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Category: employment – Page 38

If the combination of Covid-19 and remote work technologies like Zoom have undercut the role of cities in economic life, what might an even more robust technology like the metaverse do? Will it finally be the big upheaval that obliterates the role of cities and density? To paraphrase Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky: The place to be was Silicon Valley. It feels like now the place to be is the internet.

The simple answer is no, and for a basic reason. Wave after wave of technological innovation — the telegraph, the streetcar, the telephone, the car, the airplane, the internet, and more — have brought predictions of the demise of physical location and the death of cities.

Remote work has become commonplace since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the focus on daily remote work arrangements may miss a larger opportunity that the pandemic has unearthed: the possibility of a substantially increased labor pool for digital economy work. To measure interest in digital economy jobs, defined as jobs within the business, finance, art, science, information technology, and architecture and engineering sectors, the authors conducted extensive analyses of job searches on the Bing search engine, which accounts for more than a quarter of all desktop searches in the U.S. They found that, not only did searches for digital economy jobs increase since the beginning of the pandemic, but those searches also became less geographically concentrated. The single biggest societal consequence of the dual trends of corporate acceptance of remote work and people’s increased interest in digital economy jobs is the potential geographic spread of opportunity.

Page-utils class= article-utils—vertical hide-for-print data-js-target= page-utils data-id= tag: blogs.harvardbusiness.org, 2007/03/31:999.334003 data-title= Who Gets to Work in the Digital Economy? data-url=/2022/08/who-gets-to-work-in-the-digital-economy data-topic= Business and society data-authors= Scott Counts; Siddharth Suri; Alaysia Brown; Brian Xu; Sharat Raghavan data-content-type= Digital Article data-content-image=/resources/images/article_assets/2022/08/Aug22_04_509299271-383x215.jpg data-summary=

The labor market for jobs you can do on a laptop is expanding beyond major cities.

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China, which face population collapse due to low fertility rate, is starting to take steps to encourage more births.

China’s fertility rate is 1.1 children per woman. Replacement level to maintain a stable population size is 2.1 children per woman.

A total of 17 Chinese government departments on Tuesday jointly released a guideline on support policies in finance, tax, housing, employment, education and other fields to create a fertility-friendly society and encourage families to have more children, as the country faces growing pressure from falling birth rates.

Analysts said that it is rare to see so many ministries and departments jointly release such a detailed and comprehensive guideline on encouraging fertility and supporting childbearing, underscoring the seriousness of the growth rate of China’s population, which has slowed significantly, with a contraction expected before 2025.

Tuesday’s guideline was released to implement policies to support each couple to have a third child, push the government, institutions and individuals to fulfill their responsibilities in creating a friendly environment for marriage and fertility, and promote population growth, according to the guideline.

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As investors continue to put money into technology companies making a difference, there is a misconception that a majority of investors belong to younger generations. New research shows the distribution in ESG-motivated investment: 54% are Gen Z and millennials, 42% are baby boomers, and 25% are Gen Xers.

ESG Standards That Younger Generations Care About

From combatting climate change to expanding diversity in the boardroom and instituting more corporate equitable policies, technology companies need to understand what Gen Z and Gen X care about. If any sector of the global economy is sensitive to ESG it should be technology with its appeal to younger audiences. That’s why the recent acceleration of widespread reporting on ESG principles and practices is creating a shift in power, money and jobs from baby boomers to millennials and Gen Z, in which passive investing, COVID, social injustice issues, the Great Resignation and talent shortages are all contributing factors.

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A documentary exploring how artificial intelligence is changing life as we know it — from jobs to privacy to a growing rivalry between the U.S. and China.

FRONTLINE investigates the promise and perils of AI and automation, tracing a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our world, and allow the emergence of a surveillance society.

This journalism is made possible by viewers like you. Support your local PBS station here: http://www.pbs.org/donate.

Love FRONTLINE? Find us on the PBS Video App where there are more than 250 FRONTLINE documentaries available for you to watch any time: https://to.pbs.org/FLVideoApp.

Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/1BycsJW

#ArtificialIntelligence #Automation #documentary.

Continue reading “In the Age of AI (full documentary) | FRONTLINE” | >

Across the United States, local wind and solar jobs can fully replace the coal-plant jobs that will be lost as the nation’s power-generation system moves away from fossil fuels in the coming decades, according to a new University of Michigan study.

