04-18-2017, 10:57 PM
A leading thinktank has urged the government to spend billions of pounds helping poorly skilled workers in the less prosperous parts of the UK cope with the threat of the looming robot revolution. The left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said in a new report that those most at risk from automation were concentrated in low-skill sectors of the economy and were least able to adapt to change. More than 10m jobs in the UK – a third of the total – are thought to be at risk from automation within the next two decades and the IPPR said the scale of the challenge required urgent action.
Robots to replace 1 in 3 UK jobs over next 20 years, warns IPPR | Technology | The Guardian
As the world’s business and government leaders gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, the meeting will focus on what advanced technology means for the global economy. This is a big open question. While many who work in high-tech jobs like to think their field is improving the world, the truth looks to be more complicated. There are signs that spreading access to the Internet enhances inequality, for example. Workers like those in Silicon Valley, who are blessed with ample technological resources, may be on the right side of a winner-take-all economy. And what of the increasing automation of jobs? Are robots robbing the working class of a steady paycheck?
The Tension Between Technology and Inequality | MIT Technology Review
“The hard problems that are easy for AI are those that require the application of complex algorithms and pattern recognition to large quantities of data – such as beating a grandmaster at chess”, says Joshi. “Or a job such as calculating a credit score or insurance premium, translating a report from English to Mandarin Chinese, or managing a stock portfolio.” Seen in this light, the looming threat is obvious. The first army of machines wiped out well-paid jobs in manufacturing; the second army is about to wipe out well-paid jobs in the service sector. In many cases, the people who will be surplus to requirements will have spent many years in school and university building up their skills.
The new robot revolution will take the boss's job - not the gardener's | Business | The Guardian
Almost 250,000 public sector workers could lose their jobs to robots over the next 15 years, according to a new report which claims machines would be more efficient and save billions of pounds. Reform, a right-of-centre thinktank, says websites and artificial intelligence “chat bots” could replace up to 90% of Whitehall’s administrators, as well as tens of thousands in the NHS and GPs’ surgeries, by 2030 – saving as much as £4bn a year.
Robots 'could replace 250,000 UK public sector workers' | Technology | The Guardian
Mnuchin is not overly worried. Concerns about AI and jobs are so far way "it's not even on our radar screen... 50-100 years" away, he said, according to Axios. "I'm not worried at all" about robots displacing humans in the near future, he said, before adding, "In fact, I'm optimistic." However, studies have estimated that AI could affect jobs much sooner than that. And, crucially, technological advancements will likely not only be impacting the manufacturing sector. In a paper published in 2013, Oxford University's Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne looked at which current jobs are susceptible to technological innovations such as machine learning, and estimated the probability that the 702 different occupations they looked at will be computerized. Notably, they did not estimate the number of jobs that will actually be automated, but rather a given occupation's "potential job automatability" over an unspecified number of years. They found that about 47% of total US employment is in the high risk category, which the team defined as jobs they expect could be automated "relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two."
The robots are coming whether Mnuchin says so or not - Business Insider