Tag: productivity

Strategies to create jobs in India: How to reap the dividend gifted by demography

Strategies to create jobs in India: How to reap the dividend gifted by demography

By Atul Raja and Kushal Prakash

When the number of cellphones sold in India touched the billion mark in 2013, India manufactured very few cellphones. Mindful of the growing mobile phone market in the country, the government increased the import tariff for mobiles in 2015 (making the import of finished mobile devices more expensive than producing it locally – an exercise known as correcting the inverted duty structure). The reform, along with a few structural changes, made India one of the fastest growing mobile manufacturing economies in the world with more than 42 plants set up in the last […]

The new work order

The new work order

If robots are going to be the accountants, what is the point of getting a degree? Rebecca Stevenson reports on the future of work, and finds old skills are getting a new relevance.

Late last month 100 New Zealand companies including Xero, Fonterra, The Warehouse, Spark and Fisher & Paykel signed an open letter that stated tertiary qualifications would not be needed for a number of skilled roles at these organisations.

They instead are going to look at skills, attitude and adaptability, rather than relying on a bachelors as a denoter of a quality employee.Education ‘futurist’, Mind Lab founder Frances […]

Commentary: The future of work – new underclass, dystopian reality?

Commentary: The future of work – new underclass, dystopian reality?

SINGAPORE: The dust will take decades to settle on the key issue of precisely how much technology and artificial intelligence (AI) will displace human labour.

But it is already clear the coming decades will see a sizeable proportion of jobs worldwide threatened and substituted by automation, machine learning, or a combination of both.

It is increasingly apparent too that jobs commonly reckoned to be “safe” at present may in fact be candidates for an AI takeover, with many knowledge workers themselves candidates for displacement.Research by McKinsey from 2015 suggests that current technologies alone could automate 45 per cent of the activities […]

Who’s Afraid Of Artificial Intelligence?

Who's Afraid Of Artificial Intelligence?

Can artificial intelligence replace the human brain?Will it? What role for humans in the future? (Photo credit: Shutterstock) “Humans were are not built to spend more than two hours looking at a screen or scrolling through excel sheets. Humans are best at being human. Artificial Intelligence will do the rest.”

Telling words from Jim Stolze, Co-founder of aigency (www.aigency.com) – an Amsterdam-based company that recruits AI and humans for work. Kind of an employment company run by three humans overseeing 59 robots (actually computers working on algorithms created at the University of Amsterdam to solve problems).

Stolze was addressing reporters in […]

Developing countries left behind by automation, research suggests

Developing countries left behind by automation, research suggests

A substantial amount of jobs in developing countries are at risk of automation. At a time in which we as a society are making great strides with automation technology, the question looms of how this will affect jobs.

It’s important not to generalise too much about the effect automation will have either directly or indirectly, as to do so would be failing to consider the unique factors in each population that will mediate these effects.

A 2016 report published by the Oxford Martin programme on technology and employment in conjunction with Citi explains that countries such as Ethiopia (85pc), India (69pc), […]

Soft skills and hard measures the future for Singapore’s HR professionals

Soft skills and hard measures the future for Singapore’s HR professionals

The rapid change in the lives of business leaders, particularly for those responsible for organisations’ human resources, rages unabated. At a pace, we have seen emerging technologies, computerisation and automation that have reshaped the Singapore workforce.

Now, with abundant computing power and vast amounts of data, there has been a surge in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning techniques that are further transforming the workforce at dramatic speed, with many jobs starting to disappear and different skills required.

Oxford University researchers have estimated 47% of US jobs could be automated within two decades. They predict the first to go to the robots […]

World Bank foresees millions of job losses from automation

People are threatened with the millions of jobs that will be taken over by machines and policymakers need to invest in human capital as an imperative, says World Bank Chief, Dr Jim Yong Kim. Addressing an event in New York last week, Kim said that due to the ever-changing global economy, it was mandatory that a sense of urgency be created towards improving and investing in people, while highlighting that authority figures needed to implement action plans to invest in education and health, as reported by BBC.

Reporting on the same issue, The Globe and Mail Canada cited Bank of […]

Germany has way more industrial robots than the US, but they haven’t caused job losses

Germany has way more industrial robots than the US, but they haven’t caused job losses

The rise of the robots, coming first for our jobs, then maybe our lives, is a growing concern in today’s increasingly automated world. Just today (Oct. 10), the World Bank chief said the world is on a “crash course” to automate millions of jobs. But a recent report from Germany paints a less dramatic picture: Europe’s strongest economy and manufacturing powerhouse has quadrupled the amount of industrial robots it has installed in the last 20 years, without causing human redundancies.

In 1994, Germany installed almost two industrial robots per thousand workers, four times as many as in the US. By […]

The grids are all right: Robots have never and will never steal jobs

The grids are all right: Robots have never and will never steal jobs

Careers They probably are not going to allow you to live in Oscar Wilde’s work-free, creative, socialist utopia either.

On a November night in 1811, angry workers smashed textile machines in Nottingham. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened – the first such incident, on 11 March of the same year, had to be disbanded by British troops. No one managed to catch a glimpse of their elusive leader, Ned Ludd.

Unbeknownst to the protesters, they had inadvertently established a long legacy of the term “Luddite” forever being associated with fears that automation would lead to mass job […]

No Work Left to Do

No Work Left to Do

Since its founding, the United States has been a nation of work. The emergence of a strong middle class in the 20 th century—long a source of national pride—was largely due to an abundance of well-paying jobs accessible to the American masses. Millions found secure jobs that required neither highly-specialized skills nor higher education. Today, college degrees have become a prerequisite for many middle-class jobs, manufacturing has been outsourced abroad, and working-class jobs have declined. Nevertheless, the belief that all Americans should have the opportunity to find a job has held strong.

But this could all change in the near […]