Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs
By: Claire Cain Miller March 28, 2017 Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they’ve declared a different winner: the robots. The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, […]
Britain needs a smart state, not big government, to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution
By: Alan Mak Mak March 20, 2017 In her first party conference speech as Prime Minister, Theresa May declared it was “time to remember the good that government can do”. Setting out a new approach to the role of the state, she rightly acknowledged that Whitehall doesn’t have all the answers but should instead be […]
Automation is Taking Over One of the Most Popular Professions
By: Scott Santens March 2, 2017 Late last year, I took a road trip with my partner from our home in New Orleans, Louisiana to Orlando, Florida and as we drove by town after town, we got to talking about the potential effects self-driving vehicle technology would have not only on truckers themselves, but on […]
The Jobs Americans Do
By: New York Times February 23, 2017 Forget the images of men in hard hats standing before factory gates, of men with coal-blackened faces, of men perched high above New York City on steel beams. The emerging face of the American working class is a Hispanic woman who has never set foot on a factory […]
The Future of Not Working
By: Annie Lowrey Feb 23, 2017 The village is poor, even by the standards of rural Kenya. To get there, you follow a power line along a series of unmarked roads. Eventually, that power line connects to the school at the center of town, the sole building with electricity. Homesteads fan out into the hilly […]
Learning to Love Our Robot Co-Workers
By: Kim Tingley Feb 23, 2017 The robots were Joe McGillivray’s idea. The first one arrived at Dynamic Group in Ramsey, Minn., by pickup truck in two cardboard boxes. With a mixture of excitement and trepidation, McGillivray watched as a vendor unpacked two silver tubes, assorted blue-and-gray joints and a touch screen and put them […]
A warning from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking
By: Quincy Larson February 19, 2017 “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.” — Stephen Hawking There’s a rising chorus of concern about […]
This company replaced 90% of its workforce with machines. Here’s what happened
By: June Javelosa, Kristin Houser February 15, 2017 The rise of the robot workforce It’s hard to argue against automation when statistics are clearly illustrating its potential. The latest evidence comes out of a Chinese factory in Dongguan City. The factory recently replaced 90 percent of its human workforce with machines, and it led to […]
Basic income pilot in Kenya to receive up to $493,000 from eBay founder’s firm
By: Kate McFarland February 11, 2017 In the largest and longest-running basic income trial to date, GiveDirectly will provide unconditional cash transfers to the residents of 200 villages in rural Kenya (about 26,000 people in total). The residents of 40 of these villages (about 6,000 people) will receive monthly payments for 12 years. At about […]