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Archive for the ‘employment’ category: Page 79

Dec 21, 2016

The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China. It’s Automation

Posted by in categories: employment, robotics/AI, transportation

Even in the best case, automation leaves the first generation of workers it displaces in a lurch because they usually don’t have the skills to do new and more complex tasks, Mr. Acemoglu found in a paper published in May.

Robert Stilwell, 35, of Evansville, Ind., is one of them. He did not graduate from high school and worked in factories building parts for tools and cars, wrapping them up and loading them onto trucks. After he was laid off, he got a job as a convenience store cashier, which pays a lot less.

“I used to have a really good job, and I liked the people I worked with — until it got overtaken by a machine, and then I was let go,” he said.

Continue reading “The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China. It’s Automation” »

Dec 14, 2016

Trump to meet tech firms including Apple, Facebook and Google

Posted by in categories: business, employment, mobile phones, policy, robotics/AI

New article on immigration and AI in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/14/donald-tr…automation #future


All of this could be under threat if we are to take some of the comments the Trump campaign made in the run-up to the election at face value. The outspoken candidate claimed that Mark Zuckerberg’s push for specialist H1B visas (the main visa used to hire foreign talent to tech companies) was a threat to jobs for American women and minorities. Meanwhile, Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon suggested that Asians have too much power in Silicon Valley.

About a dozen members of Silicon Valley’s elite – including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg – will meet with Trump in New York. The meeting is likely to provide an opportunity for them to highlight their concerns and priorities with the incoming administration.

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Dec 9, 2016

Warehouses promised lots of jobs, but robot workforce slows hiring

Posted by in categories: employment, robotics/AI

Big corporations prefer robots to human employees.


It’s a sign of things to come.

In the last five years, online shopping has produced tens of thousands of new warehouse jobs in California, many of them in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The bulk of them paid blue collar people decent wages to do menial tasks – putting things in boxes and sending them out to the world.

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Dec 3, 2016

Stephen Hawking: Automation and AI Are Going to Decimate Middle Class Jobs

Posted by in categories: employment, robotics/AI

Artificial intelligence and increasing automation is going to decimate middle class jobs, worsening inequality and risking significant political upheaval, Stephen Hawking has warned.

In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that “the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.”

He adds his voice to a growing chorus of experts concerned about the effects that technology will have on workforce in the coming years and decades. The fear is that while artificial intelligence will bring radical increases in efficiency in industry, for ordinary people this will translate into unemployment and uncertainty, as their human jobs are replaced by machines.

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Dec 1, 2016

Thanks To ‘Fight For $15’ Minimum Wage, McDonald’s Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide

Posted by in categories: business, economics, employment, policy, robotics/AI

Technological unemployment speeding up, and the elite types as always trying to get the poor and middle class to go at each others throats, rather than address the elephant charging at both of them, that robots and AI are coming for all the jobs in under 10 years now.


Other states are also learning the same basic economic lesson: Customers have a limit to what they will pay for service. Voters in Washington, Colorado, Maine and Arizona voted to raise minimum wages on Election Day, convinced of the policy’s merits after millions of dollars were spent by union advocates. In the immediate aftermath, family-owned restaurants, coffee shops and even childcare providers have struggled to absorb the coming cost increase—with parents paying the cost through steeper childcare bills, and employees paying the cost through reduced shift hours or none at all.

The out-of-state labor groups who funded these initiatives aren’t shedding tears over the consequences. Like their Soviet-era predecessors who foolishly thought they could centrally manage prices and business operations to fit an idealistic worldview, economic reality keeps ruining the model of all gain and no pain. This brings me to my last correct prediction, which is that the Fight for $15 was always more a creation of the left-wing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rather than a legitimate grassroots effort. Reuters reported last year that, based on federal filings, the SEIU had spent anywhere from $24 million to $50 million on the its Fight for $15 campaign, and the number has surely increased since then.

Continue reading “Thanks To ‘Fight For $15’ Minimum Wage, McDonald’s Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide” »

Nov 20, 2016

80% of IT Jobs can be Replaced by Automation, and it’s ‘Exciting’

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, employment, law, robotics/AI, virtual reality

In Brief:

  • Computing pioneer, Vinod Khosla, envisions a future where Artificial Intelligence will take over 80 percent of IT jobs.
  • IT guys are not the only white collar professionals who Khosla sees as replaceable by VR they also join doctors, lawyers, and accountants on the growing list.

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Nov 12, 2016

UN report says robots threaten two thirds of jobs in developing countries

Posted by in categories: employment, robotics/AI

In the past, the United Nations has considered the threat posed by weaponized AI, but now the body is looking at a more mundane, but still important, robot invasion. A report from the latest UN Conference on Trade and Development has outlined how the increasing use of industrial automation is impacting jobs in developing countries, and what strategies may help in overcoming the problem.

Robots taking over human jobs has been a concern for decades, but those concerns generally focus on developed countries. The report points out that developing countries in Africa and Latin America may be at greater risk of having their industrialization slow down, since the increasing use of robots is eating into the low-cost labor advantage that developing countries have traditionally held. Up to two thirds of those occupations may be at risk.

Another issue is the trend of “reshoring.” Functioning as opposite of offshoring, reshoring sees companies move their labor operations back to developed countries, to be carried out by robots or automated systems. While it has the potential to disrupt developing countries from industrializing, the report notes that reshoring has so far been slow-paced, and hasn’t undermined the continued offshoring.

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Nov 11, 2016

93% of Investors Say AI Will Destroy Jobs, Governments Not Prepared

Posted by in categories: employment, robotics/AI

A vast majority of global investors believe AI and robots will destroy huge numbers of existing jobs.

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Nov 10, 2016

Trump promises to bring back manufacturing jobs, but robots won’t let him

Posted by in categories: employment, policy, robotics/AI

For Americans struggling with stagnant wages, under- or un-employment, one of Donald Trump’s most appealing campaign promises was to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

Navigating the complexities of policy, tariffs and geopolitics would make that hard enough already for the president elect. But technology will make this promise nearly impossible to fulfill.

Why? Because manufacturing jobs are increasingly done by robots, not people.

Continue reading “Trump promises to bring back manufacturing jobs, but robots won’t let him” »

Nov 7, 2016

Elon Musk: “There’s a Pretty Good Chance We’ll End Up With Universal Basic Income”

Posted by in categories: economics, Elon Musk, employment, robotics/AI

In Brief:

  • Experts assert that, in the coming years, robots will take over hundreds of thousands of jobs that are traditionally done by humans.
  • In a recent interview, Elon Musk stated that Universal Basic Income may be the only economic response to this increasing automation and job loss.

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