Lifeboat Foundation

While the USA has been extremely concerned about losing jobs (particularly manufacturing jobs to China), China performed a survey of businesses in the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing and found that 25% had moved or were planning to move their businesses out of China. Half were going to other Asian countries and 40% to America, Canada or Mexico.

China’s worker wages are rising about 7–8% each year and they have a shrinking working age population as the people age.

China is making big moves in automation and large scale deployment of robotics. In 2014, President Xi Jinping talked about a robotics revolution. China has been the number one buyer of industrial robots since 2013. However, China lags other nations in terms of robots per worker.

Continue reading “China’s Manufacturing cost advantage is eroding so China will spend trillions for automation, robotics, 3D manufacturing and research” »

After labor, not all of us will want to explore inner consciousness. Abundant leisure will not turn everyone into the Buddha. Many of our tastes are in the gutter, and I have no objection to leaving them there. I’m not a fan of shopping per se, but buying stuff is deeply satisfying and motivating for many people. Is it possible to rethink the pleasure of conspicuous consumption in a way that decouples it from the competitive labor economy? The post-work world I’m imagining will have little surplus money for unnecessary shopping, even if robots and computers can dramatically lower the overhead of such production. So, a non-consummatory form of shopping will have to be cultivated.

Some people marshal all their evolved predatory skills to hunt down the perfect sweater, shoes, or watch. Could we redesign shopping as a system of “catch-and-release,” so that, like sport fishing, it’s the adventure and not the prize that becomes central? Maybe we will hunt for luxury items, but then instead of keeping them, simply photograph ourselves wearing the items (like a fisherman holding a giant pike). It’s an unlikely adjustment, I’ll grant you, but I never thought catch-and-release fishing would be fun until I did it, and it was. The way some people already buy and return items suggests to me that catch-and-release shopping is not impossible.

I was just telling someone today this very message. Of course they believe borders keep things from happening. Maybe physically; but not in an online retail and consumer world. Who are the most advance and real time responsive in meeting the interests and demands of consumers; will be the winners.

From time to time, the Singularity Hub editorial team unearths a gem from the archives and wants to share it all over again. It’s usually a piece that was popular back then and we think is still relevant now. This is one of those articles. It was originally published October 7, 2015. We hope you enjoy it!

You’ve heard the chatter: Robots and AI want your job. One famous study predicted 47% of today’s jobs may be automated by 2034. And if you want to know how likely it is you’ll be replaced by a robot, check out this BBC tool. (Writer = 33%. Yay?)

Continue reading “Who Has the Manufacturing Edge? May Countries With the Best Robots Win” »

By now, you’ve probably heard a lot about STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Careers in STEM are the next best thing: as a matter of fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, jobs in STEM will increase by up to 30 percent by 2022, a dramatic increase over the average industry projection of just 11 percent in the past years.

With that being said, it’s time to think more about using virtual reality in education; as education officials are seeing an increase in opportunity that will help bring STEM learning to life for today’s middle, and high school students.

By presenting a complete view of the world by use of virtual reality, teachers can help offer a new opportunity to students that will close some of the pedagogical gaps that have appeared off and on throughout the duration of the 21st-century classroom environment. These gaps generated from the fact that the curriculum and content in our education have not caught up with one another yet. In other words, education has not caught up with technology advancements.

Continue reading “Enhancing STEM Learning Using Virtual Reality” »

Automation in the workplace has been one of the looming existential threats to American workers for years now. And with each new study published, the fear of robots, machines, and artificial intelligence coming to take our jobs ticks higher.

But a new report from McKinsey finds that the future of work and automation isn’t quite the zero-sum game when it comes to jobs as some perceive.

Right now, 51% of job activities could be automated with “currently demonstrated” technology, the McKinsey report says. The distinction is noteworthy: McKinsey isn’t saying half of all jobs can be automated with existing technology, but rather job tasks. Many jobs involve a blend of both the mundane and the intricate. Machines are excellent at handling rote, predictable tasks like repetitive physical labor and data collection and processing, making jobs like retail, foodservice, and manufacturing —a big theme in the 2016 campaign—most affected. As 51% of all working hours, these endangered activities make up $2.7 trillion in wages.

Continue reading “51% of All Job Tasks Could be Automated” »

Did Carl Sagan really warn about a time in the future when manufacturing jobs would slip away, when the average person would have virtually no control over their political lives, and when we would all cling to superstitions? Yes, Sagan did predict just that. The screenshot you may have seen floating around social media is real. And plenty of people are worried that Carl was talking about our era.

In Brief:

• Even though AI systems creating AI systems seems like the recipe for a Sci-Fi nightmare, experts agree that it could create a future with a less expensive and more efficient workforce
• The benefits of an AI-powered future might be outweighed by the jobs that the technology makes obsolete

Imagine the conflicted feelings of the machine learning expert who is creating artificial intelligence (AI) that they know will one day, possibly very soon, be able to create better AI than them. It’s the new age’s way of holding on to the time-honored tradition of having to train your own replacement. Machine learning experts are currently being paid a premium wage due to their limited numbers and the high demand for their valuable skills. However, with the dawn of software that is “learning to learn,” those days may be numbered.

Dear men, beware! Prolonged exposure to work-related stress may increase likelihood of cancer. The findings indicate that the link was observed in men, who had been exposed to 15 to 30 years of work-related stress and in some cases, more than 30 years. According to the study published in journal of Preventive Medicine, prolonged exposure of men to work-related stress has been linked to an increased likelihood of lung, colon, rectal and stomach cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Researchers at INRS and Université de Montréal in Canada conducted the study to assess the link between cancer and work-related stress perceived by men throughout their working life. On average, the study participants had held four jobs, with some holding up to a dozen or more during their working lifetime. A link between work-related stress and cancer was not found in participants who had held stressful jobs for less than 15 years. Significant links to five of the eleven cancers considered in the study were revealed.

The most stressful jobs included firefighter, industrial engineer, aerospace engineer, mechanic foreman, and vehicle and railway-equipment repair worker and for the same individual, stress varied depending on the job held. The study also shows that perceived stress is not limited to high work load and time constraints. ‘One of the biggest flaws in previous cancer studies is that none of them assessed work-related stress over a full working lifetime, making it impossible to determine how the duration of exposure to work-related stress affects cancer development,’ the authors explained. ‘Our study shows the importance of measuring stress at different points in an individual’s working life,’ the authors noted.

While some may be able to coast into office with the promise of bringing jobs back from oversees, they fail to realize that there may be no jobs to bring back. Automation is set to replace 5 million human jobs by 2020, with poorer countries being impacted significantly more than developed nations.