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automation technology so efficient that it is competitive with even the lowest-wage offshore workers.
Loans are often rolled over continuously, so that the principal is never repaid. This makes capital investment extremely attractive even when labor costs are low and has been one of the primary reasons that investment now accounts for nearly half of China’s GDP.
china
Japan’s Kura sushi restaurant chain
Future shoppers will rely more and more on their phones as a way to shop, pay, and get help and information about products while in traditional retail settings.
agreed. i often know moe fhan salesperson & use mobile for quickesr solution
In the late nineteenth century, nearly half of all US workers were employed on farms; by 2000 that fraction had fallen below 2 percent.
chickens are grown to standardized sizes so as to make them compatible with automated slaughtering and processing.
Vision Robotics, a company based in San Diego, California, is developing an octopus-like orange harvesting machine. The robot will use three-dimensional machine vision to make a computer model of an entire orange tree and then store the location of each fruit. That information will then be passed on to the machine’s eight robotic arms, which will rapidly harvest the oranges.
In Japan, a new machine is able to select ripe strawberries based on subtle color variations and then pick a strawberry every eight seconds—working continuously and doing most of the work at night.
Many California farmers have transitioned from delicate crops like tomatoes to more robust nuts because they can be harvested mechanically. Overall agricultural employment in California fell by about 11 percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, even as the total production of crops like almonds, which are compatible with automated farming techniques, has exploded.
helps to explain the drought
impact of technology on these kinds of jobs, you are very likely to encounter the phrase “freed up”—as in, workers who lose their low-skill jobs will be freed up to pursue more training and better opportunities. The fundamental assumption, of course, is that a dynamic economy like the United States will always be capable of generating sufficient higher-wage, higher-skill jobs to absorb all those newly freed up workers—given that they succeed in acquiring the necessary training.
yet many are incapable & what to do with then:
“potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings.”3 The result would be massive unemployment, soaring inequality, and, ultimately, falling demand for goods and services as consumers increasingly lacked the purchasing power necessary to continue driving economic growth.
the American workforce—earned about $767 per week in 1973. The following year, real average wages began a precipitous decline from which they would never fully recover. A full four decades later, a similar worker earns just $664, a decline of about 13 percent.
inflation never touched income
Growth in median incomes during this period tracked nearly perfectly with per capita GDP. Three decades later, median household income had increased to about $61,000, an increase of just 22 percent. That growth, however, was driven largely by the entry of women into the workforce. If incomes had moved in lockstep with economic growth—as was the case prior to 1973—the median household would today be earning well in excess of $90,000, over 50 percent more than the $61,000 they do earn.
This S-shaped path in which accelerating—or exponential—advance ultimately matures into a plateau effectively illustrates the life story of virtually all specific technologies.
The relentless acceleration of computer hardware over decades suggests that we’ve somehow managed to remain on the steep part of the S-curve for far longer than has been possible in other spheres of technology. The reality, however, is that Moore’s Law has involved successfully climbing a staircase of cascading S-curves, each representing a specific semiconductor fabrication technology.
For example, the lithographic process used to lay out integrated circuits was initially based on optical imaging techniques. When the size of individual device elements shrank to the point where the wavelength of visible light was too long to allow for further progress, the semiconductor industry moved on to X-ray lithography.
In a recent analysis, Martin Grötschel of the Zuse Institute in Berlin found that, using the computers and software that existed in 1982, it would have taken a full eighty-two years to solve a particularly complex production planning problem. As of 2003, the same problem could be solved in about a minute—an improvement by a factor of around 43 million. Computer hardware became about 1,000 times faster over the same period, which means that improvements in the algorithms used accounted for approximately a 43,000-fold increase in performance.
In 2012, Google, for example, generated a profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.9 Contrast that with the automotive industry. At peak employment in 1979, General Motors alone had nearly 840,000 workers but earned only about $11 billion—20 percent less than what Google raked in. And, yes, that’s after adjusting for inflation.
WorkFusion
Elance
IBM researchers confronted one of the primary tenets of the big data revolution: the idea that prediction based on correlation is sufficient, and that a deep understanding of causation is usually both unachievable and unnecessary.
within a year of Watson’s triumph on Jeopardy!, IBM was already working with Citigroup to explore applications for the system in the company’s massive retail banking operation.
Cycle Computing,
Facebook, for example, employs a smart software application called “Cyborg” that continuously monitors tens of thousands of servers, detects problems, and in many cases can perform repairs completely autonomously.
Cloud computing data centers are often built in relatively rural areas where land and, especially, electric power are plentiful and cheap. States and local governments compete intensively for the facilities, offering companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple generous tax breaks and other financial incentives. Their primary objective, of course, is to create lots of jobs for local residents—but such hopes are rarely realized.
reminiscent of gambling applicatiobs
The evaporation of thousands of skilled information technology jobs is likely a precursor for a much more wide-ranging impact on knowledge-based employment.
Iamus,
Melomics Media,
Spread Networks
I find it somewhat ironic that many conservatives in the United States are adamant about securing the border against immigrants who will likely take jobs that few Americans want, while at the same time expressing little concern that the virtual border is left completely open to higher-skill workers who take jobs that Americans definitely do want.
Yet, military pilots located in the western United States routinely operate drone aircraft in Afghanistan. By the same token, it is easy to envision remote-controlled machinery being operated by offshore workers who provide the visual perception and dexterity that, for the time being, continues to elude autonomous robots.
Arai worries that 10 to 20 percent of skilled workers replaced by automation would be a “catastrophe” and says she “can’t begin to think what 50 percent would mean.” She then adds that it would be “way beyond a catastrophe and such numbers can’t be ruled out if AI performs well in the future.”
Perelman does raise at least one valid concern, however: the prospect that students will be taught to write specifically to please algorithms that he suggests “disproportionately give students credit for length and loquacious wording.”
Udacity
Coursera
edX.
