Tag: robot

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 […]

Will A Robot Take Your Job?

Will A Robot Take Your Job?

A new estimate says that robots will perform more than half of all jobs by 2045. But don’t panic. (AP) A new estimate says that robots will perform more than half of all jobs by 2045, leaving the frightening prospect that millions of once solidly middle-class people will be left idle and jobless.

“If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?” is the alarming question asked by Rice University professor Moshe Vardi , who is the source of the new estimate.

It’s a legitimate question. And Vardi answers it, claiming that the advent […]

Will automation destroy jobs?

Will automation destroy jobs?

MT at 50: Carl Benedikt Frey, co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, gives his expert view on the effects of automation on jobs – and the news isn’t all bad.

Carl Benedikt Frey of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford has become (with colleague Michael Osborne) the leading authority on the automation of jobs. Their methodology focuses on how reliant tasks are on human aptitudes such as social perceptiveness, persuasion, originality and manual dexterity. We asked him about the impact automation will have in the future. What will determine the pace of […]

Why I’m Not Worried About Robots

Google “robots taking our jobs” and you will get 10.3 million hits.

A series of terrific books (such as Rise of the Robots , The Second Machine Age , and The Industries of the Future (can you share other titles?), have rode the wave (and encouraged) our worries about automation and jobs.

Who isn’t worried about driverless cars and truckerless trucks?The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there are 233,700 taxi and chauffeur drivers. At last count, Uber has 160,000 active drivers. What will happen to all these people who make their living driving when cars drive themselves?A recent Medium article […]

Who Needs Factories Anyway?

Who Needs Factories Anyway?

Listening to our political leaders, you’d think everyone on the planet works in a factory. Donald Trump wants to stop China and Mexico from “taking our jobs” by preventing factories from moving there — and he’s willing to launch a trade war to do so. Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, recently claimed that a loss of 264,000 manufacturing jobs under President Obama was “a stark reminder of the failure of his policies,” as if the nearly 10 million other jobs added on Obama’s watch didn’t matter.

This obsession with factories threatens to undermine sound economic policy. […]

How the rise of the robots will affect your job

How the rise of the robots will affect your job

MT at 50: We’re heading for the fourth industrial revolution where more and more jobs will be automated – from care assistants to check-in staff. So how can we manage the march of the machines?

The residents of the Colony Club, an assisted-living home near Fort Lauderdale in Florida, are fond of Zora, the little redhead who helps them with their daily exercises, tells them a story or two, takes them on a walk, reads them the weather forecast and will even dance them the Macarena if they ask.

And she works for virtually nothing, after an initial payment of […]

Weird Science: Robots Poised to Take Half the World’s Jobs in 30 Years

Weird Science: Robots Poised to Take Half the World’s Jobs in 30 Years

This picture taken on November 24, 2015 shows visitors watching a robot (C) demonstration during the World Robot Conference in Beijing Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University in Houston, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that, "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task." He added, "I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?" ‘I’m Not Just Any AI’: Meet the World’s […]