Date: 11-06-2018
Source: The Wall Street Journal By Martin Feldstein
The central bank’s employment mandate can’t be squared with coming tech disruption.
The day is coming, experts tell us, when artificial intelligence and robotics will massively disrupt the labor market. Autonomous vehicles will put 3.5 million truck drivers at risk of losing their jobs. Checkout machines may replace 3.4 million retail cashiers. That is only the beginning of the long list of jobs that will be destroyed by technological change.
The shift will not happen all at once, and most of the people who lose their jobs will eventually find new employment. The benefits of automation will include lower production costs, which will increase real incomes and job-creating consumer demand. But the technology will also cause individual hardship and frequent periods of increased unemployment.
These large supply shocks cannot be offset by monetary policy. They therefore will present the Federal Reserve with a new challenge. In 1978 Congress gave the Fed a “dual mandate” of price stability and maximum employment. This distinguishes the Fed from the world’s other major central banks. The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan, for example, are required to target only the rate of inflation (although they may informally pay attention to the level of employment). Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Date: 14-05-2018
Source: The Wall Street Journal By William Wilkes
Automation is leading to job growth in certain industries where machines take on repetitive tasks, freeing humans for more creative duties
ANSBACH, Germany—A few years ago, Roland Rösch’s job involved grabbing scalding-hot auto parts from an oven and inspecting them for signs they had failed a safety test.
These days he still inspects, but the grabbing is being done by Fritz, a robot that auto-parts manufacturer Robert Bosch GmbH installed three years ago at this German factory as part of an automation effort.
Fritz is more efficientat handling the dangerous and repetitive task of lifting the 8-inch metal-and-circuitry pieces out of the furnace. This leaves Mr. Rösch less exposed to potential accidents and gives him time to test 20% more parts than he did before the robots. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Artificial intelligence threatens to destroy a lot of jobs. But there’s another side to the story.
Now Hiring: Robot Babysitters
Robots need managers too. Meet one robot specialist who gets paid to look after several robot security guards that roam offices in the San Francisco Bay Area.
As machines get smarter, there is a persistent fear in the minds of economists, policy makers and, well, everybody: Millions of people will be left obsolete and jobless.
But the effects of artificial intelligence are likely to be a lot more complex than that.
Yes, jobs will be lost, and many people will be forced to learn new skills to keep up in this new environment. But experts say the picture has a surprisingly big silver lining. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
That could free people to pursue more interesting careers
A WAVE of automation anxiety has hit the West. Just try typing “Will machines…” into Google. An algorithm offers to complete the sentence with differing degrees of disquiet: “…take my job?”; “…take all jobs?”; “…replace humans?”; “…take over the world?”
Job-grabbing robots are no longer science fiction. In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University used—what else?—a machine-learning algorithm to assess how easily 702 different kinds of job in America could be automated. They concluded that fully 47% could be done by machines “over the next decade or two”.
A new working paper by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, employs a similar approach, looking at other developed economies. Its technique differs from Mr Frey and Mr Osborne’s study by assessing the automatability of each task within a given job, based on a survey of skills in 2015. Overall, the study finds that 14% of jobs across 32 countries are highly vulnerable, defined as having at least a 70% chance of automation. A further 32% were slightly less imperilled, with a probability between 50% and 70%. At current employment rates, that puts 210m jobs at risk across the 32 countries in the study.
Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003. The co-author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, his new book, The Curse of Cash, was released in August 2016.
Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate
As artificial intelligence reshapes the global economy, economists who once argued that China’s massive population would propel it to superpower status should rethink that assumption. In fact, as the global economy reaches higher stages of development, China’s labor advantage today could become a handicap tomorrow.
CAMBRIDGE – As China and the United States engage in their latest trade tussle, most economists take it as given that China will achieve global economic supremacy in the long run, no matter what happens now.After all, with four times as many people as the US, and a determined program to catch up after centuries of technological stagnation, isn’t it inevitable that China will decisively take over the mantle of economic hegemon? Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
A bot named ‘Goldie’ has answered nearly 1 million questions for EY employees in human resources
Companies that began experimenting a few years ago with software programs to automate mundane tasks are reaping tangible benefits now. Hundreds of software robots work alongside human employees at companies such as Ernst & Young and Walmart Inc. where they’re saving employees millions of hours of time.
