Lifeboat Foundation

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has the potential to boost productivity but increase wealth inequality and wipe out millions of jobs, a research report by the White House claimed on Tuesday. With an increasing number of industries set to be affected by automation technology in the coming years, jobs could be displaced — a fear that has been voiced by academics and business leaders. Auto companies are developing driverless cars, and factories are seeing an increased use of robotics.

Because AI is not a single technology, but rather a collection of technologies that are applied to specific tasks, the effects of AI will be felt unevenly through the economy. Some tasks will be more easily automated than others, and some jobs will be affected more than others — both negatively and positively.

Researchers around the world have given varying estimates about the size of potential job losses. One recent estimate by Forrester suggests 6 percent of jobs in the next five years could be wiped out thanks to AI. The White House report cites a 2013 study from Oxford University suggesting that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk because of AI. The report suggests that lower-skilled and less-educated workers could feel the heat the most. Overall, the White House report advocates a three-pronged approach to preparing for a future remade by AI that includes investing in AI for its benefits, training Americans for the jobs of the future and helping workers make the transition to new positions.

Continue reading “AI could boost productivity but increase wealth inequality, White House says” »

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” »

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.

Continue reading “Trump to meet tech firms including Apple, Facebook and Google” »

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.

Continue reading “Warehouses promised lots of jobs, but robot workforce slows hiring” »

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.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking: Automation and AI Are Going to Decimate Middle Class Jobs” »

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” »

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.

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.

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