jobs « Limits to Growth

Automation Mentioned at Republican Debate — by Marco Rubio

The fundamental transformation of the American workplace by smart machines has gone undiscussed in the Presidential campaign until now: one tiny mention occurred in Tuesday’s Republican debate by a man who characterizes himself as the fresh voice for the 21st century.

RUBIO: The problem is that today people are not successful working as hard as ever […]

Flying Delivery Robots Are Slated for 2017

Drones are coming, no matter whether or not the citizens want their skies filled with buzzing machines dropping shoppers’ merchandise into neighborhoods. Tech elites like Jeff Bezos think drones are a cool addition to the smart machines already speeding the processing of mail-order businesses like Amazon, which has pioneered automation with its Kiva robot warehouse […]

Amazon Doubles the Number of Kiva Warehouse Robots

Christmas is coming, and the online shopping megastore is revving up to send packages even faster by increasing the number of robot warehouse transporters from 15,000 at the end of last year to 30,000 now in its 13 “fulfillment centers.” The company believes that more of the amazing Kiva robots will enable it to ship its […]

American Workers Replaced with H-1b Foreigners Speak Out about Disney

Last spring, we learned that Disney, the fabled story-teller of moral goodness for children, axed its American IT department so it could replace them with cheaper Indian workers. The citizens were forced to train their foreign replacements or else lose their severance package. The Americans were also supposed to keep quiet about how shabbily they […]

A Future Forecast Shows Fewer Jobs for Humans Because of Automation

The Gartner consulting firm is in the business of advising tech companies and prognosticating about future trends in that regard. A year ago, it made a forecast that should have gotten a lot more attention: Smart robots will take over a third of jobs by 2025, Gartner says (PBS Newshour, Oct 7, 2014). Assuming that […]

Germany Looks to Refugees for Labor, Even as It Transforms the Workplace with Automation

One of the reasons given for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s excessive welcome to Syrian refugees was to add humans to the nation’s workforce.

Tapping refugees to combat Germany’s labor shortage, Deutsche Welle, September 2, 2015

The thousands of refugees pouring into Germany every day could offer Europe’s largest economy an opportune solution to plug the ‘gray gap’ […]

Physicist Stephen Hawking Thinks Capitalism Will Crush the Future, Not Robots

I’ve been following the topic of automation destroying employment for a few years and am still waiting for a conservative response of what to do if indeed half of America’s jobs become displaced by smart machines in 20 years, as Oxford researchers have forecast. Coverage of the robot workplace revolution has been slim from conservative media, […]

Sixty Minutes Promotes Self-Driving Cars

The CBS premier news magazine show included an entirely laudatory segment about self-driving cars on Sunday. That was disappointing, since the show had a very good piece about automation in 2013, “Are Robots Hurting Job Growth?”:

Andrew McAfee: Our economy is bigger than it was before the start of the Great Recession. Corporate profits are back. […]

Japan to Begin Testing of Self-Driving Taxis

It’s not surprising to see Japan moving forward with self-driving taxis, since that nation has chosen automation rather than immigration to augment its labor needs. After all, Japan was the first country on earth to have a dinosaur robot desk clerk in a hotel.

Japan is hosting the 2020 Olympics and envisions the event as a […]

No Drivers Need Apply! Automated Transportation Technology Advances

In Greece, (where the unemployment rate in June was 25.2 percent), an experimental program of self-driving buses is being tested. The buses are small, holding about a dozen passengers, and dink around at a safe 12 miles per hour on predetermined routes. The four buses in Trikala are an EU-funded research project to see whether […]

Human Workers Are Expected to Adjust to Robot ‘Colleagues’

People in the business of adding automation and subtracting humans from the workplace claim to be concerned about whether the remaining humans are happy with the arrangement. Certainly companies want customers to be comfortable when in direct contact with smart machines, but the opinion of average workers probably counts for sub-zero in the big offices.

One […]

Tech Experts Predict Fewer Jobs in Next Decade

Futurist forecasts are generally fun to read, and are even better when the crystal ball gazers are experts in the field. That’s the case with the paper Technological Tipping Points and Societal Impact, which polled 800 tech execs for their opinions of what’s ahead.

Another paper from the World Economic Forum focused on the workplace revolution: How […]

Fair Use: This site contains copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues related to culture and mass immigration. We believe this constitutes a "fair use" of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information, see: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000107----000-.html. In order to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond "fair use", you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Limits to Growth