Robots Will Be Harder on Men

The Atlantic - 8/4/15 by Jerry Kaplan

Nearly half of today’s jobs are likely to become obsolete in the not-too-distant future.

Many economists and technologists believe the world is on the brink of a new industrial revolution, in which advances in the field of artificial intelligence will obsolete human labor at an unforgiving pace. Two Oxford researchers recently analyzed the skills required for more than 700 different occupations to determine how many of them would be susceptible to automation in the near future, and the news was not good: They concluded that machines are likely to take over 47 percent of today’s jobs within a few decades.

This is a dire prediction, but one whose consequences will not fall upon society evenly. A close look at the data reveals a surprising pattern: The jobs performed primarily by women are relatively safe, while those typically performed by men are at risk.

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A Robot-Funded Future

The Week, April 2, 2015 by James Pethokoukis

To accept Davidow's broad conclusion, though, one also has to believe workers across many sectors would be a lot better off today if the internet had not been invented. That's an unlikely counterfactual. Just look at how the labor market has been doing.

The robopocalypse for workers may be inevitable. In this vision of the future, super-smart machines will best humans in pretty much every task. A few of us will own the machines, a few will work a bit — perhaps providing "Made by Man" artisanal goods — while the rest will live off a government-provided income. Silicon-based superintelligence and robots will dramatically alter labor markets — to name but one example, the most common job in most U.S. states probably will no longer be truck driver.

But what about right now? If you're unemployed or working part-time instead of full-time, or haven't seen a raise in years, should you blame technology?

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Can U.S. Workers Keep Pace with the Robots?

NYT - 12.15.14 by Claire Cain Miller

Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents. They could put truck and taxi drivers out of work — or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money. But for the happier outcome to happen, the drivers would need the skills to do new types of jobs.

A machine that administers sedatives recently began treating patients at a Seattle hospital. At a Silicon Valley hotel, a bellhop robot delivers items to people’s rooms. Last spring, a software algorithm wrote a breaking news article about an earthquake that The Los Angeles Times published.

Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work.

And over the same 15-year period that digital technology has inserted itself into nearly every aspect of life, the job market has fallen into a long malaise. Even with the economy’s recent improvement, the share of working-age adults who are working is substantially lower than a decade ago — and lower than any point in the 1990s.

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One-Third of All Jobs Will Go to Robots or Software by 2025

COMPUTERWORLD - 10.03.14 by Patrick Thibodeau

"Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," said Sondergaard. "New digital businesses require less labor; machines will be make sense of data faster than humans can."

ORLANDO - Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business.

This is Gartner being provocative, as it typically is, at the start of its major U.S. conference, the Symposium/ITxpo.

Take drones, for instance.

"One day, a drone may be your eyes and ears," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's research director. In five years, drones will be a standard part of operations in many industries, used in agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections.

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Are Robots About to Terminate Your Job?

Financial Times - 12.27.13 by Tim Harford

By the time today’s 10-year-olds have their degrees, computers could be a hundred times cheaper and smarter than they are today.

In future, there may be people who – despite being fit to work – have no economic value.

On August 29 1997, Skynet – a computer system controlling the US nuclear arsenal – became self-aware. Panicking operators tried to deactivate it. Skynet, perceiving the threat, launched its arsenal, killed most of humanity, and ushered in a world in which the robots ruled. So went the backstory of the 1984 movie The Terminator . But computers did not become self-aware in 1997 – the closest they managed was when Deep Blue, a B-list supercomputer, beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion. Despite decades of hand-wringing about robots taking over, the robots never quite seem to rise.

But perhaps 2014 will be different. Google certainly seems to think so: early in December it purchased Boston Dynamics, a producer of military prototype robots – with names such as “BigDog”, “WildCat” or “Petman” – that wouldn’t look out of place in the Terminator films. These nightmarish machines will now be brought to you by the folks who host all your email, know what your internet searches are and are tracking your phone’s location.

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12 Disruptive Technologies - Will Add Trillions to Economy

Real Clear Technology

The bottom line: renewable advances will deliver $0.2-$0.3 trillion to the economy by 2025.

AP Photo

One of the most common words attached to technology these days is "disruption." The very term conjures up something uncomfortable, but while technology unquestionably impacts and disrupts established methods of doing things, it also delivers enormous value to our lives.

The global research firm McKinsey has spents years quantifying this value in concrete dollar terms. They've released a new, wide-ranging report that identifies 12 potentially game-changing technological developments that will deliver significant economic impacts to the global economy by 2025. To make the cut, the technology had to have a broad scope with the potential for massive economic impact. What's more, McKinsey has put an estimated price tag on each one of these disruptive innovations, claiming they will deliver tens of trillions (yes, with a "t") of dollars of economic impact worldwide, should they come to pass.

The report, as you might guess, is fundamentally optimistic about the potential for new technology to "raise productivity and provide widespread benefits across economies." Here are the technologies that McKinsey sees adding trillions of dollars to the global economy by 2025.

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Billions of Smartphones Means...Mo' Money!

Read/WriteWeb - October 17, 2012 by Dan Rowinski

The first modern smartphone is generally considered to have been the Nokia Communicator, released in 1996. It was large and clunky, had a flip keyboard and a awkward antenna. Boy, how things have changed. Multiple companies now churn out increasingly amazing models with incredibly slick designs, intuitive features and hundreds of thousands of fun and useful apps. A billion people around the globe now have supercomputers in their pockets. The implications are dramatic and only beginning to be understood.



According to a new report from Boston-based Strategy Analytics, the global user base of smartphones surpassed one billion for the first time at the end of the third quarter of 2012. The report states that 1.038 billion smartphones in use, up from 959 million at the end of the second quarter and close to 300 million more than the 708 million counted at the end of the third quarter last year.

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In Cloud We Trust - Who needs economists?

New York Times (Bits) - 3.15.12 by Quentin Hardy

GT Nexus used shipment data to track countries’ import-export balance in 2008, left, and 2011. The diagonal line represents balanced trade.

Someday soon, the Federal Reserve may be dead, at least for economic information. Blame it on, or credit it to, cloud computing.

I recently visited the Oakland, Calif., headquarters of GT Nexus, a company that monitors supply chain information — things like ordering, payment, manufacture and logistics — for 100 major companies. Think of GT Nexus as a Facebook for corporate behavior: business partners are friends, and the completion of tasks are status updates.

The clients inside this cloud-based system include Home Depot, Sears Holdings, Adidas, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and Fiat Industrial. Each giant company typically has about 1,000 other organizations involved in its business, including suppliers and manufacturers, freight companies, customs officials and banks. GT Nexus keeps straight all their goods, services and the payments involved, in real time, on a cloud-based computing platform. It is possible because so many people, things and computers are now connected to the Internet.

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Three Technology Advances That Will Crank America's Economy

Wall Street Journal - 1.30.12 By MARK P. MILLS AND JULIO M. OTTINO

In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today.

In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and the radio amplifier—would foster such growth. Yet even knowledgeable contemporary observers failed to grasp their transformational power.

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

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