Tag: Technology

Amazon’s robot army fuels expansion

Amazon's robot army fuels expansion

TRACY — In Amazon’s million-square-foot order-filling warehouse, two low-slung orange robots carrying stacks of consumer products are zipping across the floor, headed right at each other. One stops — not on a dime, it turns out, but rather over a QR code stuck to the floor — and allows the other to proceed, carrying inventory to a human worker who will pluck out an item, scan it and send it off for packing and shipping.

In this building the size of 28 football fields, containing four miles of conveyor belts and 15 million items awaiting customer orders from Northern California […]

The digital economy needs defending from the hard left and the far right

The digital economy needs defending from the hard left and the far right

Matt Hancock, Minister for the Cabinet Office Automate work, humanize jobs. That needs to be the mantra of the digital economy, according to Matt Hancock, who as Minister for the Cabinet Office in the UK government, has responsibility in part for fostering the digital revolution.

Hancock set out his stall at the 2016 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture. For the benefit of non-UK readers, Sir Keith Joseph was a British politician, whose long career saw him serve as a minister under four Conservative Party Prime Ministers – Harold McMillan and Alec Douglas-Home in the 1960s, Edward Heath in the 1970s and […]

NEW TECHNOLOGY POSES NEW PERIL TO ARRAY OF JOBS….

NEW TECHNOLOGY POSES NEW PERIL TO ARRAY OF JOBS....

The current productivity numbers do not reflect it yet, but could soon impact employment in a multitude of fields. Is your current job, or the career you are currently studying for, going to be around when the new wave of technology hits? You could find yourself being replaced by automation, and that day might be closer than you think.

I want you to think in terms of clerical work and professional services. Technologies like the Web, artificial intelligence, big data, and improved analytics, are all made possible by the ever increasing availability of cheap computing power and storage capacity. Many […]

Living in a bubble: Y Combinator’s basic income study is merely a result of white unemployment

Living in a bubble: Y Combinator’s basic income study is merely a result of white unemployment

Workers arrive for a shift at the reopened Chrysler Warren Truck Assembly plant in Warren, Michigan, U.S., on Monday, June 29, 2009. Photo credit: Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Silicon Valley’s interest in basic income is based on a false prophecy of tech destroying jobs and wouldn’t be explored if those affected weren’t mostly white

Y Combinator made an announcement last Wednesday that it would pursue a short-term, exploratory study into the concept of a ‘ basic income ,’ a no-strings-attached form of welfare that would be allotted to every citizen of a given city or country. Residents of increasingly […]

The Race Between Machine and Man: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares and Employment

5 By: Daron Acemoglu ; Pascual Restrepo The advent of automation and the simultaneous decline in the labor share and employment among advanced economies raise concerns that labor will be marginalized and made redundant by new technologies. We examine this proposition using a task-based framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and more complex versions of existing tasks, in which labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. We characterize the equilibrium in this model and establish how the available technologies and the choices of firms between producing with capital or labor determine factor prices […]

Will A Robot Take Your Job?

Will A Robot Take Your Job?

A new estimate says that robots will perform more than half of all jobs by 2045. But don’t panic. (AP) A new estimate says that robots will perform more than half of all jobs by 2045, leaving the frightening prospect that millions of once solidly middle-class people will be left idle and jobless.

“If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?” is the alarming question asked by Rice University professor Moshe Vardi , who is the source of the new estimate.

It’s a legitimate question. And Vardi answers it, claiming that the advent […]

Will automation destroy jobs?

Will automation destroy jobs?

MT at 50: Carl Benedikt Frey, co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, gives his expert view on the effects of automation on jobs – and the news isn’t all bad.

Carl Benedikt Frey of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford has become (with colleague Michael Osborne) the leading authority on the automation of jobs. Their methodology focuses on how reliant tasks are on human aptitudes such as social perceptiveness, persuasion, originality and manual dexterity. We asked him about the impact automation will have in the future. What will determine the pace of […]

Why I’m Not Worried About Robots

Google “robots taking our jobs” and you will get 10.3 million hits.

A series of terrific books (such as Rise of the Robots , The Second Machine Age , and The Industries of the Future (can you share other titles?), have rode the wave (and encouraged) our worries about automation and jobs.

Who isn’t worried about driverless cars and truckerless trucks?The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there are 233,700 taxi and chauffeur drivers. At last count, Uber has 160,000 active drivers. What will happen to all these people who make their living driving when cars drive themselves?A recent Medium article […]

How the rise of the robots will affect your job

How the rise of the robots will affect your job

MT at 50: We’re heading for the fourth industrial revolution where more and more jobs will be automated – from care assistants to check-in staff. So how can we manage the march of the machines?

The residents of the Colony Club, an assisted-living home near Fort Lauderdale in Florida, are fond of Zora, the little redhead who helps them with their daily exercises, tells them a story or two, takes them on a walk, reads them the weather forecast and will even dance them the Macarena if they ask.

And she works for virtually nothing, after an initial payment of […]