Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: employment – Page 84

“I Don’t Think We Can Stop It:” The Future of Automation and Job Loss

Technology can be a catalyst for the creation or destruction of jobs, but historically, it has always ultimately created more opportunities for employment, not less. That’s not stopping many from speaking out against Amazon Go for its potential to increase unemployment, though.

According to Ford, however, the implementation of automation technology is inevitable because it has obvious advantages for both consumers and retailers. “I don’t think we can stop it,” he says. “It’s a part of capitalism, that there’s going to be this continuous drive for more efficiency.”

While many have been focusing on manufacturing and transportation as the industries that will be hardest hit by automation, Amazon Go is an example of how tech that exists right now could replace retail salespersons and cashiers, jobs that had the highest employment numbers in the U.S. in May 2015 according to the Bureau of Labor statistics.

Robots that steal human jobs should pay taxes, Gates says

Taxation and redistribution.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes.

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things,” he said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

Gates made the remark during an interview with Quartz. He said robot taxes could help fund projects like caring for the elderly or working with children in school. Quartz reported that European Union lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robots in the past. The law was rejected.

DARPA to brief industry on RadioBio program to communicate biologically using radio waves

While everyone is worried over Robots and other AI systems taking our jobs and do we need universal income; I want to use my energy to change the world and the people in it to be better, stronger, and smarter.

Definitely Quantum (Quantum Bio) at work here due to the experiment program write up for the RFP targeted cell to cell communications and leveraging electromagnetisms to do so. And, that is Quantum Mechanics at work.

ARLINGTON, Va. – ARLINGTON, Va. U.S. military researchers will use an online Webcast to brief industry later this month on a new initiative to determine if humans and other living things can communicate with one another biologically with radio waves without the use of conventional antennas or RF transmitting equipment.

China’s Manufacturing cost advantage is eroding so China will spend trillions for automation, robotics, 3D manufacturing and research

While the USA has been extremely concerned about losing jobs (particularly manufacturing jobs to China), China performed a survey of businesses in the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing and found that 25% had moved or were planning to move their businesses out of China. Half were going to other Asian countries and 40% to America, Canada or Mexico.

China’s worker wages are rising about 7–8% each year and they have a shrinking working age population as the people age.

China is making big moves in automation and large scale deployment of robotics. In 2014, President Xi Jinping talked about a robotics revolution. China has been the number one buyer of industrial robots since 2013. However, China lags other nations in terms of robots per worker.

After Robots Take Our Jobs, What Will We Buy in a Society Without Money?

After labor, not all of us will want to explore inner consciousness. Abundant leisure will not turn everyone into the Buddha. Many of our tastes are in the gutter, and I have no objection to leaving them there. I’m not a fan of shopping per se, but buying stuff is deeply satisfying and motivating for many people. Is it possible to rethink the pleasure of conspicuous consumption in a way that decouples it from the competitive labor economy? The post-work world I’m imagining will have little surplus money for unnecessary shopping, even if robots and computers can dramatically lower the overhead of such production. So, a non-consummatory form of shopping will have to be cultivated.

Some people marshal all their evolved predatory skills to hunt down the perfect sweater, shoes, or watch. Could we redesign shopping as a system of “catch-and-release,” so that, like sport fishing, it’s the adventure and not the prize that becomes central? Maybe we will hunt for luxury items, but then instead of keeping them, simply photograph ourselves wearing the items (like a fisherman holding a giant pike). It’s an unlikely adjustment, I’ll grant you, but I never thought catch-and-release fishing would be fun until I did it, and it was. The way some people already buy and return items suggests to me that catch-and-release shopping is not impossible.