Tag: Services

The Data Center Journal | Automation Spawns New Jobs and Takes Old Ones

The Data Center Journal | Automation Spawns New Jobs and Takes Old Ones

This article was written by Greg Council and first published on August 16, 2017 in The Data Center Journal and an excerpt is provided below: Automation —whether from robotic process automation (RPA), traditional expert-based systems or new deep machine learning—is causing both excitement and anxiety regarding how it affects economies and jobs.

What’s the real driver of job loss? Is it globalization? Automation? Technological innovation? It’s all three and more when assessing the actual reasons for changes in employment. Although you can’t go far on the Internet without finding a doom-and-gloom article blaming automation for future mass unemployment and crying […]

The radical future has to become a radical present. Interview with Nick Srnicek

The radical future has to become a radical present. Interview with Nick Srnicek

Jakub Dymek: What’s behind the idea of a ‘radical future’ on which you and Alex Williams just wrote a book?

Nick Srnicek*: The core argument is the idea that the left has given up on the idea of the future and we have to reclaim it. With changes to the labour market, through automation, we can start building towards something like a post-work society. We have to get rid of the centrality of work to our lives. We have to build alternatives. There are four demands. One, to push for automation – let’s automate all the drudgery and […]

Editorial: Prepare for automated unemployment

Editorial: Prepare for automated unemployment

Employment competition in the new job market will increasingly pit humans against robots, and the smart money is riding on the latter, because humans are shaping up to be no match for machines when it comes to entry-level employment opportunities.

In “Lower Mainland eateries starving for workers” (Business in Vancouver issue 1450; August 15-21], Ian Tostenson, president of the BC Restaurant and Food Services Association, noted that difficulty in attracting and retaining workers is a theme common to large chains and smaller local restaurants alike.

In decades past, the restaurant trade was an instructive entry point for young people seeking workplace […]

Jobs at stake in B.C.’s minimum-wage hikes, critics say

Jobs at stake in B.C.’s minimum-wage hikes, critics say

Increase targets workers reliant on minimum wage, but trade-off could be lower demand for young workers and tighter margins for small businesses B.C.’s minimum wage is set to increase to $15 by 2021, a move that is being praised as overdue by some, though restaurant-sector leaders fear that the hike is being implemented too quickly | Sorbis/Shutterstock B.C.’s plan to raise the province’s hourly minimum wage to $15 by 2021 will benefit some workers but will also reduce demand for young workers, increase prices and squeeze margins for small businesses, especially in the food services sector, experts say.

The B.C. […]

Computers With Wheels or High-Tech Cars?

Computers With Wheels or High-Tech Cars?

The majority of car companies have dedicated themselves to an electric future, and some bold ones are going a step further, pledging to go autonomous in the next several years .

We’re still a few years away from the Jetson’s mode of transportation becomes a reality because there are a number of legislative and technical roadblocks to navigate, as well as the potential effect this technology will have on jobs within the transportation industry. A RETURN TO THE GLORY DAYS FOR AMERICAN AUTOMAKERS?

Self-driving vehicles are already here — sorta.Many cars already have some sort of autonomous aspect (think: […]

How fast can our economy grow at full employment?

How fast can our economy grow at full employment?

It’s August, the start of the fall semester, and a good time to figure out what’s going on in the economy. There are some new limits on what can happen, because we’re close to full employment.

When the economy is not at full employment, there are more people searching for work than there are jobs available. When a job opens up, there are people to fill it. There are empty business rentals searching for occupants. When a tenant shows up, a new business will open. There are factories operating at less than full capacity. When an order arrives, production expands.

An […]

How will AI shape the workforce of the future?

How will AI shape the workforce of the future?

Will artificial intelligence bring a utopia of plenty? Or a dystopic hellscape? Will we, jobless and destitute, scavenge for scraps outside the walls of a few techno-trillionaires? Or will we work alongside machines, achieving new levels of productivity and fulfillment? The tech world has no lack of prognosticators: Bill Gates and Elon Musk, for example, see in AI an existential threat to the human species, while Ray Kurzweil thinks it can’t come soon enough.

Silicon Slopes and big data

In fact, artificial intelligence is already here, and has been for some time. While many mistakenly equate AI with consciousness—Hollywood […]

Robots will not lead to fewer jobs but the hollowing out of the middle class | Larry Elliott

(MENAFN Editorial) iCrowdNewswire – Aug 21, 2017 Weak wage growth could already be a sign automation creating economy in which small number of very rich employ armies of poor Throughout modern history there has been a recurrent fear that jobs will be destroyed by technology. Everybody knows the story of the Luddites, bands of workers who smashed up machinery in the textile industry in the second decade of the 19th century. The Luddites were wrong. There has been wave after wave of technological advance since the first Industrial Revolution, and yet more people are working than ever before. Jobs […]

Minimum wage increases: The opposite of helpful

Minimum wage increases: The opposite of helpful

Like so much of the legislation that comes out of Sacramento, the hike in California’s minimum wage has been touted by Democrats as helping the poor while assuring businesses won’t be harmed. But, like much of that legislation, it’s likely to do the opposite.

In 2014 California’s minimum wage was $8 per hour. Today it is $10.50—a 31 percent increase in just three years. It’s scheduled to increase again in January to $11 an hour followed by annual dollar hikes until it reaches $15 an hour in 2022. That’s an 88 percent increase in the cost of unskilled labor in […]

Automation, Unemployment and Moravec’s Paradox

Automation, Unemployment and Moravec’s Paradox

Writing in the Guardian , here’s Larry Elliott on automation. The whole article is well worth a read, even if it’s too simplistic to argue (as he does) that the Luddites were wrong. Over the longish term they most certainly were. The industrial revolution paved the way for an immense improvement in living standards. But what that happy history omits is the fact that it took a while to do so, a phenomenon known as the ‘Engels pause’: In the first half of the nineteenth century, the real wage [in Britain] stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit […]