According to the website Sleep Judge, the U.S. is one of only a few countries that doesn’t mandate a set number of vacation days.
People are overworked and burnt out, and we seem content to treat this as a fact of life. But it doesn’t have to be.
In fact, the issue that Americans are so overworked — one-third of all American workers haven’t even taken a vacation in over two years — is precisely why we should be making a commitment to take more time off in 2020.
Hardly a week goes by without a report announcing the end of work as we know it.
In 2013, Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne were the first to capture this anxiety in a paper titled: “The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?”.
They concluded 47% of US jobs were threatened by automation. Since then, Frey has taken multiple opportunities to repeat his predictions of major labour market disruptions due to automation.
In the face of threats to employment, some progressive thinkers advocate jettisoning our work ethic and building a world without work.
If machines can do our work, why not reduce the working week drastically? We should be mature enough to decide what truly matters to us, without tying our identity to a job, or measuring happiness in dollars and professional status. Right?
Not quite.
Continue reading… “Work is a fundamental part of being human. Robots won’t stop us doing it”
An uncertain retirement may be lurking just over that ridge.(Dennis Curran)
Is the “retirement crisis” just a scare story? That’s what conservatives would like you to believe as they rail against proposals from progressives in Congress to expand and increase Social Security.
Andrew Biggs, a former Social Security official, wrote recently in the conservative National Review that there’s no need to expand Social Security benefits because “Americans’ retirement incomes and retirement savings have never been stronger.”
That may be true, in the aggregate. But the question is: whose retirement incomes and savings? Monique Morrissey of the labor-supported Economic Policy Institute presents evidence that, just as income inequality for those in their working years has soared, so has inequality in the distribution of retirement resources.
The trends…paint a picture of increasingly inadequate retirement savings for successive generations of Americans—and large disparities by income, race, ethnicity, education, and marital status.
Continue reading… “The retirement crisis is real and frightening, as these six charts show”
Call it hire power.
On Tuesday, career and job site LinkedIn released its annual “Emerging Jobs” list, which identifies the roles that have seen the largest rate of hiring growth from 2015 through this year. No. 1 on the list: Artificial Intelligence Specialist—typically an engineer, researcher or other specialty that focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence, figuring out things like where it makes sense to implement AI or building AI systems.
Hiring for this role has been tremendous, growing 74% annually in the past 4 years alone. “AI has infiltrated every industry, and right now the demand for people skilled in AI is outpacing the supply for it,” Guy Berger, the principal economist at LinkedIn, tells MarketWatch. “This is the third year in a row a role related to machine learning or artificial intelligence has topped the list, and we can only expect demand to increase.”
The pay is impressive too, with AI roles often commanding six figures. Jobs site Indeed notes that artificial intelligence engineers in San Francisco, for example, rake in $120,000 to upwards of $160,000. Sometimes AI roles can garner pay of $250,000 or more.
Continue reading… “The No.1 job of 2019 pays $140,000 – and its hiring growth has exploded 74%”
Losing your job to a human stings more than getting replaced by a robot, research found.
The question has a surprising psychological factor for workers now and in the future.
Losing a job can be stressful and demoralizing. Seeing your role replaced by automation is an additional stressor that more workers will have to contend with and worry about in the future.
Robots are already replacing people in some jobs. Apps take orders in chain restaurants, and some supermarkets use self-checkout machines to replace checkers. This is the new reality. The Brookings Institution predicts that 36 million Americans face a “high exposure to automation” in the coming decades, meaning they will have more than 70% of their role at risk of being substituted by artificial intelligence.
Continue reading… “We would rather lose our jobs to robots than humans, a study shows”
A new report maps the top 10 areas of the US with the highest robot intensity
In the last decade, the number of manufacturing robots has more than doubled in the US to almost 2 per 1,000 workers
Some studies predict as many as 50% of all workers are at risk of losing their jobs to automation
Robots are displacing younger, less-educated, and minority workers in the Midwest manufacturing industry at the highest rates, a new report shows.
However, the findings also show that a strong economic recovery over the past decade has saved many jobs and slowed automation in the United States.
Continue reading… “Workers in these 10 US areas are more likely to be replaced by robots”
Managers can’t compete with artificial intelligence (AI) when it comes to some areas of decision-making and trust building, according to a broad new global study of workers. But rather than be viewed as an indictment of managers, the study findings can help organizations create a more human workplace, some experts say.
The study by Oracle and Future Workplace, an HR advisory and research firm in New York City, found that the growing use of AI is having a significant impact on the way employees interact with their managers. Among the study’s key findings is that 64 percent of respondents would trust a robot more than their direct manager, and 82 percent believed AI or bots could perform certain tasks better than their managers. The study surveyed 8,370 HR leaders, managers and employees across 10 countries.
While robots upend blue-collar factory work and trucking in the middle of the country, AI and machine learning are poised to deeply alter white-collar jobs in superstar coastal cities.
Why it matters: No one is immune to the shockwave of automation in the workplace.
“AI will be as central to the white-collar office environment as robotics has been to the production economy,” said Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. “They’ll fundamentally change what work is and what humans do. And no one gets a free pass.”
Continue reading… “AI is coming for white-collar workers”
In the AI world, data is the new currency and analytics competency a crucial competitive differentiator across business lines
Cubicle workers. Shipping clerks. Loan processors.
“All gone,” Forrester vice president and principal consultant Huard Smith said in describing the impact of artificial intelligence on various professions by 2030.
Continue reading… “Artificial Intelligence will obliterate these jobs by 2030”
Machine intelligence, also known as artificial intelligence (AI) is going to have both an awesome and an unfortunate impact on our posterity. Let’s explore one possible way AI may impact the future of work, and how it may dramatically change how we train our workforce.
A brand manager needs an advertisement. So, the brand manager sends a brief to the senior art director (in-house or at an agency) and asks for something amazing to be created. On or before the deadline, the brand manager and the art director meet to review the work. The brand manager is presented with three approaches, and after a number of meetings, a number of revisions, and revelations, they agree on a final product.
This is a process that has repeated itself for more than a century, and AI is not going to stop it (today).
Continue reading… “AI won’t take your job, people will”
Obtaining an undergraduate degree is almost always worth it — bachelor’s degree holders earn 84% more than those with just a high school diploma.
However, not all majors are the same, ZipRecruiter found.
As tuition costs soar, more students and their families are asking themselves if college is still worth it.
Some experts say the value of a bachelor’s degree is fading. Starting salaries for new college graduates have grown less than 1% over the past two years, remaining at around $50,000.
Worse yet: A decade after leaving school, more than 1 in 5 graduates are working in a job that doesn’t even require a degree.
Continue reading… “The 5 college majors American students most regret picking”
KEY POINTS
Five Canadian companies made CNBC’s 2019 Upstart 100 list unveiled on Tuesday: Attabotics, Calgary; Cmd, Vancouver; Deep Genomics and Nobul, Toronto; and RenoRun, Montreal.
Collectively, these promising start-ups raised more than $77 million in venture capital.
The entrepreneurial ecosystem is booming in major cities in Canada, thanks to government incentives, a growing tech talent pool and access to venture capital.
Continue reading… “Why Canada is becoming a start-up mecca rivaling Silicon Valley”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.