The coming productivity boom

[BoyRacer]

The coming productivity boom - → techceocouncil.org/clientupl … 0FINAL.pdf

The Information Age is not over. It has barely begun.

• The diffusion of information technology into the physical industries is poised to revive the economy, create jobs, and boost incomes. Far from nearing its end, the Information Age
  may give us its most powerful and widespread economic benefits in the years ahead. Aided by improved public policy focused on innovation, we project a significant acceleration of productivity across a wide array of industries, leading to more broad-based economic growth.

• The 10-year productivity drought is almost over. The next waves of the information revolution—where we connect the physical world and infuse it with intelligence—are beginning
  to emerge. Increased use of mobile technologies, cloud services, artificial intelligence, big data, inexpensive and ubiquitous sensors, computer vision, virtual reality, robotics, 3D additive manufacturing, and a new generation of 5G wireless are on the verge of transforming the traditional physical industries—healthcare, transportation, energy, education, manufacturing, agriculture, retail, and urban travel services.
  there is more

[owenm]

Productivity boom or profit boom. I know all too well that technology creates jobs but it destroys them too.

The problem is that Micheal who used to drive a bus is faced with quite a challenge getting a job as a BI analyst for a marketing firm locally and he’s not too happy about alternatives such as a QC analyst in a factory that makes RFID chips - because those jobs are in Brazil or Vietnam.

I fear this boom will make the squeezed middle smaller and smaller until they cannot be taxed enough to pay for the public service and the unemployed any more.

[BoyRacer]

The tax implications are already being considered.

A Tax on Robots? - Yanis Varoufakis → project-syndicate.org/comme … is-2017-02

The misguided logic of a robot income tax - Izabella Kaminska → ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/02/22/ … ncome-tax/

And herein lies the fallacy of Gates’ argument. A call for robot income tax is really just a call for more corporation tax and/or a wealth tax.

But, as we all know, corporations don’t like paying corporation tax. To the contrary, they like to claim high corporate tax rates damage economies because they reduce industry competitiveness, undermine fiduciary duties to maximise profits and overlook corporations’ roles in creating jobs in the first place. Some also like to argue they discourage new investment and thus the chance for further value creation. Corporations, they note, should be entitled to retain or return profits to investors and/or reinvest them in even more capital (in a way which creates even more jobs).

It seems strange then for Gates to forget this argument just because the nature of the capital investment is now anthropomorphised. If investment in machinery is to be deemed productive and prosperity boosting, why should investment in robotic machinery or AI be any different? Either both are good for prosperity or none of them are? Either the investment increases productivity or it does not? And what constitutes a robot anyway?

source

[Tyrannosaurus]

abc.net.au/news/2017-04-05/a … bs/8415286

If you’re an accountant, lawyer or data analyst, a robot may soon take over your job.
Key points:

New development of AI and robotics affects both blue and white collar sector
Life could be safer with artificial intelligence around us
Report recommends a 'human quota' in sectors
Legislation needed to protect human safety and security

A new report from the International Bar Association suggests machines will most likely replace humans in high-routine occupations.

The authors have suggested that governments introduce human quotas in some sectors in order to protect jobs.

fortune.com/2017/03/29/blackrock … k-picking/

BlackRock on Tuesday said it would overhaul its actively managed equities business, cutting jobs, dropping fees and relying more on computers to pick stocks in a move that highlights how difficult it has become for humans to beat the market.

The world’s biggest money manager has faced active stock fund withdrawals and the revamp is its biggest attempt yet to engineer a turnaround.

Last May, BlackRock (blk, -0.34%) said it had recruited Mark Wiseman, the head of Canada’s biggest public pension fund, to oversee the stockpicking operations after he revamped that fund’s operations to embrace data-mining and other technological approaches to investing.

finance.yahoo.com/news/automatio … 41968.html

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin raised eyebrows last week by saying he was “not worried at all,” about robots taking jobs, even going so far to say, “I’m optimistic.” According to Mnuchin, “it’s not even on our radar screen…50 to 100 more years.”

According to a new study by researchers at MIT and Boston University, this is very wrong, and the data tell a far different story of robots driving down wages and stealing jobs. The researchers, Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, examined the rise of industrial robots, which increased fourfold between 1990 to 2007 or around one robot per every thousand workers, largely in the automotive and electronics industries.

That one robot, the research found, reduces the aggregate employment-to-population ratio by 0.34 percentage points. Translated from professor-speak, the researchers say that’s equivalent to “one new robot reducing employment by 5.6 workers,” a figure that factors in workers being soaked up by other industries unaffected by industrial robots. And by making the labor market more competitive, one robot can depress wages by 0.25% to 0.5%.

