Tag: productivity

If automation is the future, what comes next?

If automation is the future, what comes next?

Tanner Mirrlees Instead of hiring workers, many companies are employing new technology. No job seems safe from automation.

The factories of the world are filled with gigantic robotic arms programmed to put together everything from BMV luxury automobiles to Apple iPhones. Assembly lines are working with fewer blue collars.

Distribution warehouses, like those run by Amazon.com, employ robotic dollies to fill and carry shelves of books and beauty accessories to the small human workforce that packs these goods into the boxes mailed to our doors.Customer service is being designed away by user-friendly interfaces that shift tasks once done by paid workers […]

Barack Obama wrong about size of U.S. steel production, work force

Barack Obama wrong about size of U.S. steel production, work force

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, share a laugh with U.S. President Barack Obama after his address to Parliament in Ottawa, on June 29, 2016. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press via AP) Activity at the ArcelorMittal coke factory, which currently employs about 180 people, in Monessen, Pa., on June 30, 2016. (Jeff Swensen/New York Times) When Donald Trump made a high-profile speech outlining his approach to trade, he did it in Monessen, Pa., a town near Pittsburgh where a big steel mill has been shuttered for the past three decades.

A day after Trump’s speech, Barack […]

The Enemies of Economic Independence

The founders sought more than political independence from Europe. They also sought to secure America’s economic independence. To that end, the second bill enacted by the first Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789 , the stated purpose of which was "the encouragement and protection of manufactures." The end result of America’s reliance on the tariff was both prosperity and economic independence, as American manufacturing became the envy of the world and Americans ended up relying on fellow Americans for most of the goods they purchased. This happy situation was brought to an end by our elites’ fatuous embrace […]

Robots are responsible for low wages, Trump and the Brexit

Robots are responsible for low wages, Trump and the Brexit

For decades, economic textbooks have highlighted the golden relationship between productivity and wages. As workers are able to produce more, employees reap the gains in the form of higher wages.

But this is no longer the case. View gallery . Wages and productivity climbed in lockstep between 1950 and 1980. However, there is a striking divergence between the 1980s and today. Even with the unemployment rate near multi-decade lows, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen highlighted concerns about the lack of wage growth and underemployment during her speech at Harvard last month.

“We’re close to an unemployment rate that I think most […]

Robots, Jobs and Productivity in the Manufacturing Industry

Robots, Jobs and Productivity in the Manufacturing Industry

Reprinted with Permission

The Association for Advancing Automation recently published a white paper discussing the impact of industrial robotics on productivity and employment in the manufacturing industry. We would like to share our thoughts about its main findings.

Figure 1 below illustrates the evolution of robot shipments and employment for almost 20 years. The relationship between those two is clearly visible. As the robot shipments slowed down (blue bars), like in 2001-2002 and 2007-2010, so did nonfarm employment (green bars). . The industrial robot shipments are linked with the growth in manufacturing labor productivity, as it can be seen in […]

Five things we’re getting wrong about the future of work

HR needs to reframe its thinking on technology, millennials and data, experts tell the Future Works conference

HR has much to learn from the academics, policy experts and economists who gathered at last week’s Future Works conference, hosted by The Economist, where they collectively laid bare the host of challenges facing every leader – and employee – as the working world undergoes a transformation, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Here are five myths about the future of work that they collectively debunked during their discussions.

The relationship between tech and jobs is straightforward More automation means […]

How tech is reshaping work values and goals

How tech is reshaping work values and goals

Companies can find talent. They just can’t attract it. Fifteen years ago, corporate was king, and bigger was better. Companies such as Bank of America , Qualcomm , Cisco Systems , Intel , Sun Microsystems and Merck were top companies desired for employment. That mindset has evaporated. Today Stryker , Baptist Health South Florida , Workday and Genentech are among the 100 best companies to work for, according to Fortune Magazine .

Small is beautiful

Worker preferences are changing. It’s no longer good enough to tout social responsibility and entice talent with the sparkle of high earnings. Employees want […]

Universal Basic Income

Universal Basic Income

Universal Basic Income by Independent Trader

It wasn’t long time ago when Swiss had a referendum about universal basic income (UBI). They rejected it. The initiators of the campaign for UBI wanted a minimum salary to be paid to everyone regardless of their age, occupation or level of income. The UBI was aimed to replace pensions and benefits thanks to which numbers of bureaucrats would decrease. One argument for such a change is advancing automation and the end goal is to disconnect salary from work.

The Swiss economy is one of the most efficient economies in the world. Robotised manufacturing […]

Re-educating Rita

Re-educating Rita

IN JULY 2011 Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, posted a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague, Peter Norvig, were making their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course available free online. By the time the course began in October, 160,000 people in 190 countries had signed up for it. At the same time Andrew Ng, also a Stanford professor, made one of his courses, on machine learning, available free online, for which 100,000 people enrolled. Both courses ran for ten weeks. Mr Thrun’s was completed by 23,000 people; Mr Ng’s by […]

Will new technologies put us out of work? A peek into the future

Will new technologies put us out of work? A peek into the future

Over the past year, questions about how emerging technologies will impact employment have taken on a new tenor. Will robots take over our jobs? One thing is indisputable: automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will displace workers in the IT and business process outsourcing services industry.

But this is not a new trend.

+ Also on Network World: The 6 hottest new jobs in IT + Such tectonic shifts have occurred every few decades over the last two centuries. With each wave of new technology and each accompanying paradigm shift, jobs have disappeared. During the Industrial Revolution, people feared the loss […]