Tag Archives: automation

We are used to thinking of workers as free agents who sell their labour in a market place. They bid a price, companies offer a lower price and the market clearing rate is somewhere between the two. Free market economics, pure and simple. But actually that's not quite right. The financial motivations of workers and companies are entirely different. To a worker, the financial benefit from getting a job is an income stream, which can be ended by either side at any time. But to a company, a...

We are used to thinking of workers as free agents who sell their labour in a market place. They bid a price, companies offer a lower price and the market clearing rate is somewhere between the two. Free market economics, pure and simple. But actually that's not quite right. The financial motivations of workers and companies are entirely different. To a worker, the financial benefit from getting a job is an income stream, which can be ended by either side at any time. But to a company, a...

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for a robot revolution in manufacturing to boost productivity. Wages in China are rising, and it's becoming harder to compete with cheap labor. An aging population in China also necessitates automation. The working-age population, people age 15 to 64, could drop to 800 million by 2050 from 998 million today. Chinese robotic growth is forecast to exceed 20 percent annually through 2020. Interesting article to read in full. China's socialist ideology...

So when Trump won the presidential election, the true-blue data believers dismissed his victory as the triumph of rhetoric over fact. His supporters had succumbed to a nativist tale with cartoon villains like “cheating China” and a shadowy cabal of Rust Belt-razing “globalists.” But it turns out that Trump’s story of US manufacturing decline was much closer to being right than the story of technological progress being spun in Washington, New York, and Cambridge. Thanks to a painstaking...

Mass unemployment, wage stagnation and growth of communism could come from technological advances  Karl agrees: The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of...

Productivity growth (the rate at which technology is displacing workers) had slowed to roughly 1.0 percent annually in the years since 2005. This compares to a 3.0 percent growth rate in the decade from 1995 to 2005 and the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973. Most economists expect the rate of productivity growth to remain near 1.0 percent as opposed to returning back to something close to its 3.0 percent rate in more prosperous times.…  It is also worth noting that the high productivity...

Many professions, including education and health care, will become increasingly automated. This won't eliminate the need for humans, however, since the social element is also a vital factor in many fields, especially education, which involves socialization.The problem inherent in this article is difficulty thinking outside the box, in this case the traditional classroom. That model is obsolescent, and technology will soon make it obsolete. Then we will look back on it and wonder why it...

On August 19, 1964, the then US President Lyndon B. Johnson established the – National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress. He established the Commission in response to growing concern during the deep 1960-61 recession that the unemployment had been created by the pace of technological change. Ring a bell! He wanted to an inquiry to explore this issue and come up with recommendations on how to deal with the possibility that automation was wiping out jobs and the...

Important.  Is global society and the global economy at a turning point and if so, what happens next? It's chiefly about the developing world, but similar challenges face the developed world.  Technological innovation results in emergence and emergence present fresh challenges along with new opportunities. How those involved in rapid change will react is uncertain. Will they be able to adapt, and, if so, how? While coordination increase the return from coordination, or will competition...

We have a crisis of work. The secure, well-paid jobs of the past - many of them in manufacturing - are disappearing. What is replacing them is insecurity and uncertainty. Low-paid, part-time, temporary and seasonal work. The "feast or famine" of self-employment. The so-called "sharing economy", where people rent out their possessions for a pittance. The "gig economy", where people are paid performance by performance - or piece by piece. "Piecework", we used to call it. Perhaps we...