Tag: Services

Maybe the robot will do you a favor and snatch your job

Maybe the robot will do you a favor and snatch your job

Recently, Amazon floated the idea that it would be fully automated in a decade: Not all of the 125,000 people who work at Amazon warehouses have to worry about losing their jobs to robots — not for 10 years or so, anyways.

On Tuesday, Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, led reporters on a tour of the company’s Baltimore warehouse during which he said it would be “at least 10 years” before Amazon could entirely automate the fulfillment process. When we read further into the story, of course, we find it’s not so simple. Robots are especially bad […]

Will AI in digital marketing lead to marketer obsolescence?

Will AI in digital marketing lead to marketer obsolescence?

I just returned from attending several spring digital marketing conferences – Adobe Summit and Martech West. In both the art of the possible was on full display and got me thinking about whether fully-automated AI-driven digital marketing could ever be a thing, and what realistic automation goals look like.

Spurred on by conference highs and three years of ramped-up writing on AI in digital marketing, it seemed the right time to step back and ask a few questions: Is fully automated digital marketing even possible?

Will marketers wake up one day and find themselves obsolete? What should marketers […]

Robots and us

Robots and us

Photo: Getty Images The robots are not at the gates and the future of work could be great, Kinley Salmon says. So why are others not so chipper? And what does Trump, Kaitangata and the demise of the middle class have to do with how we will live when automation takes over? Bruce Munro investigates.

In late-June, 1970, as Joyce Kempton stood in the fading light at the Balclutha bus stop waiting for her fiance, Sid Beck, to pick her up in his Mark II Zephyr, she was acutely aware of the air of concern pervading her hometown, Kaitangata.

Joyce […]

Chinese millennials are looking past factory jobs now. It’s all part of the plan

Chinese millennials are looking past factory jobs now. It's all part of the plan

Chinese millennials are looking past factory jobs now. It’s all part of the plan Life as one of China’s industrial worker ants did not suit Liu Xu: waking up early in factory accommodation, working for 11 hours operating a machine in the tool-making factory, eating all his meals in the factory canteen and going to bed, only to wake up and do it again.

His parents spent most of their lives in deadening jobs — his father on construction sites and his mother in factories — but 23-year-old Liu Xu lasted just a year in a factory in the southern […]

Appreciating direct care workers

Appreciating direct care workers

Let’s stop assuming there’s a relationship between low-valued work and low-paid workers

Rebecca Bryant, president and CEO of Lakes Region Community Services, a New Hampshire social services organization, penned an impressive opinion piece in the March 1-14 issue of the NH Business Review (“ NH’s eroding direct care workforce ”) that concretely highlighted the plight of direct support professionals, those who care for the elderly and disabled. To this cohort I would also add child care workers.

As a whole, this segment of the New Hampshire workforce is underpaid, underappreciated, disrespected and lacking in the placement of esteem they deserve […]

National service can bring us together as a nation

The following column is adapted from Fareed Zakaria’s commencement address at Ohio State University on May 5, 2019.

It’s graduation season in America and a good time to be leaving college and looking for a job. Despite this week’s stock market tremors, the U.S. economy is on solid footing. Now in its 120th month of expansion, the economy shows few signs of bubbles about to burst. Unemployment is way down, inflation is contained, wages are finally moving up, and, perhaps most significantly, productivity is up. Some of these trends might prove ephemeral, but there is no denying that economic […]

Challenges Of The Technological Transition: The Impact Of Automation In The Labor Market

Challenges Of The Technological Transition: The Impact Of Automation In The Labor Market

Robotic Mission Flickr The digital era is here, and it will change the world as we know it at lightning speed. The 2019 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook published last month has presented new evidence on how digitalization will provoke a huge impact on our lives, especially in the labor market. In the next 15-20 years, the international organization estimates that 14% of existing jobs could disappear as a result of automation while another 32% are likely to change radically as individual tasks are automated.

Despite the gravity of the data, the destruction of employment is not the main […]

It’s not cutting-edge AI we should feel anxious about, but mediocre automation

It’s not cutting-edge AI we should feel anxious about, but mediocre automation

The cost your supermarket shop has not exactly been reduced much by the introduction of automated check-outs – but jobs have been lost as a result (Source: Getty) If there were a betting market in future winners of the Nobel prize in economics, MIT’s Daniel Acemoglu would be at pretty short odds. His highly innovative work has already won him a string of prizes.

So his research is always worth following – especially when he challenges the conventional wisdom, as in his paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Economists are usually optimistic about the impact of […]

Demand for Drivers in Transportation Sector Declining [Jobs of the Future Report, Part 3]

Demand for Drivers in Transportation Sector Declining [Jobs of the Future Report, Part 3]

As the industrial sphere becomes increasingly automated, employment in the transportation sector will take a big hit. A recent report from Goldman Sachs Economic Research predicted that self-driving technology could cost America’s professional drivers up to 25,000 jobs a month, or 300,000 jobs a year.

Autonomous vehicle makers are paying more attention to the trucking industry, as trucks typically travel on highways or fixed routes that make automation relatively easy. Automation is also being turned to as a potential solution to the much-discussed driver shortage .

Many companies have been working on driverless trucks, including Kodiak Robotics, Starsky Robotics , […]

Job disruption in AI era likely to catch Asian governments by surprise, says MIT report

Job disruption in AI era likely to catch Asian governments by surprise, says MIT report

Job disruption in AI era likely to catch Asian governments by surprise, says MIT report More The speed and scale of the transition to artificial intelligence is likely to take Asian governments by surprise, potentially causing economic and social shocks, according to MIT Technology Review.

In a report released Wednesday, the technology media outlet warns of the risk of Asia’s employment landscape becoming “increasingly polarised” with a growing number of workers excluded from the value creation side of AI.

“Decision-makers in Asia must assume that technology will continually evolve, making the need for continuous reskilling and training critical,” said the report, […]