As of 2019, -fired directly employed nearly 80,000 workers at more than 250 plants in 43 U.S. states. The new U-M study quantifies—for the first time—the technical feasibility and costs of replacing those coal jobs with local wind and solar employment across the country.

The study, published online Aug. 10 in iScience, concludes that local wind and solar jobs can fill the electricity generation and employment gap, even if it’s required that all the new jobs are located within 50 miles of each retiring coal plant.

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The fear of losing jobs to computers is a common one among millions of people, and one that many have seen happen in their lifetime. But A.I. has the potential to allow many jobs to evolve, to become safer, more efficient and better for society as a whole.

The Age of A.I. is a 8 part documentary series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. covering the ways Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neural Networks will change the world.

0:00 Will A Robot Take My Job?
1:24 Trucking.
5:22 Testing Automation.
14:13 The Port.
21:22 Robots With Vision.
27:31 Cooking With Robots.
33:50 Change Is Coming

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Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UC Riverside) have identified a single protein that seems to control when hair follicles die. Armed with this new information, it might eventually be possible to reverse the process and stimulate hair regrowth.

The protein in question is known as TGF-beta, a signaling protein that regulates the division, growth and death of cells. As such, it plays major roles in important jobs like wound healing, and seems to be hijacked by cancer cells to allow uncontrolled growth. In this case, the team found that TGF-beta extends its work to the cells inside hair follicles.

“TGF-beta has two opposite roles,” said Qixuan Wang, co-author of the study. “It helps activate some hair follicle cells to produce new life, and later, it helps orchestrate apoptosis, the process of cell death.”

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What does the future of AI look like? Let’s try out some AI software that’s readily available for consumers and see how it holds up against the human brain.

🦾 AI can outperform humans. But at what cost? 👉 👉 https://cybernews.com/editorial/ai-can-outperform-humans-but-at-what-cost/

Whether you welcome our new AI overlords with open arms, or you’re a little terrified about what an AI future may look like, many say it’s not really a question of ‘if,’ but more of a question of ‘when.’

Okay, you’ve got AI technologies on a small scale to a grand scale. From Siri — self-driving cars, text generators — humanoid robots, but what really is the real threat? As far back as 2013, Oxford University (ironically) used a machine-learning algorithm to determine whether 702 different jobs throughout America could turn automated, this found that a whopping 47% could in fact be replaced by machines.

A huge concern that comes alongside this is whether the technology will be reliable enough? We’re already seeing AI technology in countless professions, most recently the boom of AI generated-text used in over 300 different apps. It’s even used beyond this planet, out in space. If anything, this is a rude awakening for the future potential of AI technology, outside of the industrial market.

🦾 Do humans stand a chance against AI technology?

Continue reading “Watch: 🤖 🤖 Will AI become an “existential threat?”” | >

Scientists recently discovered thousands of ancient unknown bacteria lurking in Hawaii’s lava caves and geothermal vents.

Hawai’i is home to multiple lava caves, lava tubes, and geothermal vents. And a new study that researchers published in Frontiers in Microbiology reveals that these caves have higher bacteria diversity than expected. Researchers have discovered thousands of ancient unknown bacteria lurking within the caves.

Scientists say that these bacteria ecosystems represent how life might have existed during Earth’s early ages. They also say it could give us insight into how life on Mars looked before losing much of its atmosphere. The caves, home to lava tubes and geothermal vents on the island, house ancient unknown bacteria, unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

“This study points to the possibility that more ancient lineages of bacteria, like the phylum Chloroflexi, may have important ecological ‘jobs,’ or roles,” Dr. Rebecca D. Prescott, first author of the paper, said in a statement. The bacteria is so intriguing that some scientists have started calling it “microbial dark matter,” because of how unseen and un-studied it is.

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When communication lines are open, individual agents such as robots or drones can work together to collaborate and complete a task. But what if they aren’t equipped with the right hardware or the signals are blocked, making communication impossible? University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers started with this more difficult challenge. They developed a method to train multiple agents to work together using multi-agent reinforcement learning, a type of artificial intelligence.

“It’s easier when agents can talk to each other,” said Huy Tran, an at Illinois. “But we wanted to do this in a way that’s decentralized, meaning that they don’t talk to each other. We also focused on situations where it’s not obvious what the different roles or jobs for the agents should be.”

Tran said this scenario is much more complex and a harder problem because it’s not clear what one agent should do versus another agent.

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