The latest figures are a clear sign that India’s largest outsourcing firms are succeeding at ‘non-linear’ growth, where revenues increase disproportionately compared with hiring.
While the numbers are good news for an industry that is trying to defend profit margins, it raises concerns over the future of hiring and the availability of engineering jobs in a sector that employs over three million people.
“What you’re seeing now is about 200,000 people being hired in the IT industry — it’s not the 4–5 lakhs that they used to hire 10 years ago. And that’s because the growth has shrunk from 35–40% and the competition was for resources. Even now the competition is for resources, but it’s for slightly more experienced resources — people who can work on automation, artificial intelligence, machine languages, data sciences. So, it’s not hiring for Java coding anymore,” said Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan in a recent interview.
Companies from Detroit and Silicon Valley are teaming up to urge lawmakers to put self-driving cars on the street as fast as they can. Companies believe the technology can save many of the 33,000 who die in car accidents, although thousands of jobs may be lost.
Titled the Self-driving Coalition for Safer Streets, the new lobbying group is composed of Google, Ford, Uber, Volvo, and Lyft. The group’s entire goal is to advocate for self-driving technology at the federal level.
Former administration of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), David Strickland, will be leading the group.
Good article overall highlighting the gaps in AI talent. I do know that some of the best AI SMEs in the US all have worked somewhere in their careers at the US National Labs because many us had to build “real time” systems that leveraged complex algorithms to self-monitor conditions and react independently under certain conditions arise and in some cases we leveraged the super computer to prove theories as well. I suggest locate where some of these folks exist because you will find your talent pool.
Artificial Intelligence is the field where jobs continue to grow, provided you have the desired skill sets
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the buzzword in almost all industries. Decision-makers want to make use of massive data they get from various sources. This is where data analytics and artificial intelligence come into play.
Again; many problems with AI & IoT all ties back to the infrastructure of things. Focus on fast tracking QC and an interim solution (pre-QC) such as a mix of Nvidia’s GPU, blockchain for financial transactions, etc. to improve the infrastructure and Net then investors will begin to pay more attention to AI, etc.
After more than 60 years since its conceptual inception — and after too many hype-generating moments — AI is yet again making its presence felt in mainstream media.
Following a recent WEF report, many perceive AI as a threat to our jobs, while others even go so far to assert that it poses a real threat to humanity itself.
What is clear for the time being is that there are many questions that still remain unanswered: Can we actually create conscious machines that have the ability to think and feel? What we do we mean by the word conscious in the first place? What is the accurate definition of intelligence? And what are the implications of combining the Internet of Things (IoT) with intelligence?
The office today for some and near future for others.
Vodafone says collaboration and gaming will fuel future office design.
Young people coming into employment in the next five years will work in a virtual reality office in the future, according to Vodafone.
Speaking at a keynote speech at the UC Expo in London, Peter Terry-Brown, head of product management at Vodafone, said 14-to-16-year-olds worked together in a virtual environment better than an older group did in a traditional office, when the telco decided to compare them.
Income inequality in the United States has risen sharply in recent years and continues to get worse. Widespread unemployment is becoming imminent, as more and more traditional jobs are replaced by technology and automation. Without serious intervention, we could face massive increases in poverty and civil unrest in the years ahead.
A guaranteed Basic Income, which would directly provide all Americans with enough money each month to live on, would both end poverty in the US and shift our economy to one that doesn’t require full employment. It’s a simple program that could save us from the looming economic crises.
It’s time for the federal government to create a social safety net designed for the 21st-century. We’re calling on President Obama and members of the United States Congress to enact a Basic Income for all Americans.
A lot of transhumanism friends have asked me to write about Bernie Sanders, so here are my thoughts:
The transhumanism movement has been dramatically growing in size—and most of that growth is from millennials and youth joining. Transhumanists want to use science and technology to radically improve the human race, and the onslaught of new gear and gadgets to do that—like virtual reality, robots, and chip implants —are giving them plenty of ammunition to do that.
But what has caught many people off guard—including myself who probably best fits into the category: left-leaning Libertarian—is the amount of support transhumanists are giving to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Historically, transhumanism (and its de facto home: Silicon Valley) has been Libertarian-minded —with a hands-off attitude towards the government, religion, and basically any authority trying to tell them what to do or how to innovate. But with the demographics of the transhumanism movement sharply changing from older academics and technologists to young people—especially those in college—the push towards more leftist and progressive-leaning ideas is strong. For many young transhumanists, they believe they have found an ideal in Sanders.
While I like the charisma of Sanders and his long standing devotion to the people—and that is enough for me to say he’d be a good president for change—the reality is capitalism is still a hallmark of the American way. For the next four and maybe even eight years, capitalism won’t be going anywhere. Afterward, though, within 10–25 years, when robots, software, and AI really start dismantling capitalism as we know it (see my latest TechCrunch article and thoughts on a Universal Basic Income), it will be a totally different story.
Like it or not, millennials and youth obsess over this type of economy stuff—especially machines taking jobs. They know future employment statistics better than many 30-year veteran business executives running publicly traded companies. The dangerous truth is many young people know they likely won’t have jobs in the future. And neither will most of the executives for that matter, since they too can (and will) be replaced by super intelligent machines programmed to make sound mathematical business decisions.
My new article for TechCrunch on capitalism and the robot revolution:
Economic experts are trying to figure out a question that just two decades ago seemed ridiculous: If 90 percent of human jobs are replaced by robots in the next 50 years — something now considered plausible — is capitalism still the ideal economic system to champion? No one is certain about the answer, but the question is making everyone nervous — and forcing people to dig deep inside themselves to discover the kind of future they want.
After America beat Russia in the Cold War, most of the world generally considered capitalism to be the hands-down best system on which to base economies and democracies. For decades, few doubted capitalism’s merit, which was made stronger by thriving globalization and a skyrocketing world net worth. In 1989 — when the Berlin Wall fell — the world had only 198 billionaires. Now, according to Forbes, there are 1,826 of them in 2016.
Despite growing riches, when banks collapsed in 2007 during the Great Recession, the world stepped back and wondered aloud if a more nuanced approach to economic progress was needed. These doubts of 21st century capitalism helped set the stage for an economic paradigm shift just starting to appear — economists observing jobs not just disappearing to other countries, but disappearing off the face of the Earth. The culprit: robots and software.
(An alternate version of this article was originally published in the Boston Globe)
On December 2nd, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood underneath a football field at the University of Chicago. Known to history as Chicago Pile-1, it was celebrated in silence with a single bottle of Chianti, for those who were there understood exactly what it meant for humankind, without any need for words.
Now, something new has occurred that, again, quietly changed the world forever. Like a whispered word in a foreign language, it was quiet in that you may have heard it, but its full meaning may not have been comprehended. However, it’s vital we understand this new language, and what it’s increasingly telling us, for the ramifications are set to alter everything we take for granted about the way our globalized economy functions, and the ways in which we as humans exist within it.