At the same time, the researchers note that “perhaps surprisingly, we do not find positive and offsetting employment gains in any occupation or education groups.”

techrepublic.com/article/rob … s-by-2027/

Yes, robots are coming for our jobs, but the casualties won’t be as bad as experts once thought. According to Forrester Research’s Future Of Jobs report, released Monday, automation and robotics will displace 24.7 million jobs by 2027, while also creating 14.9 million new jobs in the same time period, leading to a net loss of 9.8 million US jobs.

Now, 9.8 million jobs is still a huge number, but it pales in comparison to the 69 million jobs figure that is often cited by industry experts. For those unfamiliar, that number comes from a 2013 paper out of Oxford University that claimed 47% of US jobs (or 69 million) were at a high risk of being automated. Forrester’s report seems to point to a much smaller impact.

[mr_anderson]

@Barney Gumble

@BoyRacer

A Tax on Robots? - Yanis Varoufakis → project-syndicate.org/comme … is-2017-02

No taxation without representation.

No Taxation without Automation.

[woger]

I’ sure Matheson could arrange it!

[Madness_of_Crowds]

@mr_anderson

@Barney Gumble

@BoyRacer

A Tax on Robots? - Yanis Varoufakis → project-syndicate.org/comme … is-2017-02

No taxation without representation.

No Taxation without Automation.

Don’t we still have some voting machines in a warehouse somewhere?

No Representation without Automation.

[Tyrannosaurus]

theatlantic.com/business/ar … is/254270/

Technology can kill jobs. Or, to put things more softly, it can replace certain jobs. Robot arms replace human arms in our factories. TurboTax does the work of tax preparers. We mourn the disappearance of these position even as we enjoy the most important consequence of the technologies, themselves: more useful goods and services at a lower price.

This is an article about an old job-killing technology. But the job that it made most obsolete wasn’t the worker – at least, not the kind of worker you’re probably thinking of, nor the kind that the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts. This is an article about how the mighty tractor killed the farm horse. But it’s also a story about how innovation replaces us, and how the economy can get bigger, faster, and stronger, while also making us feel obsolete.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/horsesandtractorsdammit.png

In 1910, one third of our 92 million citizens and 38 million workers were on the farm. By 1950, only 10% of Americans worked on farms. By 2010, farmers accounted for only 2% of the workforce, even though we produce and export considerably more food. Machines took over the farm.

In the 1940s and 1950s, workers released from farming duties went to build things to fill houses that needed refrigerators and other modern appliances.

Today’s workers released from manufacturing’s own mechanization and offshoring are having a harder time finding an industry to adopt them. The same is true for middle-skilled workers whose jobs have gone to software and foreign workers. Some of their plight can be explained by temporary weak demand. But much of it is also structural. It is the destructive part of creative destruction. Workers have been flowing away from our most productive (and most mechanized) industries like manufacturing and toward our least productive service jobs like nursing and teaching for decades now. This isn’t bad. Nursing and teaching are valuable. But they’re aren’t very highly paid, and the result is millions of workers in local, low-value-added service jobs whose productivity ceiling is low and whose wages fall behind elites with the education to excel in a competitive economy. The pessimistic take on our employment crisis is that something has changed, and there is no modern manufacturing sector to absorb millions of modern replaced workers. The optimistic take is that we are simply living in the destructive valley of creative destruction, and the U.S. economy will continue to create decent-paying jobs, because it always has.

[mr_anderson]

@Blindjustice BATONEFFECT

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/horsesandtractorsdammit.png

That is the coming chart of Taxi drivers v Self-driving cars.
Except the timeline will be much faster.

[Tyrannosaurus]

It could be electric cars v combustion engine too
Assembly line workers and robots

[dolanbaker]

@mightyz

All new tech will go to west countries and old tech will be sold cheap to cheaper countries as it was previously.

Not so much these days, the new tech is often cheaper than decommissioning and reinstalling the old tech, or simply installing the new stuff.
Gone are the days when stuff was built to last decades, even commercial grade stuff has a far shorter life than their predecessors.

[mr_anderson]

@mightyz

I saw this some time ago, he talks about ‘peaks’ and how technological disruption make a change very fast:

Clean Disruption - Why Energy & Transportation will be Obsolete by 2030 - Oslo, March 2016 - YouTube

Superb presentation.
Highly recommend everyone watches this.

[Tyrannosaurus]

@mr_anderson

@mightyz

I saw this some time ago, he talks about ‘peaks’ and how technological disruption make a change very fast:

Clean Disruption - Why Energy & Transportation will be Obsolete by 2030 - Oslo, March 2016 - YouTube

Superb presentation.
Highly recommend everyone watches this.

Just watched, recommended viewing. There are definitely big changes ahead in cars, energy and the labour force.

