Tag: Services

Here Is How Entrepreneurs Can Help Create Real, High-Value Jobs

Here Is How Entrepreneurs Can Help Create Real, High-Value Jobs

Every job is valuable to the person who holds it, but just bringing on more people does not make our companies or our economy healthier. Entrepreneurs do best if they create jobs that are both high-value and real.

The conversation on job creation is both energetic and confusing: energetic because job creation is a major challenge of our time and a political hot button. It’s confusing because the language is sloppy, and the underlying dynamics of job creation are not straightforward.

Consider the value of a job on two dimensions. One dimension is the value of a job to the employee. […]

Simplicity is attractive, but not always realistic

Simplicity is attractive, but not always realistic

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I enjoy reader responses. Praise is gratifying, but criticism is often more valuable, as a doorway to discussion and insight. Case in point, David R. Lecklider’s Dec. 10 letter: “There are ultimately two ways to value goods and services, either the price system or the dictates of a central authority.” Plain and simple.

But reality seldom conforms to simple ideologies. Einstein advised that ideas be expressed in the simplest possible terms — “but no simpler!” Simplifying complex ideas helps us understand them; but oversimplifying leads to error, by ignoring essential information. The notion that matters must distill to either […]

Robot arms replace factory hands

Robot arms replace factory hands

Donald Trump has been crowing as companies including Ford renounce plans to move factories to Mexico. But the main beneficiaries of this shift back to the US aren’t saying much by way of celebration — industrial robots don’t tend to speak.

While globalisation’s detractors blame countries such as China and Mexico for stealing the factory jobs of the West, experts point to less obvious culprits which are harder to scapegoat and to overcome in an interconnected economy with complex supply chains.

Since US manufacturing employment peaked in the late 1970s, according to Michael Hicks of the Center for Business and Economic […]

Robot arms replace factory hands

Robot arms replace factory hands

95 per cent of job losses are due to automation and computer technology. PHOTO: AFP PARIS: Donald Trump has been crowing as companies including Ford renounce plans to move factories to Mexico. But the main beneficiaries of this shift back to the US aren’t saying much by way of celebration — industrial robots don’t tend to speak.

While globalisation’s detractors blame countries such as China and Mexico for stealing the factory jobs of the West, experts point to less obvious culprits which are harder to scapegoat and to overcome in an interconnected economy with complex supply chains.

Since US manufacturing employment […]

Will you be replaced by a robot? A look at what jobs are going to the bots

Will you be replaced by a robot? A look at what jobs are going to the bots

WATCH ABOVE: European politicians debate whether to give robots rights With automation and artificial intelligence seeping into our everyday lives, the threat of a robot revolution taking over our jobs (and, according to sci-fi movies, the world) seems more realistic.

While automation will inevitably become more common in the workplace, a new report estimates only about five per cent of jobs are in jeopardy of a total takeover.

READ MORE: Do humans trust robots too much? Overall, automation will benefit businesses and economies as a whole, write the authors of the report from the McKinsey Global Institute , the business […]

Coping with AI revolution

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the artificial intelligence revolution will eliminate 3.5 million simple jobs.

U.S. online commerce player Amazon has recently opened a grocery store where customers can walk in and grab what they need and leave without having to go through a checkout line. Customers simply tap their smartphones at the turnstile as they walk into an Amazon Go store that logs them into the store’s network and connects to their Amazon account through an app.

Korean retailer Lotte Department Store also has employed a similar payment system in an outlet in Bundang on the outskirts […]

How college students can make better career choices

How college students can make better career choices

Over the holiday break, we pondered the usual thorny questions with our daughter, who’s in her second year of college.

What summer job should she find that can offer her the right experience for promising future employment? What courses does she need to take to position herself for a good job after she graduates? What kinds of careers should she contemplate to avoid poverty?

I know millions of parents probably grappled with the same questions, yet didn’t come up with solid answers. In the face of rampant automation, outsourcing and entire industries downsizing or disappearing, our childrens’ vocational future is anything […]

Solutions needed to make India’s youth employable

Solutions needed to make India’s youth employable

With services contributing to 66.1% gross value-added growth in FY15-16 based on data from an India Brand Equity Foundation report, it’s clear that burgeoning progress is firmly entrenched in the waves of the services sector. India’s employment scenario has experienced a pendulum-like shift, from an agricultural towards a service-rich economy, corroborated with a boom in employment for sectors like IT, insurance, finance, infrastructure, retail and telecom.

With services contributing to 66.1% gross value-added growth in FY15-16 based on data from an India Brand Equity Foundation report, it’s clear that burgeoning progress is firmly entrenched in the waves of the services […]

The Robot Rampage

The Robot Rampage

Donald Trump tends to present the labor market as a zero-sum game: companies have shifted production to China and other emerging markets. He’s going to bring those jobs home.

Put aside for a moment how moving jobs back to a country with high costs gives companies an incentive to automate . There’s a bigger problem: After displacing U.S. manufacturing workers, robots are poised to do the same in developing economies, too. It will be hard to re-shore jobs that no longer exist.

It took 50 years for the world to install the first million industrial robots. The next million will take […]

Automation: Almost 50% of American jobs to dissappear

Automation: Almost 50% of American jobs to dissappear

Big Think | Aidan Quinn, Editor in Chief

A key platform for President Elect Donald Trump is to “bring the jobs back from China”. But what happens when the Chinese are already giving those jobs to machines? The jobs aren’t coming back:

One of the key drivers for Donald Trump’s shock victory during the U.S. election has been an anxiety about job security and the changes that the globalized economy has made across the globe. President Elect Trump capitalized on a ground-swell of dissatisfaction that middle-class Americans felt about stagnating wages and rapidly shrinking job opportunities, stoking anger […]