Download or read book The Work of the Future written by David H. Autor and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the United States lags behind other industrialized countries in sharing the benefits of innovation with workers and how we can remedy the problem. The United States has too many low-quality, low-wage jobs. Every country has its share, but those in the United States are especially poorly paid and often without benefits. Meanwhile, overall productivity increases steadily and new technology has transformed large parts of the economy, enhancing the skills and paychecks of higher paid knowledge workers. What’s wrong with this picture? Why have so many workers benefited so little from decades of growth? The Work of the Future shows that technology is neither the problem nor the solution. We can build better jobs if we create institutions that leverage technological innovation and also support workers though long cycles of technological transformation. Building on findings from the multiyear MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, the book argues that we must foster institutional innovations that complement technological change. Skills programs that emphasize work-based and hybrid learning (in person and online), for example, empower workers to become and remain productive in a continuously evolving workplace. Industries fueled by new technology that augments workers can supply good jobs, and federal investment in R&D can help make these industries worker-friendly. We must act to ensure that the labor market of the future offers benefits, opportunity, and a measure of economic security to all.

Download or read book The Future of Work written by Darrell M. West and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking for ways to handle the transition to a digital economy Robots, artificial intelligence, and driverless cars are no longer things of the distant future. They are with us today and will become increasingly common in coming years, along with virtual reality and digital personal assistants. As these tools advance deeper into everyday use, they raise the question—how will they transform society, the economy, and politics? If companies need fewer workers due to automation and robotics, what happens to those who once held those jobs and don't have the skills for new jobs? And since many social benefits are delivered through jobs, how are people outside the workforce for a lengthy period of time going to earn a living and get health care and social benefits? Looking past today's headlines, political scientist and cultural observer Darrell M. West argues that society needs to rethink the concept of jobs, reconfigure the social contract, move toward a system of lifetime learning, and develop a new kind of politics that can deal with economic dislocations. With the U.S. governance system in shambles because of political polarization and hyper-partisanship, dealing creatively with the transition to a fully digital economy will vex political leaders and complicate the adoption of remedies that could ease the transition pain. It is imperative that we make major adjustments in how we think about work and the social contract in order to prevent society from spiraling out of control. This book presents a number of proposals to help people deal with the transition from an industrial to a digital economy. We must broaden the concept of employment to include volunteering and parenting and pay greater attention to the opportunities for leisure time. New forms of identity will be possible when the "job" no longer defines people's sense of personal meaning, and they engage in a broader range of activities. Workers will need help throughout their lifetimes to acquire new skills and develop new job capabilities. Political reforms will be necessary to reduce polarization and restore civility so there can be open and healthy debate about where responsibility lies for economic well-being. This book is an important contribution to a discussion about tomorrow—one that needs to take place today.

Download or read book Robotization of Work written by Barbara Czarniawska and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-24 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely book, Barbara Czarniawska and Bernward Joerges examine the hopes and fears around work and job security inspired by automation, from the original coining of the term ‘robot’ to the present day media fascination. Have these hopes and fears changed or do they remain the same? This discerning book investigates whether these changes in perception correlate to actual changes taking place in the field of robotics.

Download or read book Robot Proof revised and updated edition written by Joseph E. Aoun and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh look at a “robot-proof” education in the new age of generative AI. In 2017, Robot-Proof, the first edition, foresaw the advent of the AI economy and called for a new model of higher education designed to help human beings flourish alongside smart machines. That economy has arrived. Creative tasks that, seven years ago, seemed resistant to automation can now be performed with a simple prompt. As a result, we must now learn not only to be conversant with these technologies, but also to comprehend and deploy their outputs. In this revised and updated edition, Joseph Aoun rethinks the university’s mission for a world transformed by AI, advocating for the lifelong endeavor of a “robot-proof” education. Aoun puts forth a framework for a new curriculum, humanics, which integrates technological, data, and human literacies in an experiential setting, and he renews the call for universities to embrace lifelong learning through a social compact with government, employers, and learners themselves. Drawing on the latest developments and debates around generative AI, Robot-Proof is a blueprint for the university as a force for human reinvention in an era of technological change—an era in which we must constantly renegotiate the shifting boundaries between artificial intelligence and the capacities that remain uniquely human.

Download or read book Meaningful Work written by Andrea Veltman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the importance of work in human well-being, addressing several related philosophical questions about work and arguing on the whole that meaningful work is central in human flourishing. Work impacts flourishing not only in developing and exercising human capabilities but also in instilling and reflecting virtues such as honor, pride, dignity, self-discipline and self-respect. Work also attaches to a sense of purposefulness and personal identity, and meaningful work can promote both personal autonomy and a sense of personal satisfaction that issues from making oneself useful. Further still, work bears a formative influence on character and intelligence and provides a primary avenue for exercising complex skills and garnering esteem and recognition from others. The author defends a pluralistic account of meaningful work, arguing that work can be meaningful in virtue of developing capabilities, supporting virtues, providing a purpose, or integrating elements of a worker's life. In light of the impact of meaningful work on living well, the author argues that well-ordered societies provide opportunities for meaningful work, that individuals would be well advised to pursue these opportunities, and that the philosophical view of value pluralism, which casts work as having no special significance in an individual's life, is false. The book also addresses oppressive work that undermines human flourishing, examining potential solutions to mitigate the impact of bad work on those who perform it. Finally, a guiding argument of the book is that promoting meaningful work is a matter of ethics, more so than a matter of politics. Prioritizing people over profit, treating workers with respect, respecting the intelligence of working people, and creating opportunities for people to contribute developed skills are basic ethical principles for employing organizations and for communities at large.

