Is AI a job killer? What does history say?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now the focus of the most recent automation-is-a-job-killer stories. History suggests an alternate narrative.
robots
Oil Industry Plans to Keep Workers Safe—by Firing Them and Having Robots Do Their Jobs
The oil and gas industry is finally acknowledging how dangerous employment can be for its workers after years of touting the sector as a beacon of worker safety. This sudden honesty about the dangers of working in the oil patch coincides with the industry’s new solution to greatly improve the safety of those workers — which is to fire them and replace them with robots.
How to Fund a Universal Basic Income Without Increasing Taxes or Inflation
In a stagnant economy, a UBI can create the demand needed to clear the shelves of unsold products and drive new productivity. Robots do not buy food, clothing, or electronic gadgets. Demand must come from consumers, and for that they need money to spend.
Frankenstein: Giving Voice to the Monster
The possibility that artificial creatures, products of human hands, might achieve sentience and take on an active role in society is an age-old conception in world cultures, the subject of myths, stories, moral fables, and philosophical speculation.
Services provided by nature
A while back I had considered free energy as it exists in modern industrial society. Today I want to consider free services provided by nature, but that are ignored for what they are, especially in the context of a long-running trend that is finally getting notice in the tech-centric media: the tension between automation and employment. Specifically, I’ve been trying to understand what these trends say about how we conceive of our society and the ecosystem around it.
The siren song of the robot
Indeed, the world now faces a double constraint to any further revolutionary gains to physical production: resource scarcity and the diminishing supply of the cheapest global labor, as wages in the Non-OECD have most likely seen their low. That we have reached this juncture probably explains why a new idea has arisen: The advent of robots.