Automation

Please see below selected recent work-related change. 

See also:

• Halcyon Work Headlines

July 2018

• In a new report, the OECD said that positive employment trends are at risk of being overshadowed by “unprecedented” wage stagnation. While labour participation continues to rise and unemployment has reached record lows in some OECD countries, wage growth has been significantly more sluggish than before the global financial crisis. As at the end of 2017, wages growth in the OECD area was only half of what it was 10 years earlier.  Wage stagnation is also hitting low-paid earners particularly hard.

Please see below selected recent automation-related change,

See also: On Automation

July 2018

• A new report from Capgemini's Digital Transformation Institute revealed that the financial services industry could expect to add up to $512bn to global revenues by 2020 through 'intelligent automation', the right combination of robotics process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and business process optimisation applied cohesively to achieve business objectives.

In the distant future, no one needs to work. Energy is available wherever people can set up a solar panel, windmill, or hydro-turbine. Artificial Intelligence (AI) units, distant descendants of today’s 3D printers, are capable of producing anything a person can program into them. Just by asking, anyone can have anything they want. People trade energy credits or donate energy to projects that interest them.

See for example HBR on "Computers Create Jobs and Inequality at the Same Time".

This is the post-labour economy imagined by today’s sci-fi writers. Indeed, science fiction has been speculating on what post-labour economies might look like for more than 100 years, In a post-labour economy, people don’t need to work in order to live or access goods. In fact, work has nothing to do with wealth or value.