Download or read book Shadow Work written by Craig Lambert and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work. Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations. It has slipped into our routines stealthily; most of us do not realize how much of it we are already doing, even as we pump our own gas, scan and bag our own groceries, execute our own stock trades, and build our own unassembled furniture. But its presence is unmistakable, and its effects far–reaching. Fueled by the twin forces of technology and skyrocketing personnel costs, shadow work has taken a foothold in our society. Lambert terms its prevalence as "middle–class serfdom," and examines its sources in the invasion of robotics, the democratization of expertise, and new demands on individuals at all levels of society. The end result? A more personalized form of consumption, a great social leveling (pedigrees don't help with shadow work!), and the weakening of communities as robotics reduce daily human interaction. Shadow Work offers a field guide to this new phenomenon. It shines a light on these trends now so prevalent in our daily lives and, more importantly, offers valuable insight into how to counter their effects. It will be essential reading to anyone seeking to understand how their day got so full—and how to deal with the ubiquitous shadow work that surrounds them.

Download or read book Rise of the Robots written by Martin Ford and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times-bestselling guide to how automation is changing the economy, undermining work, and reshaping our lives Winner of Best Business Book of the Year awards from the Financial Times and from Forbes "Lucid, comprehensive, and unafraid . . . ;an indispensable contribution to a long-running argument." -- Los Angeles Times What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making "good jobs" obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working -- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries-education and health care-that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work. We must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading to understand what accelerating technology means for our economic prospects-not to mention those of our children-as well as for society as a whole.

Download or read book Robots Will Steal Your Job But That s OK written by Federico Pistono and published by Federico Pistono. This book was released on with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You are about to become obsolete. You think you are special, unique, and that whatever it is that you are doing is impossible to replace. You are wrong. As we speak, millions of algorithms created by computer scientists are frantically running on servers all over the world, with one sole purpose: do whatever humans can do, but better. That is the argument for a phenomenon called technological unemployment, one that is pervading modern society. But is that really the case? Or is it just a futuristic fantasy? What will become of us in the coming years, and what can we do to prevent a catastrophic collapse of society? Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: how to survive the economic collapse and be happy explores the impact of technological advances on our lives, what it means to be happy, and provides suggestions on how to avoid a systemic collapse.

Download or read book The Psychology of Workplace Technology written by Michael D. Coovert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent advances in technology have dramatically altered the manner in which organizations function, transforming the way people think about and perform their work. The implications of these trends continue to evolve as emerging innovations adapt to and are adapted by organizations, workers, and other components of the socio-technical systems in which they are embedded. A rigorous consideration of these implications is needed to understand, manage, and drive the reciprocal interplay between technology and the workplace. This edited volume brings together top scholars within and outside of the field of industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology to explore the psychological and organizational effects of contemporary workplace technologies. A special section is included at the end of the book by four experts in the field entitled Reflections and Future Directions.

Download or read book The Globotics Upheaval written by Richard E. Baldwin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Digital technology will bring globalisation and robotics (globotics) to previously shielded professional and service sectors. Jobs will be displaced at the eruptive pace of digital technology while they will be replaced at a normal historical pace. The mismatch will produce a backlash - the globotics upheaval"--

Download or read book The Robots Are Coming written by Andres Oppenheimer and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staying true to his trademark journalistic approach, Andrés Oppenheimer takes his readers on yet another journey, this time across the globe, in a thought-provoking search to understand what the future holds for today's jobs in the foreseeable age of automation. The Robots Are Coming! centers around the issue of jobs and their future in the context of rapid automation and the growth of online products and services. As two of Oppenheimer's interviewees -- both experts in technology and economics from Oxford University -- indicate, forty-seven percent of existing jobs are at risk of becoming automated or rendered obsolete by other technological changes in the next twenty years. Oppenheimer examines current changes in several fields, including the food business, legal work, banking, and medicine, speaking with experts in the field, and citing articles and literature on automation in various areas of the workforce. He contrasts the perspectives of "techno-optimists" with those of "techno-negativists" and generally attempts to find a middle ground between an alarmist vision of the future, and one that is too uncritical. A self-described "cautious optimist", Oppenheimer believes that technology will not create massive unemployment, but rather will drastically change what work looks like.

Download or read book Robots and Immigrants written by Kostas Maronitis and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book scrutinises the narratives created around stealing jobs, opening new debates on the role of automation and migration policies. The authors reveal how the advances in AI and demands for constant flow of immigrant workers eradicate political and working rights, propagating fears over job theft and ownership.

