Will China Really Supplant US Economic Hegemony?

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.

Apr 2, 2018 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?

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No Coffee Breaks Needed: Companies Add Software Robots to Workforce

Date: 23-03-2018
Source: The Wall Street Journal

A screenshot of a software-robot control center.

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.

Automation Isn’t Killing Jobs, Study Says, But May Be Keeping Income in Check

Date: 10-03-2018
Source: The Wall Street Journal

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.

From the factory floor to the OR, robots can make great teammates

Date: 05-03-2018
Source: Technology Review

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.

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME: HALF OF AMERICANS THINK GOVERNMENT SHOULD PAY WORKERS WHO LOSE OUT TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Date: 01-03-2018
Source: NewsWeek

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.

The Robots Are Coming for Garment Workers. That’s Good for the U.S., Bad for Poor Countries

Date: 17-02-2018
Source: The Wall Street Journal

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.

Racing the Machine

Robert Skidelsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University and a fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, is a member of the British House of Lords. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

Dec 22, 2017 Robert Skidelsky, Project Syndicate

Economists have always believed that previous waves of job destruction led to an equilibrium between supply and demand in the labor market at a higher level of both employment and earnings. But if robots can actually replace, not just displace, humans, it is hard to see an equilibrium point until the human race itself becomes redundant.

LONDON – Dispelling anxiety about robots has become a major preoccupation of business apologetics. The commonsense – and far from foolish – view is that the more jobs are automated, the fewer there will be for humans to perform. The headline example is the driverless car. If cars can drive themselves, what will happen to chauffeurs, taxi drivers, and so on?

Economic theory tells us that our worries are groundless. Attaching machines to workers increases their output for each hour they work. They then have an enviable choice: work less for the same wage as before, or work the same number of hours for more pay. And as the cost of existing goods falls, consumers will have more money to spend on more of the same goods or different ones. Either way, there is no reason to expect a net loss of human jobs – or anything but continual improvements in living standards.

Globalisation may soon accelerate again – time to get domestic policies right

Richard Baldwin

Professor of International Economics, Graduate Institute, Geneva; President of CEPR; Vox Editor-in-Chief

Vesa Vihriälä

Managing Director of the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA)

Richard Baldwin, Vesa Vihriälä 19 December 2017, voxeu

Despite the setbacks globalisation has faced in recent years from reactionary politics, the advent of artificial intelligence and robotisation are set to ensure its continuation. Domestic policy must therefore be designed in such a way as to reap the rewards of globalisation while avoiding its pitfalls. This column uses the case of Finland to show how this can be done. Finland has grown faster than its peers over two waves of globalisation, despite enduring substantial setbacks. In both its successes and challenges, it is an important example of the need for deliberate policies to prepare for future disruptions.

Globalisation has been encountering headwinds in many developed countries for several years.  The perception that globalisation does not benefit but rather harms ordinary people has contributed to major political upheavals, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as US president (Rodrik 2017, Guiso et al. 2017). 

Does Amazon Create Jobs? Well, It Hired 75,000 Robots in 2017

By Dave Edwards and Helen Edwards, gz.com
December 4, 2017
Originally published here

There are 170,000 fewer retail jobs in 2017 – and 75,000 more Amazon robots.

Amazon’s headcount is growing by 40% year-over-year. It was the eighth-largest private employer in the US at the end of 2016, and it’s poised to climb those ranks quickly. The online retailer also announced plans to build a second US headquarters that will employ 50,000 employees.

But Amazon’s growth comes at a cost. It has a well-earned reputation for overwhelming competitors. Even though Amazon represents a small portion of the overall retail industry, it dominates the industry’s sales growth.

We wondered: Does Amazon create more jobs than it destroys?

It depends – on whether you are a robot

We assembled employment data for the retail industry as a whole, and for Amazon in particular. We estimated year-end results for 2017, based on current trends.

Rage Against the Machine?

Laura Tyson, a former chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior adviser at the Rock Creek Group, and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Gender Parity.

Susan Lund is a partner of McKinsey & Company and a leader at the McKinsey Global Institute.

Dec 7, 2017 Laura Tyson ,  Susan Lund, Project Syndicate

Almost every aspect of our economies will be transformed by automation in the coming years. But history and economic theory suggest that fears about technological unemployment, a term coined by John Maynard Keynes nearly a century ago, are misplaced.

BERKELEY – Intelligent machines are transforming the way we produce, work, learn, and live throughout the world. Almost every aspect of our economies will be radically altered.