Lifeboat Foundation

We’ve all read the headlines: the robots are coming, and they will take our jobs. In fact, up to 45 percent of tasks workers perform can be automated using current technology, let alone future forecasts.

However, there is a side of this story that is often overlooked: while emerging technologies will destroy many jobs, they will also create many new ones. In fact, over half of the jobs current middle school students will be doing in the future do not even exist today. Widespread innovation is continuing to give birth to exciting new industries, all of which are sources of new jobs.

More often than not, we have used our imaginations to envision dystopian futures where we submit to robots that leave us feeling jobless and purposeless. But we can also imagine an exciting parallel future in which technology has created even more opportunities for the workforce.

Continue reading “These Are the Most Exciting Industries and Jobs of the Future” »

Robots are already changing jobs as an endless array of robots enter our everyday lives. From trucking to service work to high-end jobs like doctors and lawyers, this documentary explores how robotics and artificial intelligence are changing the workplace.

AJ+‘s documentary series on automation explores how advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning and automated vehicles will affect jobs, cities and inequality. From trucking to radiology, new technology is already changing white collar and blue collar occupations, reshaping cities and concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. Robots are taking over the world as companies like Tesla, Amazon, Uber and Google are using robots to automate.

Continue reading “The Future Is Automated And Every Job Is At Risk [Automation, Pt. 1]” »

Sheelah Kolhatkar on whether the technology in Amazon’s new automated grocery store, Amazon Go, in Seattle, could eventually eliminate millions of retail jobs.

When Kumar lost his job, he became part of a wave of layoffs washing through the Indian IT industry—a term that includes, in its vastness, call centers, engineering services, business process outsourcing firms, and infrastructure management and software companies. The recent layoffs are part of the industry’s most significant period of churn since it began to boom two decades ago. Companies don’t necessarily attribute these layoffs directly to automation, but at the same time, they constantly identify automation as the spark for huge changes in the industry. Bots, machine learning, and algorithms that robotically execute processes are rendering old skills redundant, recasting the idea of work and making a smaller labor force seem likely.

Technology outsourcing has been India’s only reliable job creator in the past 30 years. Now artificial intelligence threatens to wipe out those gains.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent in the domains of security and employment, what are the policy implications? What effects might AI have on cybersecurity, criminal and civil justice, and labor market patterns?

Poverty rates have fallen faster in the past 30 years than at any other time on record. The UN wants extreme poverty to disappear by 2030. We assess the data to see if this is achievable.

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Continue reading “Can extreme poverty ever be eradicated?” »

Three new reports combine to suggest these answers: It can probably do less right now than you think. But it will eventually do more than you probably think, in more places than you probably think, and will probably evolve faster than powerful technologies have in the past.

Three new reports suggest that artificial intelligence can probably do less right now than you think. But by one estimation, up to a third of American workers will have to switch jobs by 2030 largely because of it.

Last week, Chancellor Philip Hammond announced in the Autumn Budget a £500m package of investment into tech initiatives, including the development of artificial intelligence.

Which must have had the Channel 4 executives ordering trebles all round, because with perfect timing they’ve designated this week the “Rise of the Robots season”, with a schedule that includes documentaries on the take-off of artificial intelligences (AIs) as consulting doctors, a David Tennant -narrated piece on the challenge of making robots as human as possible, and the one that’s had the tabloids hot under the collar, today’s The Sex Robots Are Coming – which needs little further explanation.

Doctor Who and the Invasion of the Sex-Bots aside, though, is it actually possible that the dream of science fiction writers going back a century or more is on the verge of reality? Are we really about to live in the long-promised future of robots and AIs?

Continue reading “The robots are coming – but will they really take all our jobs?” »

Ontario intends to provide a basic income to 4,000 people in three different communities as part of an experiment that seeks to evaluate whether providing more money to people on public assistance or low incomes will make a significant material difference in their lives. How people like Button respond over the next three years is being closely watched by social scientists, economists and policymakers in Canada and around the world.

Former security guard Tim Button considers how a sudden increase in his income from an unusual social experiment has changed his life in this Canadian industrial city along the shore of Lake Ontario.

Sipping coffee in a Tim Horton’s doughnut shop, Button says he has been unable to work because of a fall from a roof, and the financial boost from Ontario Province’s new “basic income” program has enabled him to make plans to visit distant family for Christmas for the first time in years. It has also prompted him to eat healthier, schedule a long-postponed trip to the dentist and mull taking a course to help him get back to work.

Continue reading “Canada tests ‘basic income’ effect on poverty amid lost jobs” »