Download or read book Futureproof written by Kevin Roose and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestselling author and tech columnist's counter-intuitive guide to staying relevant - and employable - in the machine age by becoming irreplaceably human. It's not a future scenario any more. We've been taught that to compete with automation and AI, we'll have to become more like the machines themselves, building up technical skills like coding. But, there's simply no way to keep up. What if all the advice is wrong? And what do we need to do instead to become futureproof? We tend to think of automation as a blue-collar phenomenon that will affect truck drivers, factory workers, and other people with repetitive manual jobs. But it's much, much broader than that. Lawyers are being automated out of existence. Last year, JPMorgan Chase built a piece of software called COIN, which uses machine learning to review complicated contracts and documents. It used to take the firm's lawyers more than 300,000 hours every year to review all of those documents. Now, it takes a few seconds, and requires just one human to run the program. Doctors are being automated out of existence, too. Last summer, a Chinese tech company built a deep learning algorithm that diagnosed brain cancer and other diseases faster and more accurately than a team of 15 top Chinese doctors. Kevin Roose has spent the past few years studying the question of how people, communities, and organisations adapt to periods of change, from the Industrial Revolution to the present. And the insight that is sweeping through Silicon Valley as we speak -- that in an age dominated by machines, it's human skills that really matter - is one of the more profound and counter-intuitive ideas he's discovered. It's the antidote to the doom-and-gloom worries many people feel when they think about AI and automation. And it's something everyone needs to hear. In nine accessible, prescriptive chapters, Roose distills what he has learned about how we will survive the future, that the way to become futureproof is to become incredibly, irreplaceably human.

Download or read book Anatomy of a Robot written by Despina Kakoudaki and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human. They perform this function by offering us a non-human version of ourselves as a site of investigation. Artificial people teach us that being human, being a person or a self, is a constant process and often a matter of legal, philosophical, and political struggle. By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films (including episodes from Twilight Zone, the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, Metropolis, The Golem, Frankenstein, The Terminator, Iron Man, Blade Runner, and I, Robot), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle’s Physics and De Anima, she tracks four foundational narrative elements in this centuries-old discourse— the fantasy of the artificial birth, the fantasy of the mechanical body, the tendency to represent artificial people as slaves, and the interpretation of artificiality as an existential trope. What unifies these investigations is the return of all four elements to the question of what constitutes the human. This focused approach to the topic of the artificial, constructed, or mechanical person allows us to reconsider the creation of artificial life. By focusing on their historical provenance and textual versatility, Kakoudaki elucidates artificial people’s main cultural function, which is the political and existential negotiation of what it means to be a person.

Download or read book The Future of Work written by Darrell M. West and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking for ways to handle the transition to a digital economy Robots, artificial intelligence, and driverless cars are no longer things of the distant future. They are with us today and will become increasingly common in coming years, along with virtual reality and digital personal assistants. As these tools advance deeper into everyday use, they raise the question—how will they transform society, the economy, and politics? If companies need fewer workers due to automation and robotics, what happens to those who once held those jobs and don't have the skills for new jobs? And since many social benefits are delivered through jobs, how are people outside the workforce for a lengthy period of time going to earn a living and get health care and social benefits? Looking past today's headlines, political scientist and cultural observer Darrell M. West argues that society needs to rethink the concept of jobs, reconfigure the social contract, move toward a system of lifetime learning, and develop a new kind of politics that can deal with economic dislocations. With the U.S. governance system in shambles because of political polarization and hyper-partisanship, dealing creatively with the transition to a fully digital economy will vex political leaders and complicate the adoption of remedies that could ease the transition pain. It is imperative that we make major adjustments in how we think about work and the social contract in order to prevent society from spiraling out of control. This book presents a number of proposals to help people deal with the transition from an industrial to a digital economy. We must broaden the concept of employment to include volunteering and parenting and pay greater attention to the opportunities for leisure time. New forms of identity will be possible when the "job" no longer defines people's sense of personal meaning, and they engage in a broader range of activities. Workers will need help throughout their lifetimes to acquire new skills and develop new job capabilities. Political reforms will be necessary to reduce polarization and restore civility so there can be open and healthy debate about where responsibility lies for economic well-being. This book is an important contribution to a discussion about tomorrow—one that needs to take place today.

Download or read book Human Robot Interaction written by Christoph Bartneck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This broad overview for graduate students introduces multidisciplinary topics from robotics to sociology which are needed to understand the area.

Download or read book What To Expect When You re Expecting Robots written by Laura Major and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The next generation of robots will be truly social, but can we make sure that they play well in the sandbox? Most robots are just tools. They do limited sets of tasks subject to constant human control. But a new type of robot is coming. These machines will operate on their own in busy, unpredictable public spaces. They'll ferry deliveries, manage emergency rooms, even grocery shop. Such systems could be truly collaborative, accomplishing tasks we don't do well without our having to stop and direct them. This makes them social entities, so, as robot designers Laura Major and Julie Shah argue, whether they make our lives better or worse is a matter of whether they know how to behave. What to Expect When You're Expecting Robots offers a vision for how robots can survive in the real world and how they will change our relationship to technology. From teaching them manners, to robot-proofing public spaces, to planning for their mistakes, this book answers every question you didn't know you needed to ask about the robots on the way.