Tag: Services

Dying Professions to Avoid

Dying Professions to Avoid

John Pugliano, author of "The Robots Are Coming: A Human’s Survival Guide to Profiting in the Age of Automation," sees plenty of white-collar jobs that will be threatened by automation. "Bottom line, any routine job that can easily be defined by a mathematical or logic equation will be at risk," Pugliano said. "Opportunity will be [there] for those that can create new products/services or solve/fix unexpected problems."

So your accountant may not have a job in the future, but plastic surgeons and emergency room doctors should do well. And plumbers, Pugliano said, will always have work.

Pugliano and other experts contacted […]

Can generative AI limit the impact of a shrinking, ageing field service workforce?

Can generative AI limit the impact of a shrinking, ageing field service workforce?

There’s an understandable nervousness among any workforce when you start talking about automation. It’s actually been 10 years since Oxford University academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne released their seminal paper entitled The Future of Employment which contained a list of occupations with an automation probability score. It was the paper that launched a spate of headlines claiming robots were coming for our jobs.

For field services teams, this has been a slow burn. As the paper suggests, “the manual tasks of service occupations are less susceptible to computerisation, as they require a higher degree of flexibility and physical […]

The Turing Transformation: Artificial intelligence, intelligence augmentation, and skill premiums

The Turing Transformation: Artificial intelligence, intelligence augmentation, and skill premiums

Almon Brown Strowager, an American undertaker from the 19 th century, allegedly angry that a local switch operator (and wife of a competing undertaker) was redirecting his customer calls to her husband , sought to take all switch operators to their employment graves. He conceived of and, with family members, invented the Strowager switch that automated the placement of phone calls in a network. The switch spread worldwide and, as a consequence, a job that once employed over 200,000 Americans has almost disappeared.

While the pioneer researchers in new areas of artificial intelligence (AI) such as machine learning, deep learning, […]

Manufacturing’s Rebirth In America: A Chance To Embrace Fair Wages

Manufacturing’s Rebirth In America: A Chance To Embrace Fair Wages

Workers assemble Ford vehicles at the Chicago Assembly Plant on June 24, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. … [+] Getty Images Manufacturing has been returning to these shores for a number of years now, but the pace at which new factories are going up now is a wonderful surprise. The need for better quality control, lower shipping costs, faster time-to-market, and more reliable supply chains: these motivations are driving this boom. It’s about time. The Wall Street Journal recently reported this astonishing news: “Construction spending related to manufacturing reached $108 billion in 2022, Census Bureau data show, the highest annual […]

Services No Longer Required: The Fastest-Shrinking Jobs

Services No Longer Required: The Fastest-Shrinking Jobs

Long before the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI tools threatening to take over our jobs, technological advancements have altered the way people work, making some occupations disappear, while others emerged. Did you know, for example, that people used to work as living alarm clocks before actual alarm clocks became a thing? “ Knocker uppers ”, as they were called, would walk around in industrial England, wielding a long stick with which they’d tap on workers’ doors to wake them in time for their shifts. There also used to be “computers” long before the arrival of personal computers. They […]

AI will be disruptive, the question is who will deal with the fallout?

with artificial intelligence (AI), the genie is out of the bottle. We’re going to be stuck with the fallout – some of it unforeseen benefits, others as-yet-unimagined horrors – come what may.

Questions about controlling AI’s evolution are largely moot, given that we’re now in a global race to see who can make the best ongoing improvements … and put the technology to the worst uses, from cybercrimes to weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.

We’re on a one-way trip to destinations unknown.While predictions today about AI’s specific impacts in the future are unlikely to be at all realistic, we can […]

8 Jobs AI Will Replace and 8 It Won’t (Yet)

AI has changed many jobs already and may make others obsolete. Panchenko Vladimir/Shutterstock Citizens walk past a screen showing an AI-generated painting at a metro station on March 8, 2023, in Shanghai, China. Wang Gang/VCG via Getty Images For all of the hype around generative AI, there are many jobs that are very difficult, if not impossible to automate. 1. Skilled Tradespeople

Think about all of the knowledge, dexterity and problem-solving skills required to be a certified plumber or electrician. Sure, there are routine jobs, but every situation brings unique and unexpected challenges, both physical and mental.

Generative AI is […]

Automation Could Set Us Free — If We Didn’t Live Under Capitalism

Automation Could Set Us Free — If We Didn’t Live Under Capitalism

As millions more jobs are eliminated, a process that could and should benefit workers will instead be one that makes their lives more difficult and insecure. (Leon Neal / Getty Images) Last year, the Daily Wire ’s Ben Shapiro debated Tucker Carlson on the question of automation. Ventriloquizing a very familiar market-conservative argument, Shapiro asked his guest point-blank whether he would support restrictions on the use of technology in order to protect jobs. In his reply, Carlson was nothing short of incredulous. Shapiro: You talk in [your] book about technology and how it’s shifting and taking away jobs from […]

The jobs most and least at risk of being replaced by AI

The jobs most and least at risk of being replaced by AI

Generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have captured the world’s imagination Getty Images/NurPhoto AI job fears: how can we regulate the ‘rise of the robots’?

Pros and cons of artificial intelligence

Rishi Sunak has put AI at the top of his agenda when he meets with President Biden later this week.At his first White House talks with the US President , “he is expected to plug London as the venue for a new international body to regulate AI”, reported The Daily Telegraph .Ahead of the trip, the PM’s spokesperson said: “Obviously we are not complacent about the […]

How ‘Your Package Has Been Delivered’ and other Automated Messages Erase Essential Human Labor

How ‘Your Package Has Been Delivered’ and other Automated Messages Erase Essential Human Labor

Few aspects of the English language are so thoroughly maligned as the passive voice. And for good reason. The passive (“mistakes were made”) as opposed to the active (“I made mistakes”) permits wriggly writing. It acknowledges that something happened without explaining who made it happen or how. As such, the passive voice isn’t just the hallmark of sloppy prose; it’s a rhetorical device that evades recognition, dispenses with attribution and, according to one style guide , “liquidates and buries the active individual.”

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that at a time when major e-commerce platforms and app-based delivery services are brazenly […]