“We’re saving (employees) from repetitive tasks that they tend to enjoy less, and freeing them up to do more meaningful, thought-intensive more focused human work,”said Jeff Wong, global chief innovation officer for Ernst & Young, which brands itself as EY.
Software robots are part of an industry called robotic process automation, which is evolving to include advanced software bots built with machine learning algorithms in order to perform tasks such as object recognition. Other software bots, though, don’t require artificial intelligence because they are designed to complete rules-based tasks. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
New research finds workers are getting a smaller slice of an expanding economy
Robotic arms weld car frames in a Japanese auto factory in December.
Employment in transportation equipment manufacturing was nearly unchanged between 1970 and 2007, but the sector became far more productive.
A new study rebuts the notion that automation is eliminating jobs broadly in the economy, but does find technological advancement doesn’t reward workers much with added income.
Over the previous five decades, automation hasn’t reduced the number of jobs available in 18 advanced economies, including the U.S.–in fact, it helped increase total employment, finds a new paper by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s David Autor and Utrecht University’s Anna Salomons and released Thursday by the Brookings Institution.
But the economists’ paper also found that automation, and the productivity enhancements that it drives, has resulted in laborers taking home a smaller slice of an expanding economic pie. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Julie Shah is figuring out the best ways for us to interact with our future robotic colleagues.
Julie Shah is all about robotic augmentation.
Robot coworkers and AI assistants are coming to an office near you.
And instead of worrying about a robotic takeover, Julie Shah is embracing it. An associate professor at MIT and one of our 2014 Innovators Under 35, Shah works on ways to make humans and machines into safe, efficient teammates.Her work has taken her to factory floors and bustling hospitals, where she tries to figure out how automation can make humans more productive. We sat down to talk to her about what we can expect to encounter when we begin working alongside robots—something many of us are already doing
Erin: What do you think is the most common misconception about robots in the workplace?
Julie: People often think artificial intelligence is one very general and powerful capability moving its way through all these different jobs. But AI does not work like that today. Currently each AI system needs to be designed to perform a very specific task.It takes a lot of engineering. The sets of tasks are expanding, but we don’t have this “general AI” that will take over large swaths of human work. As it becomes more capable, it is able to do many small tasks across many different fields. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
As robots become more sophisticated and replace humans in the workforce, Americans are split over whether those who lose their jobs to artificial intelligence should receive a minimum income.
The hypothetical universal basic income (UBI) would have the federal government give every adult below a certain income threshold an annual allowance of money.
The survey of more than 3,000 U.S. adults showed that almost three-quarters predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to a loss of more jobs than it creates.
Nevertheless, some 48 percent of people support, and 52 percent oppose, the rollout of a UBI to safeguard workers who lose their jobs because of advances in AI, according to a new poll for Northeastern University by Gallup. Those over 66 were least likely to support the UBI, compared with 46 percent of millennials. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Automation is reaching into trades that once seemed immune, transforming sweatshops in places like Bangladesh and bringing production back to America
The Mohammadi Group’s automated knitting machines leave little for humans to do.
DHAKA—At the Mohammadi Fashion Sweaters Ltd. factory in Bangladesh’s capital, a few dozen workers stand watching as 173 German-made machines knit black sweaters for overseas buyers. Occasionally the workers step in to program designs or clean the machines, but otherwise there is little for humans to do.
It’s a big change from a few years ago, when hundreds of employees could be found standing over manual knitting stations for up to 10 hours a day. Mohammadi’s owners began phasing out such work in 2012, and by last year, the knitting process was fully automated. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
CAMBRIDGE – As China and the United States engage in their latest trade tussle, most economists take it as given that China will achieve global economic supremacy in the long run, no matter what happens now. After all, with four times as many people as the US, and a determined program to catch up after centuries of technological stagnation, isn’t it inevitable that China will decisively take over the mantle of economic hegemon? Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »