Tag: robot

Robots likely to affect 40 pct Canadian jobs: study

A humanoid robot "Wabian-2R", developed by Japan’s Waseda University professor Atsuo Takanishi walks for a demonstration at Takanishi’s laboratory in Tokyo on October 22, 2013. (AFP/file photo)

TORONTO, June 15 (Xinhua) — As much as 42 percent of Canadian workforce is at high risk of being affected by automation and replaced by technology and computers in the next two decades, a new report showed Wednesday.

Automation previously has been restricted to routine, manual tasks, the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship at Toronto’s Ryerson University said in its report.However, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and advanced robotics now mean that automation is […]

42% of Canadian jobs at high risk of being affected by automation, new study suggests

42% of Canadian jobs at high risk of being affected by automation, new study suggests

This May 2016 photo shows an Otto driverless truck at a garage in San Francisco. A new report suggests technology and computers could put 42 per cent of Canadian jobs at risk in the next two decades. (Eric Risberg/Associated Press) More than 40 per cent of the Canadian workforce is at high risk of being replacedby technology and computers in the next two decades, according to a new report out Wednesday.

The Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship at Toronto’s Ryerson University said in its report that automation previously has been restricted to routine, manual tasks. However, breakthroughs in artificial […]

Ironman Suits Coming To Factory Floors

Ironman Suits Coming To Factory Floors

To compete with robots, workers need lots of help. The future of manual work is an exoskeleton suit that gives its wearer superhuman powers. And it’s coming faster than you might think.

Consultants have been pessimistic about the future of employment. The World Economic Forum recently estimated more than five million jobs will be lost worldwide as middle-income, white-collar workers are made redundant by advances in artificial-intelligence software. To make matters worse, blue-collar work has been in decline for decades, a victim of globalization and automation.

Taken together, finding work in an office complex will be no more likely than getting […]

Amazon’s Successful Automation Boosts Employment — For Now

Amazon’s Successful Automation Boosts Employment — For Now

Amazon’s automated warehouses continue to show how rapidly smart machines are taking over tasks that were performed by humans. A few years ago, workers pushed carts for miles around the warehouse picking out items for customer orders. Huffpo reported in 2011, “Some workers at Amazon.com’s Allentown, Pennsylvania warehouse are reportedly willing to contend with working at a brutal pace in dizzying heat so long as it means having a job.”

Was that only five years ago? It shows how quickly an industry can change when modern automation is applied.

Now the Amazon warehouse is immersed in tech, and other companies are […]

The Wrong Inequality Solution: No One Has Anything

The Wrong Inequality Solution: No One Has Anything

Robots are presented at the Robotics event Innorobo in La Plaine Saint-Denis on May 26, 2016. / AFP / ERIC PIERMONT (Photo credit should read ERIC PIERMONT/AFP/Getty Images) The approach to the inequality question has typically been how to either create or redistribute wealth so that those at the bottom of the economic ladder have more. Inherent in that approach is an assumption that societies have the time and choice to lift up those without, compressing the difference between haves and have-nots.

But there’s another approach, one that we seem blindly headed for, that could largely reach a reduction in […]

Relax, a robot might not take you job after all

Relax, a robot might not take you job after all

Worried about being replaced by a robot? According to some recent forecasts many workers should be. There are gloomy predictions that even high-wage, knowledge jobs in finance, law and medicine won’t be spared amid the relentless rise of smart machines.

A striking 2013 study by Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne said 47 per cent of all employment in America is "at risk" of being replaced by computers and algorithms in the next 10 to 20 years. Earlier this year a CSIRO put the proportion of Australian jobs vulnerable to automation at a worrying 44 per cent.

But now […]

Amazon’s robot army fuels expansion

Amazon's robot army fuels expansion

TRACY — In Amazon’s million-square-foot order-filling warehouse, two low-slung orange robots carrying stacks of consumer products are zipping across the floor, headed right at each other. One stops — not on a dime, it turns out, but rather over a QR code stuck to the floor — and allows the other to proceed, carrying inventory to a human worker who will pluck out an item, scan it and send it off for packing and shipping.

In this building the size of 28 football fields, containing four miles of conveyor belts and 15 million items awaiting customer orders from Northern California […]

Vote: Are you afraid a robot will take your job?

I’ve written about the momentous potential effects on employment of the revolution ahead in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence (see here and here ).

This week I got some company with Eduardo Porter (a fellow native Phoenician) in his New York Times column. He contends that the consensus among economists was “fraying.” It held that automation has happened since the Industrial Revolution and still didn’t lead to long-term, massive unemployment. People merely took new jobs.

But this time might be different. He writes : “As the idea sinks in that humans as workhorses might also be on the way out, what […]

The digital economy needs defending from the hard left and the far right

The digital economy needs defending from the hard left and the far right

Matt Hancock, Minister for the Cabinet Office Automate work, humanize jobs. That needs to be the mantra of the digital economy, according to Matt Hancock, who as Minister for the Cabinet Office in the UK government, has responsibility in part for fostering the digital revolution.

Hancock set out his stall at the 2016 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture. For the benefit of non-UK readers, Sir Keith Joseph was a British politician, whose long career saw him serve as a minister under four Conservative Party Prime Ministers – Harold McMillan and Alec Douglas-Home in the 1960s, Edward Heath in the 1970s and […]

Living in a bubble: Y Combinator’s basic income study is merely a result of white unemployment

Living in a bubble: Y Combinator’s basic income study is merely a result of white unemployment

Workers arrive for a shift at the reopened Chrysler Warren Truck Assembly plant in Warren, Michigan, U.S., on Monday, June 29, 2009. Photo credit: Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Silicon Valley’s interest in basic income is based on a false prophecy of tech destroying jobs and wouldn’t be explored if those affected weren’t mostly white

Y Combinator made an announcement last Wednesday that it would pursue a short-term, exploratory study into the concept of a ‘ basic income ,’ a no-strings-attached form of welfare that would be allotted to every citizen of a given city or country. Residents of increasingly […]