Tag: mobility

Robots are after our jobs: what can we do?

Robots are after our jobs: what can we do?

Photo: The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images Will smart automation, intelligent software bots and brainy robots take away our jobs anytime soon?

Pose this question to any Indian working in a company where unions are strong, or to any Indian who has a government job, or to the majority of Indians who work in the unorganized sector—those who drive taxis, trucks pull handcarts, hawk goods on footpaths or are employed as maids—and you will, in all probability, be looked at askance or even dismissed as an uninformed prophet of doom.

The reaction may not be surprising in emerging countries like India, […]

The Agile Mindset: Becker College’s Academic Foundation and Ethos

The Agile Mindset: Becker College’s Academic Foundation and Ethos

Six years ago, Becker College began to take a more adaptive, nimble, and entrepreneurial approach to higher education. The results—including growing enrollments and improving institutional and academic rankings, notably in the areas of game design—propelled the College forward on a path of historic growth and transformation.

The Becker community recognized that preparing students for the workplace of the future would mean cultivating global learners with agile mindsets, capable of thriving in a world of growing ambiguity and unpredictability.

This year, Becker College affirms the Agile Mindset as the academic foundation that equips students to navigate change and create value in the […]

A hire power

A hire power

JOSEPH SCHUMPETER gave the name “creative destruction” to the process by which new and innovative firms displace stodgy ones, thereby driving long-run economic growth. The Schumpeterian sort of economic reinvention is out of fashion at the moment. Unhappy workers are casting their lot with populist politicians, who are in turn looking to rein in the disruption caused by everyone from tech unicorns in Silicon Valley to sellers of cut-price steel in China. Economists understandably worry that this backlash will lead to sweeping new regulations, taxes and protections for firms and workers. But red tape and tax are not the […]

Growth no longer means jobs: Inflexible labour laws, rapid technological change have caused employment generation to stall

Growth no longer means jobs: Inflexible labour laws, rapid technological change have caused employment generation to stall

Where are the jobs? This is the question Prime Minister Narendra Modi is repeatedly asked by his political opponents. One answer he has given recently in media interviews is that the jobs that are being created are invisible in the statistics: loans from the Mudra Bank are enabling self-employment, and as these micro businesses grow, they will add employees, one or two at a time. Hopefully, they will ultimately create millions of jobs in an economy that is releasing one million youth every month into the job market.

While creating a nation of micro-entrepreneurs is better than doing nothing, there […]

Book review: The Rise Of The Robots

Book review: The Rise Of The Robots

The Rise Of The Robots—Technology And The Threat Of Mass Unemployment: By Martin Ford, Oneworld Publications, 334 pages, Rs.599. If the Industrial Revolution introduced the assembly-line production concept in factories, the 1950s and 1960s saw companies like General Motors introduce robotics on shop floors. These developments, however, will pale in comparison to what is in store for the human workforce a few decades from now, given the acceleration in capabilities of software automation and artificial intelligence (AI) driven predictive algorithms.

The Rise Of The Robots—Technology And The Threat Of Mass Employment by Martin Ford is a well-researched attempt to […]

The return of the machinery question

The return of the machinery question

THERE IS SOMETHING familiar about fears that new machines will take everyone’s jobs, benefiting only a select few and upending society. Such concerns sparked furious arguments two centuries ago as industrialisation took hold in Britain. People at the time did not talk of an “industrial revolution” but of the “machinery question”. First posed by the economist David Ricardo in 1821, it concerned the “influence of machinery on the interests of the different classes of society”, and in particular the “opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests”. Thomas Carlyle, writing […]