Tag: manufactur

Lack of skilled labor threatens manufacturing

Lack of skilled labor threatens manufacturing

During the 2016 primary election, several presidential candidates repeatedly lamented the loss of American manufacturing jobs. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump built their populist economic platforms around the issue, soon followed by other candidates and members of Congress. None of the rhetoric explains manufacturing as an industry or the entire economy.

Over the last 20 years, low-skilled manufacturing jobs have vanished from the U.S. while high skilled jobs flourish. The central political narrative is that jobs are primarily lost to overseas competitors.

While this may be anecdotally true, low-skilled manufacturing jobs disappeared primarily as the result of automation — which, ironically, […]

Clinton, Trump and Obama aren’t telling American workers the truth. Here it is

Clinton, Trump and Obama aren't telling American workers the truth. Here it is

Labor Day is the one day every year when we come together as a nation to celebrate the achievements of the American worker and the history of the labor movement in this country. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will join President Obama (who spent the weekend meeting with G20 leaders issued a Labor Day message on September 1) as well as a variety of politicians and public officials from across the country, in commemorating the day.

You can bet that their lofty rhetoric will be accompanied by a promise to restore the nation to its manufacturing heyday.

At the Democratic Convention […]

The future of automation and your job

The future of automation and your job

Buy Photo Imagine it’s 2030, and it’s nearing time to eat dinner.

You text a grocery store where your order is taken for a pound of ground beef, a box of Hamburger Helper and maybe some lettuce and tomatoes for a salad. Possibly you want to fancy it up with a bottle of cabernet. The beef was butchered and packaged by a machine. Robots picked and processed the grapes, which where then bottled and shipped to a market by automation.

A driverless car, or possibly a drone aircraft, delivers the goods to your front door. You never see a person from […]

We Need To Talk About Tomorrow’s World

We Need To Talk About Tomorrow’s World

Bloomberg via Getty Images Every time I visit my local supermarket I see a minor change, maybe not noticeable to many, but definitely there. What started with a few automatic tills at one end of the aisles has grown to over half the store in length. This presumably means every time I visit less people are employed at the supermarket.

For me this is the most graphic representation of not just where our economy is changing now but how it will develop over the next 20 years, with the most pessimistic estimates claiming that half of all jobs could be […]

The new technology revolution – impact on SL

The new technology revolution - impact on SL

( Continued from yesterday )

By C.R. de Silva,
Retired World Bank Official
Artificial Intelligence (AI) -The Second Machine Age is Here.The Nobel Prize winner in behavioural economics Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, believes that robots will actually replace CEOs, which is well beyond the limits of manual or physical labour. His view is that there is no concrete evidence that expert human cognition does better than intelligently constructed formulas, meaning algorithms conjoined with artificial intelligence(AI) to create good business judgement. So, what is AI ? It is the invention and deployment to actual situations of intelligent or […]

The new technology revolution – impact on SL

The new technology revolution - impact on SL

By C.R. de Silva,
Retired World Bank Official

Revolutionary changes in technology, following on the heels of globalization, are changing the world economy as a result of the evolving changes in employment and resulting wage patterns in the industrialized economies. The overriding structural issues facing the advanced economies are creeping job insecurity and the need for providing productive employment and adequate salaries for affected workers to take care of their families, in the wake of progressive use of robots and also ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). This is occurring in diverse sectors of industrialized economies with a wave of robotic machines and […]

Trump takes night off from Boeing-Beijing blather

Donald Trump ventured into the beating heart of Boeing country when he staged a rally in Everett Tuesday evening . Oddly enough, the Republican presidential candidate didn’t talk about Boeing.

Some might consider it an act of cowardice, this refusal by the New York billionaire to stand up and explain his facile You’d-Better-Elect-Me-or-Boeing-Is-Going-to-China sound bites, which he’s thrown out like red meat to friendly interviewers. ("They’ll start taking your business away, and you won’t have much of Boeing," Trump told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson on Monday.)

Did Trump shed his backbone by appearing before a company town audience and failing to […]

Does Workplace Automation Destroy Jobs Or Create Unexpected Opportunities? An Optimists’ View

The Robots are Coming… to Take Your Job. That’s the title of a recent article in Knowledge@Wharton, which describes how today’s job losses due to automation are just “the tip of the iceberg.”

Are things really that bad? We’ve been hearing plenty about the impact of machines on what seem to most existing jobs these days — from truck drivers to journalists to computer programmers themselves . However, there are also reasons to be optimistic — automation is delivering opportunities unheard of even a few years ago, both for people and the enterprises in which they work.

That’s the key takeaway […]

Indian industry pushes for advanced robotics, but the question of jobs remains

Indian industry pushes for advanced robotics, but the question of jobs remains

A robot stacking solar panels in a factory in California. The media may focus on humanoid robots, but it is advanced robots that mimic human behaviour that get the job done, the manufacturing industry says. Indian companies feel that advanced robotics is one way forward for the government’s signature Make in India campaign, a survey has found.

The survey, by industry lobby group Ficci and Tata Strategic Management Group, says that it is crucial to adopt futuristic manufacturing trends such as greater use of advanced robotics.

This could also help Indian industry leapfrog past China, which is at least 8-10 years […]

Robots and AI eating into job market for predictable and routine work

Robots and AI eating into job market for predictable and routine work

Robots and early AI are already proficient enough to displace vast tracts of predictable physical work and data process and collection tasks in the US. The effect of automation may see more and more tasks taken away from humans, across a wide range of professions, either creating more time for different tasks – or seeing a reduction in FTE. Management of people remains an area with a low automation potential – given current technologies.

Automation has the potential to free humanity from the fetters of repetitive, physically demanding and, often, unpleasant work. The loss of such work, particularly where […]