Tag: Services

Robots and AI eating into job market for predictable and routine work

Robots and AI eating into job market for predictable and routine work

Robots and early AI are already proficient enough to displace vast tracts of predictable physical work and data process and collection tasks in the US. The effect of automation may see more and more tasks taken away from humans, across a wide range of professions, either creating more time for different tasks – or seeing a reduction in FTE. Management of people remains an area with a low automation potential – given current technologies.

Automation has the potential to free humanity from the fetters of repetitive, physically demanding and, often, unpleasant work. The loss of such work, particularly where […]

Enemy is poor education, not mechanisation

Enemy is poor education, not mechanisation

THE replacement of people in the workplace by machines has been feared throughout history. During the Industrial Revolution, workers known as Luddites attacked and destroyed the machines that threatened their jobs.

Yet while mechanisation did bring great hardship to the cottage weavers and spinners, fears of widespread unemployment proved unfounded. Mechanisation brought about rising prosperity and demand for new products and services. Lower production costs meant lower prices, which generated greater demand for goods previously affordable only to the wealthy.

As a result, the new machines set the scene for massive increases in jobs, wages and prosperity unequalled in history.Today, the […]

Global warming and robotics: the two biggest threats to the ‘Asian Century’

Global warming and robotics: the two biggest threats to the ‘Asian Century’

A beer assembly line inside a brewery in Shenyang, Liaoning province. Such automation could keep factory jobs and provide more high-end jobs. But as China moves up the value chain – and no longer has an endless supply of cheap labour – India and the ASEAN member countries are expected to fill its role. Photo: Reuters We are living in the “Asian Century”, so called because by 2050, the region is projected to be as wealthy as Europe on a per capita basis, and hold a dominant share of global economic output.

But what if it turns out to be […]

Cost-cutting measures: Startups using layoffs to tackle tightening fund flow

Cost-cutting measures: Startups using layoffs to tackle tightening fund flow

At a time when investors are gradually tightening their purse strings on venture capital-backed e-commerce firms and tech startups — from $2.91 billion in September quarter of 2015 to $1.52 billion in December quarter to $1.40 billion in March quarter of 2016 and to $583 million in June quarter of the ongoing year — the investee companies are having to take a hard look at their growth oriented businesses. And it is the employees who are having to bear the brunt.

Since August 2015, eight of the poster-boys of the country’s e-commerce and technology ventures have reportedly trimmed close to […]

Who Took My Job: 7 Potential Job Killers You Should Look Out For

Who Took My Job: 7 Potential Job Killers You Should Look Out For

As technology becomes more and more advanced, it displaces more and more people from their jobs.

People can’t afford to merely hang on to their jobs anymore. What’s required is preparation for newer jobs and constant upgrading of skills.

Jobless growth is not just a concept limited to the column inches of the newspapers anymore. It is now a reality. Growth itself is not coming easy. Countries across the globe are trying every trick in the book to boost growth, from zero interest rates to quantitative easing to helicopter money, but such antics have yielded a mouse.Not just growth but job […]

Automation could eliminate millions of truck driving jobs

Automation could eliminate millions of truck driving jobs

Millions of trucking jobs could be at risk due to automation What will happen to the countless truckers who could lose their livelihoods?

Nearly 50% of jobs in the United States are at risk of being eliminated by automation according to an Oxford University study. With recent advances in self-driving vehicles, trucking can be added to the list.

Already, The Daimler Freightliner Inspiration automated truck is approved to drive on Nevada freeways, and certainly will not be the last vehicle of its type. The autopilot feature steers the truck, but the Freightliner Inspiration still requires a human driver to take […]

Here’s the best argument that computers could replace doctors, teachers, and even nannies

Here’s the best argument that computers could replace doctors, teachers, and even nannies

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Artificial intelligence is improving rapidly, and a lot of people are worried that it will lead to massive job losses. In the past, technology mostly displaced workers doing routine tasks or manual labor. But as software becomes more sophisticated, there’s a growing prospect that truck drivers, teachers, and perhaps even doctors could see their jobs replaced by a robot or a computer program.

Ryan Avent is an economics correspondent for the Economist who has been thinking about the economics of automation for several years. He’s a technology optimist — he thinks software and robots really will massively boost economic […]

Job automation threatens peoples’ livelihoods. Can universal basic income save the day?

Job automation threatens peoples’ livelihoods. Can universal basic income save the day?

Planet Earth ( openDemocracy ) – In early 2013, a colleague and I attended the inaugural meeting of the UK Robot Ethics association. There, we suggested that developments in robotics and computing technology meant that we needed to re-evaluate some of our economic thinking. Machines were now increasingly capable of replacing human cognitive power as well as physical power, as had primarily been the case in the past. There is an orthodox idea in economics according to which increases in productivity driven by technology will not create long-term or ‘structural’ unemployment. Conventional thinking has it that as technology-driven productivity […]

All jobs susceptible to automation, says McKinsey Global Institute study

All jobs susceptible to automation, says McKinsey Global Institute study

NewsWrap Some of the activities that have the greatest potential for automation are physical activities that occur in predictable environments

It is not just low-skill, low-wage jobs that are affected by automation; some high-skill, high-wage jobs too, are susceptible to automation, according to McKinsey Global Institute, the business and economics research arm of consultancy firm McKinsey.

Take for instance, the task of collecting and analysing data. Some of it falls into the category of low-skill, low-wage. But, says Michael Chui, Partner, McKinsey Global Institute, some of the activities that fit into the category of collecting and analysing data are done by […]

Creativity will save us from the robots, QUT professor predicts

Creativity will save us from the robots, QUT professor predicts

The creative industries will have a resurgence in the age of of programmatic and the increasing role of digital in communications, a leading academic has predicted. Professor Stuart Cunningham of the Queensland University of Technology said the value of an Arts degree was increasing as robots and automation looked set to kill a host of careers with foundations in the digital space.

Cunningham predicts that workers in the future will have to have a working knowledge of digital and understand what is happening “under the hood’, but as robots assumed roles traditionally held by humans, the opportunities would grow for […]