Work in the Age of Robots
Published on 5. June 2018
80 pages
978-1-64177-028-6 (ISBN)
Description
Are robots finally replacing humans? Does the emerging age of artificial intelligence and automation mean we will soon see "peak jobs" and the need for a Universal Basic Income to support a widening swath of hapless citizens unsuited for employment in a primarily "knowledge" workforce? Improving productivity-reducing labor hours per unit of product or service-has been the hallmark of economic progress for centuries. But advances due to robots and AI, some say, will be fundamentally different because digital machines are ready to revolutionize the nature of work in nearly every sector, not just one or two. But the lessons of history and the realities of technologies suggest that, despite yet more disruption, the overall result will be net job gains and faster economic growth.
More details
Person
Mark Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Faculty Fellow at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. He also serves on the Advisory Board of Notre Dame's Reilly Center for Science Technology & Values, and is a partner in a boutique energy-tech venture fund. Mills writes the Energy Intelligence column for Forbes.com and is coauthor of the 2005 book The Bottomless Well which rose to #1 in Amazon's science rankings. He was a staff consultant in the White House Science Office under President Reagan, and earlier in his career an experimental physicist and development engineer in microprocessors, fiber optics, and optical detectors working at Canada's Bell Labs, and RCA's Sarnoff Research Center.
Content
- Intro
- Table of Contents
- Grand transitions in productivity are episodic and powerful
- Technology is the only leverage we've ever had to "buy" time
- We're in a productivity deficit
- Productivity growth solves a lot of problems
- Productivity and employment have grown together for 130 years
- Amara's Law helps us imagine the future
- Taxonomy for automation: Code in the Cloud and code in the cobot
- America has always been service-dominated, but manufacturing remains critical
- The post-industrial myth for manufacturing jobs
- Blue-collar bots
- Manufacturing 2.0
- The coming robotification of services
- Better labor productivity can bring down soaring healthcare costs
- Data: The fuel for boosting service-sector productivity
- The hyperscale data infrastructure and ubiquitous productivity
- Ubiquitous data and ambient computing lead to the third information era
- Software, productivity and jobs grow together
- STEM employment is growing fast, but most jobs won't be STEM ones
- Long booms, and challenging disruptions, follow great infrastructure shifts
- Copyright
