Pros & Cons | The Debate
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James Pethokoukis | American Enterprise Institute
A Q&A with Tyler Cowen, author of ‘Average is Over’
Flash fact:
most of the jobs lost during the Great Recession were mid-wage occupations,
most of the jobs added in the recovery have been low-wage jobs.
many of those disappearing middle-level jobs are what economists call “routine, manual tasks” that can be easily automated.
If economist Tyler Cowen is right, that trend is merely a taste of things to come.
Books: A colorful and accessible picture of dynamic forces that are shaping our lives, our work, and our economies
The Second Machine Age will alter how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.
“Technology is overturning the world’s economies, and The Second Machine Age is the best explanation of this revolution yet written.”
Amazon
Squeezing out the middle class could generate antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.
Society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages.
Technophobia distracts people from real economic problems
A new wave of technological progress may dramatically accelerate the automation of brain-work.
Previous technological innovation has always delivered more long-run employment, not less. But things can change
The Economist
Satochi Kambayashi
We might not have expected much resistance to the disease in earlier times, before evidence accumulated that the fears it inspired were irrational.
To judge from the symptomatic hand-wringing the epidemic is spreading, we are on the verge of mass unemployment as work becomes increasingly automated.
Parts of the nation’s commentariat have been seized with a nasty bout of technophobia.
Scott Winship | Brookings
Now's the time to Start Planning
A rational planning process would look something like this ......
We don't know what will happen. We only know what might happen. But it would be foolish not to plan for that.
A new study says that nearly half of all American jobs may soon be performed by robots.
Richard (RJ) Eskow | The Huffington Post
Engineer Arto Nurmikko examines a prototype of a wireless, fully implantable brain-recording device.Fred Field for Brown University
Ben Hider/Getty Images
Robin Young & Jeremy Hobson|Here and Now / NPR
There’s no economic law that says that when technology advances, that everybody necessarily benefits: some people, even a majority of people, could be made worse off. – Erik Brynjolfsson
Create Jobs or Destroy Jobs?
A industry sponsored report - under the banner Robots Create Jobs - cited the following reasons why they opposed the CBS 60 Minutes piece and why robotics really does create jobs ...
The Post Singularity Economy
There are at least 350,000 people directly employed by and in the industrial robotics industry. More than half of those 350,000 jobs are offshore.
Frank Tobe | The Robot Report
KUKA
Lobke Peers | Shutterstock
Tia Ghose | LiveScience
It's been the fodder for countless dystopian movies: a singularity in which artificial intelligence rivals human smarts.
From mass extinction to life extension, here are seven potential implications of super-smart robots.
Reason 5: Economy On Fire: Whereas the economy doubled every thousand years after the agricultural revolution, and every 15 years after the industrial revolution, a post-singularity economy could double every month... that blistering pace of economic growth could be so fast that humans couldn't ...
Crunch the Numbers
EVERYONE AGREES THAT SOME JOBS FOR HUMANS WILL BE LOST TO ROBOTS, AND SOME JOBS FOR HUMANS WILL BE MADE BECAUSE OF OUR 'BOT OVERLORDS. BUT THERE'S A GROWING DEBATE ABOUT THE MATH.
CAMILLE SWEENEY AND JOSH GOSFIELD | Fast Company
Fast Company
Why then is the middle class not benefiting? The answer is that while our technologies are racing ahead, our institutions, organizations and skills are not adapting fast enough. That will require not just more investment in education, but a complete reinvention of how we learn, drawing heavily on the digital technologies that have already transformed many other industries. It will also require changes in the way we organize work, including learning to “race with machines”, meaning using technology to complement human efforts, not substitute for them. And it will mean rethinking some of the more fundamental institutions of our political and economic system. "
Destroy Jobs
Smart Machines: they'll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.
by Eric Drum in Mother Jones Read the entire article
"What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?
The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor market.
During the Industrial Revolution, machines were limited to performing physical tasks. The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently.
This isn't something that will happen overnight. It will happen slowly, as machines grow increasingly capable. We've already seen it in factories, where robots do work that used to be done by semiskilled assembly line workers. In a decade, driverless cars will start to put taxi hacks and truck drivers out of a job. And while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.
Increasingly, then, robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us......
Read the Entire Artical by Eric Drum in Mother Jones
Destroy Jobs
Here why Robert J. Gordon thinks Robots may destroy more jobs than they create:
"So I started wondering and pondering, could it be that the best years of American economic growth are behind us? And that leads to the suggestion, maybe economic growth is almost over. Some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial. There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face. They're demographics, education, debt and inequality. They're powerful enough to cut growth in half. So we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline. And here's my theme: Because of the headwinds, if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years, growth is cut in half. If innovation is less powerful, invents less great, wonderful things, then growth is going to be even lower than half of history.
Future
How Robots Will Change the World
Excellent 45 minute BBC Documentary. Watch the video
"I see an amazing array of new technologies in the pipeline that promise even more productivity and progress.
The endgame here is the so-called singularity—the point at which technological development, spurred by Moore’s Law and another generation or two of software and robotics development, is so sophisticated that humans have become irrelevant.
Robots Create Jobs
Here's why Erik Brynjolfsson thinks Robots create more Jobs than they destroy.
(Scroll down to see why Robert Gordon disagrees.)
Automation has displaced a lot of workers in the last 50 years;
Steven Cherry | IEEE Spectrum’s “Techwise Conversations
Listen to the PodcastIEEE Spectrum
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