Tag: software

How the Gig Economy Profits off Desperation

How the Gig Economy Profits off Desperation

Illustration by Laurent Hrybyk “Children are running the company [Homejoy] and they act like they are still in college. The poor cleaners are being treated like slaves; the children make fun of them behind their backs; this company is a tax-evader and a moral concern to the working class.” While the gig economy promises to free workers from the traditional, drab 9-to-5 work environment, the reality is quite different. Many contractors employed in gig economy–type jobs lack health care and retirement benefits, are at the mercy of their employers’ scheduling needs, and — despite being promised so much freedom […]

The Skills Delusion

The Skills Delusion

LONDON – Everybody agrees that better education and improved skills, for as many people as possible, is crucial to increasing productivity and living standards and to tackling rising inequality. But what if everybody is wrong?

Most economists are certain that human capital is as important to productivity growth as physical capital. And to some degree, that’s obviously true. Modern economies would not be possible without widespread literacy and numeracy: many emerging economies are held back by inadequate skills. John Andrews views the country’s civil war in the context of the Middle East’s strategic disarray, assessing how Shlomo Ben-Ami, Christopher Hill, […]

Shaking hands with the robot

Shaking hands with the robot

Title: Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines Authors: Thomas H Davenport and Julia Kirby Publisher: Harper Collins Price: ₹899 An optimistic take on the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on work

Have you read a financial report by the Associated Press recently? Chances are that a non-human brain conceived and wrote it. AP — one of the biggest news agencies in the world — publishes more than 3,000 articles every quarter using an content-automation programme, Wordsmith. This ‘robot’ runs on technology from US-based big data analytics and language generation company Automated Insights.

Employment […]

Debate: will robots fuel inequality?

Gerald Huff and Jerry Kaplan debate whether robots will leave us all worse off Automation is coming. No: Jerry Kaplan

Computer scientist, entrepreneur and author of Humans Need Not Apply

First and foremost, robots are a form of automation, and automation is the substitution of capital for labour. Historically, automation first advances the interests of the people who invest in it, before the positive impact is felt more broadly across society. In other words, with any new technologies there are winners and losers, even if in the long run we are better off on average.Just as mechanical looms […]

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, And Status In The Twenty-first Century

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, And Status In The Twenty-first Century

Ryan Avent Ryan Avent, thank you very much for joining us today. You’ve got a new book out entitled ‘ The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century ’, and it addresses one of the hottest topics around at the moment – the digital revolution, and what it means for the future of work.

So, what do you think? What does it mean?

Well, I think it means big change. I think the starting point of the book is that the digital revolution actually is probably going to be as transformative as the industrial […]

Will new technologies destroy jobs?

Will new technologies destroy jobs?

At TM Forum Live! Asia (December 7-8, Singapore), Andrew Milroy, SVP ICT Asia Pacific, Frost & Sullivan, will take part in a panel on the future of digital services and the Internet of Everything across APAC . Here, he looks at the impact of automation on employment.

There has been much discussion recently around the impact of automation on employment, particularly the use of robotics. Advances in machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are steadily eliminating routine and repetitive types of jobs. Some studies state that half of manufacturing jobs will be […]

Will Artifical Intelligence Mean Massive Job Loss?

This article is from the
September/October 2016 issue. Dear Dr. Dollar:

What’s the story with artificial intelligence and jobs? Will the application of robotics to production really lead to massive unemployment?
—Anonymous, via email In the late 1970s, my early years at the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB), the Department of Economics had two secretaries. When I retired, in 2008, the number of faculty members and students in the department had increased, but there was only one secretary. All the faculty members had their own computers, with which they did much of the work that secretaries had […]

What to study to prevent robots stealing your job

What to study to prevent robots stealing your job

Up to one-third of our jobs are at risk of computerisation over the next 20 years

Some 44 per cent of companies that reduced their number of employees since the global financial crash in 2008 did so by means of automation. Photograph: Getty Images Beware of the robots – they are on the rise and could be after your job. It might sounds like something from an outlandish sci-fi movie, but the figures are all too real.

A report by McKinsey Global Institute shows that 44 per cent of companies that reduced their number of employees since the global […]

Deckle McLain: Rise of bots can’t be ignored in economy

Deckle McLain: Rise of bots can't be ignored in economy

Zoom Robots and software bots are poised to dominate routine work; thus, steps to keep jobs in the United States may not improve the availability of work as much as hoped, the claims of 2016 presidential contenders notwithstanding. Some experts say bots are now shrinking the total number of jobs for all time. Two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, have concluded that since 2000 productivity has increased while employment has declined, reaching a significant gap by 2011. Nevertheless, sanguine experts believe that after painful adjustments automation will create as many jobs as […]

The human omission

It’s hard to conceive of a more fundamental topic than the future of work. Economists have grappled with it for centuries. Now slow growth, rising inequality and rapid technological change have raised a new, urgent question. Will robots free us from boring labour, or will they leave many workers permanently redundant?

Ryan Avent’s “The Wealth of Humans” manages to be both optimistic about innovation and gloomy about its consequences. This wide-ranging and highly readable book echoes famous tracts by tackling the biggest challenges facing the human race. The title is a nod to Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” – […]