Tag: mobility

COMMENTARY: Heading out of town today? Prepare to pay more for gas

COMMENTARY: Heading out of town today? Prepare to pay more for gas

Memorial Day weekend kicks off the annual summer driving season, but like a bad movie we have watched several times before, this holiday weekend is waiting to greet us with higher gasoline prices.

National average gasoline prices today are bumping up against $3 per gallon and could hit $4 per gallon on the West Coast. At the same time, West Texas Intermediate crude oil is now $70 per barrel, up from less than $30 per barrel.

Higher oil prices might be good for Texas oil companies, but if they spike too high too fast, they can be hard for the industry […]

10 jobs that won’t exist 20 years from now

10 jobs that won't exist 20 years from now

Mail carriers might become a thing of the past. Paul De Los Reyes/Flickr The truth is, no industry is 100% safeguarded against the influence of technology.

Some workers, such as dispatchers, are more at risk of seeing their jobs become computerized than others.

Occupations that tend to be more routine and repetitive will likely cease to exist in 20 years. Out with the old, in with the robots! These days, new technological advances happen all the time — and while some industries have flourished in the changing landscape, others have fallen prey to automation .Here’s the […]

China really is to blame for millions of lost U.S. manufacturing jobs, new study finds

China really is to blame for millions of lost U.S. manufacturing jobs, new study finds

Robots are not to blame for the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Millions of Americans who lost manufacturing jobs during the 2000s have long ”known” China was to blame, not robots. Evidently many academics who’ve studied the issue are finally drawing the same conclusion.

For years economists have viewed the increased role of automation in the computer age as the culprit for some 6 million lost jobs from 1999 to 2010 — one-third of all U.S. manufacturing employment. Firms adopted new technologies to boost production, the thinking goes, and put workers out of the job in the process. […]

Tech Optimists See a Golden Future—Let’s Talk About How We’ll Get There

Tech Optimists See a Golden Future—Let’s Talk About How We’ll Get There

Technology evangelists dream about a future where we’re all liberated from the more mundane aspects of our jobs by artificial intelligence. Other futurists go further, imagining AI will enable us to become superhuman, enhancing our intelligence, abandoning our mortal bodies, and uploading ourselves to the cloud.

Paradise is all very well, although your mileage may vary on whether these scenarios are realistic or desirable. The real question is, how do we get there?

Economist John Maynard Keynes notably argued in favor of active intervention when an economic crisis hits, rather than waiting for the markets to settle down to a more […]

Churchill: Self-driving cars will run over workers

Churchill: Self-driving cars will run over workers

Albany

The election of Donald Trump was supposed to be a wake-up call. The shock of his success, we were told, would lead the political establishment to finally start paying attention to working-class Americans and forgotten workers.

Has that happened?Well, an optimist could point out that manufacturing jobs have been roaring back since Trump’s election. A pessimist, though, need only note the attitude among Republicans and Democrats alike toward a big technological change coming our way: self-driving cars.Now, corporate America is thrilled about autonomous vehicles, as they’re also called, and for an obvious reason: Many companies will save gobs […]

Automation may steal your job, and spawn a whole new industry

Mayank Kumar & Apoorva Shankar Analysis

Automation and the rise of technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are making everyone paranoid — paranoid about job losses: The fact that a machine may soon do your job, make you redundant – and paranoid about what the future of work may look like.

Will it just be a bunch of robots manufacturing everything, end to end, as well as rendering services in clinics, restaurants and shopping malls? Or will humans continue to be a significant factor in most of these activities?Of course, it’s hard to predict exactly what the Fourth […]

Employment is not in jeopardy; Your salary Yes

Employment is not in jeopardy; Your salary Yes

More information The age of algorithm has arrived and your data is a treasure

The precarious ones of new digital economy

The work mutation Are robots, supercomputers and algorithms going to finish with work? Are we about to enter a post-industrial world where employment will be a rare warning that only a privileged group will have access to? These questions are increasingly common in view of technological revolution that threatens to replace people by machines. But, contrary to widespread notion that age of employment is coming to an end, a recent study concludes that automation does not reduce number […]

How rising minimum wages undercut long-term economic success

How rising minimum wages undercut long-term economic success

© Getty Images Robots are invading the job market. Each day we see urgent headlines feverishly warning us of our automated futures. While the doomsday predictions of no employment opportunities for humans have yet to come to fruition, the automation revolution has certainly changed the American economy and labor market.

Making sure today’s workers have the skills necessary to succeed in the modern labor market should be a top priority for policymakers — and the best place to start is by ensuring public policies do not sabotage their chances. The skills needed to succeed in our modern economy are often […]

Adopt or Die: AI Leaves Manufacturing No Choice

Adopt or Die: AI Leaves Manufacturing No Choice

Artificial Intelligence is positioning itself as the transformative technology of the century. The speed at which it is improving manufacturing operations leaves the industry with two options: embrace the machines or get left behind.

It’s difficult to identify exactly what Stephen Hawking will be most remembered for. Is it his contributions to cosmology and our understanding of space-time? Or maybe quantum mechanics and the very key to unlocking reality? Maybe it’s the fortitude of the human spirit and mind, which he proved can thrive even as the body atrophies.

Hawking had ALS for 55 of his 76 years, a disease which […]

Microsoft Word – Automation Blog_Dan

How Will Technology Affect Immigrant Workers?

News media and analysts have given much attention to automation — the process of technology taking over manual tasks — and how it will affect jobs in the United States over the next few decades. The impact could be significant on the immigrant population, especially those with “low-skilled†jobs, defined as jobs that require a high school diploma or less. Many fear that increased automation will reduce the number of overall jobs available to the general population as well as immigrants. Experts agree that automation will affect certain professions to a degree. In a […]