,100 jobs since 2014, a decline of 6.7 percent.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing blamed about 19,000 layoffs in the steel industry over the past few years on a global import crisis triggered by rampant overcapacity that led China to dump steel below cost across the world. Nearly a third of the steel purchased in the United States in 2015 was made overseas, and steelmakers responded by cuts at Gary Works, East Chicago Tin and other local mills.

Industry observers also have pointed to […]

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 […]

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. […]

Automation, then and now

Automation, then and now

In the just-released March issue of the Brooklyn Rail , Jason E. Smith compares twentieth-century waves of automation to the new wave of automation that seems to be engulfing the global economy now. In the process, Smith questions some widespread assumptions about automation, including the notion that it necessarily leads to greater unemployment, as well as the idea espoused by some leftists that automation will eventually free us from work entirely. Read an excerpt from Smith’s piece below, of the full text here13 . It may be that the history of capitalism is the history of automation. Warnings about […]

Matt Nolan presents his Top 10 links on the economics of automation

Matt Nolan presents his Top 10 links on the economics of automation

Today’s Top 10 is a guest post from Matt Nolan, an economist at Infometrics , and an author at the blog site TVHE .

As always, we welcome your additions in the comment stream below or via email to david.chaston@interest.co.nz.

And if you’re interested in contributing the occasional Top 10 yourself, contact gareth.vaughan@interest.co.nz.Before writing this I had a search of interest.co.nz for “automation”. I found the following articles as the first 5 links: A top ten by Lena Hesselgrave , an article by Nigel Pinkerton (a colleague of mine), an article from NZIER , and two Top Tens from myself. Finally, […]