Words from Web Worker

Robots may take our jobs, but they bring us freedom as well The robots and software applications we are building to take away jobs are simply not something we can or should attempt to compete against. We won't win. However, as human beings, we can evolve and be happier and more fulfilled than we've ever been before. The key is a shift in our thinking—and in the value we place in the kind of work we want to do and how we enjoy free time. In the future—with less work and responsibility due to robots taking our jobs and leaving us only to collect our UBI—we might find there is a lot more to life than buying the latest trinkets from Walmart, or zoning out late at night in front of a television, or worrying about how poorly our bosses treat us at work. Let the robots come. They bring us freedom. With that freedom, we can become the best human beings we are capable of—a people full of passion, education, and a newly discovered drive of what it means to be alive. #workautomation #futu...

Places that have specialised in creative work are most likely to prosper in the 21st century The chance of finding yourself replaced by a robot varies depending on where you work, the field you work in, and how much you earn (factors that are obviously linked) Across the whole UK, jobs paying less than £30,000 ($48,000) are nearly five times more likely to be lost to automation than jobs paying over £100,000 ($159,000). The finer points of how automation will affect the workplace: jobs in administrative support, transportation, sales and services, construction, and manufacturing as among the most high-risk from technology. Meanwhile, jobs in sectors like financial services, senior management, engineering, law, science, education, and the arts and media are at the least risk of being roboticized. That broadly echoes and reflects where automated systems are at now: great at repetitive drudgery, not so much at creative thought and people skills. Cities that maintain their ability to shift...

Quantum robots are being designed to become the worker of tomorrow If robots are ever going to start learning, thinking, and creating on their own, they're going to have to go quantum. Robots are still mostly designed to complete specific tasks and aren't learning from their past mistakes. But the coming quantum computing revolution will change all of that, in a decade, and will lead to real artificial intelligence and smart, creative robots. Quantum computers can be used to allow robots to remember situations they've encountered before in "classical environment"—that is, the real world, where things are constantly changing. The robots will then be able to react and learn at a quadratic rate (that is, very fast, perhaps in real time) and be able to recall memories at that same speed. #workautomation #futureofwork #robotics #artificialintelligence #automation #jobs #machinelearning #bots #quantumcomputing https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3dkpk8/quantum-ro...

Robots and the corporations have been taking our jobs for years, and they're going to take a lot more soon Clearly, many of robotics and automation technologies are ways off from mass adoption. But they're there, and if they become cost effective—for giant retailers or fast food chains or the inevitable robo-lawn care multinational—another slice of the economy will fall asunder to automation. Dislodging that major swath of the workforce will be much more problematic—we're going to need to improve our safety net and rejigger income distribution to account for the coming disruption, lest our menial labor bots service only the rich and/or eventually get smashed to bits in the inevitable Luddite 2.0 revolution. The benefits of robots taking our crappy summer jobs and thankless permanent ones will only be manifest if we take the proper steps to prepare for them politically and socially. #workautomation #futureofwork #robotics #automation #robotprocessautomation #jobs #universalb...

We are in for a great disruption and those most disrupted will be the middle and working classes Jobs have been created — but many, in the service sector, are both insecure or what the academic-activist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” — jobs which give neither pleasure to their holders nor benefit to society. More, the service jobs are often wearying, and don’t provide a decent living — especially for those who live in expensive cities like New York, London or Paris. Gone is the era of the lifetime career, let alone the lifelong job and the economic security that came with it, having been replaced by a new economy intent on recasting full-time employees into contractors, vendors, and temporary workers. Work — making sure it’s there, making it meaningful, giving it the dignity of being part-constructed by the worker — will be the largest domestic issue in our economies. #workautomation #futureofwork #jobs #automation #disruptivetechnology http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/0...

702 occupations would soon be computerized out of existence Advances in data mining, machine vision, artificial intelligence and other technologies could, put 47 percent of American jobs at high risk of being automated in the years ahead. Loan officers, tax preparers, cashiers, locomotive engineers, paralegals, roofers, taxi drivers and even animal breeders are all in danger of going the way of the switchboard operator. Since the end of the Great Recession, job creation has not kept up with population growth. Corporate profits have doubled since 2000, yet median household income dropped from $55,986 to $51,017. Somehow businesses are making more profit with fewer workers. Business researchers at MIT, call this divergence the “great decoupling.” In their view, it is a historic shift. The conventional economic wisdom has long been that as long as productivity is increasing, all is well. Technological innovations foster higher productivity, which leads to higher incomes and greater well-b...

Robots won't just be taking our jobs; they'll be forcing us to confront a major existential dilemma: if we didn't have to work anymore, what would we do? Optimists say that more robots will lead to greater productivity and economic growth, while pessimists complain that huge swaths of the labor force will see their employment options automated out of existence. What if both are right? As robots start doing more and more of the work humans used to do, and doing it so much more efficiently than we ever did, what if the need for jobs disappears altogether? What if the robots end up producing more than enough of everything that everyone needs? A future that looks more like Star Trek than Blade Runner, a lot of people could end up with a lot more time on their hands. The answer is both a quantitative and qualitative exercise in defining what makes human intelligence distinct from the artificial kind, a definition that seems to keep getting narrower. Humans will continue to be us...