To take the really cynical view about the youtube above would be that yay cars are going to be so cheap that more and more money will be pumped into asset bubbles to the point where nobody can afford a car the only difference then being that you cant just hop in a car at any time and have less freedom to do as you please

Its not an entirely crazy scenario…look what happened when we shifted to dual incomes per family. We didnt get twice as rich, we put twice as much into mortgages!

Throw in the end of human manufacturing and automation of even admin/reporting. Who even needs expert advisors when you have business intelligence/data mining etc

The system for the last few decades in the US (and now in Australia), for example, has simply accumulated wealth in smaller and smaller circles while the real wage decreases.

[Tyrannosaurus]

news.com.au/finance/work/car … de9a92609d

“The reality is that 40 per cent of current jobs in Australia won’t exist in 10 to 15 years due to automation — that’s five million jobs gone,” she said, citing the latest report on the topic by CEDA.

“If I look at the exponential advancements in technology, it is very clear that this figure will continue to rise.”

The really scary part? It’s not future innovation that puts our jobs at risk, but existing technology that is available for use right now.

[tulip]

Humans are in an unfair position against robots and software. Humans have to be paid and in a lot of Western Countries the Company also has to pay national insurance contributions per employee. Robots only pay tax when they are purchased and on the energy and parts they use.

The crunch will come when Western Governments see a reduction in their tax take, which in the Globalised era of the freeflow of captial is increasingly from income tax. We’re already there.

The Corporations get their wealth from the means of production. The Governments get theirs from its labour force which is under threat.

[yoganmahew]

@tulip

Humans are in an unfair position against robots and software. Humans have to be paid and in a lot of Western Countries the Company also has to pay national insurance contributions per employee. Robots only pay tax when they are purchased and on the energy and parts they use.

The crunch will come when Western Governments see a reduction in their tax take, which in the Globalised era of the freeflow of captial is increasingly from income tax. We’re already there.

The Corporations get their wealth from the means of production. The Governments get theirs from its labour force which is under threat.

As corporations have demanded the same rights as people, I think we should move to taxing corporations with personal rates of tax - do away entirely with the distinction between personal and business rates…

[DM18]

Above was a very interesting video.

I hadn’t fully grasped before that Uber’s loss making with human drivers isn’t necessarily to drive out the non-Uber current competition and raise the price later. It is to get a huge customer base with the plan to replace their costly drivers with driver-less.

We have seen manual factory jobs move to low cost countries and big pressure on non-regulated fields with “off-shoring”. The protected professions (law, medicine, pharmacy, architecture) with legal protection towards professional bodies have been relatively un-hit so far…

[tulip]

@yoganmahew

@tulip

Humans are in an unfair position against robots and software. Humans have to be paid and in a lot of Western Countries the Company also has to pay national insurance contributions per employee. Robots only pay tax when they are purchased and on the energy and parts they use.

The crunch will come when Western Governments see a reduction in their tax take, which in the Globalised era of the freeflow of captial is increasingly from income tax. We’re already there.

The Corporations get their wealth from the means of production. The Governments get theirs from its labour force which is under threat.

As corporations have demanded the same rights as people, I think we should move to taxing corporations with personal rates of tax - do away entirely with the distinction between personal and business rates…

Exactly, and if they break the law they should be prosecuted like people. Someone is killed by the company by them releasing a knowlingly dangerous product the Company becomes the property of the State for 30 years like flesh human beings and all profits it generates goes to the Government and/or the affected parties.

[Mossy_Heneberry]

@yoganmahew

@tulip

Humans are in an unfair position against robots and software. Humans have to be paid and in a lot of Western Countries the Company also has to pay national insurance contributions per employee. Robots only pay tax when they are purchased and on the energy and parts they use.

The crunch will come when Western Governments see a reduction in their tax take, which in the Globalised era of the freeflow of captial is increasingly from income tax. We’re already there.

The Corporations get their wealth from the means of production. The Governments get theirs from its labour force which is under threat.

As corporations have demanded the same rights as people, I think we should move to taxing corporations with personal rates of tax - do away entirely with the distinction between personal and business rates…

Erm, who pays the business rate as it stands now?

[yoganmahew]

@Mossy_Heneberry

@yoganmahew

@tulip

Humans are in an unfair position against robots and software. Humans have to be paid and in a lot of Western Countries the Company also has to pay national insurance contributions per employee. Robots only pay tax when they are purchased and on the energy and parts they use.

The crunch will come when Western Governments see a reduction in their tax take, which in the Globalised era of the freeflow of captial is increasingly from income tax. We’re already there.

The Corporations get their wealth from the means of production. The Governments get theirs from its labour force which is under threat.

As corporations have demanded the same rights as people, I think we should move to taxing corporations with personal rates of tax - do away entirely with the distinction between personal and business rates…

Erm, who pays the business rate as it stands now?

Nobody, it’s whisked away as IP and parked in a tax haven. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s no IP exemption to personal income