There are more Tweets about golfing than doing the dishes. More Facebook checkins at the luxurious Bellagio in Las Vegas than the budget Circus Circus, even though the same number of guests stay at the two hotels. And more Facebook likes for the high-brow Atlantic Magazine than the much more widely read National Enquirer.
The video was on Facebook for 20 hours. It showed Wuttisan Wongtalay, a 20-year-old man in Thailand, slipping a noose over his 11-month-old daughter’s neck and dropping her off the side of the building to her death. Off camera, Wongtalay then committed suicide, but his Facebook video outlived him, and continued to spread for nearly an entire day.
In 2010, pundits believed New York City was poised to become the next Silicon Valley.
As fresh allegations of sexual harassment swirled around its star anchor, Fox News made a convenient observation on behalf of its parent company: Not one employee, it told the New York Times in a statement, “ever took advantage of the 21st Century Fox hotline to raise a concern about Bill O’Reilly, even anonymously.”
Google wants to help you search for jobs, and its biggest advantage may be that you use its products to search for everything else.
The argument that humans will keep their jobs even as machines become more advanced is generally an optimistic one—except when it’s being made by Albert Wenger.
The EU Commission on Wednesday published a ”Pillar of Social Rights,” which sets out 20 proposals for improving worker social protections. Among them is one aimed at building better social protections for gig economy workers who are hired, on a task-by-task basis, by companies like Uber.
Uber, like other gig economy companies, has positioned its drivers as entrepreneurs–in this case “transportation entrepreneurs“–who run their own small businesses on their own schedules. Its executives have even argued that its gigs provide a solution to underemployment and wage stagnation.
Before becoming WeWork’s COO in 2015, Artie Minson was the CFO of Time Warner Cable.
Incessant follow-up emails have their time and place, but when it comes to freelancers collecting pay from clients who have stiffed them, a clever new service offers what it hopes will be a more effective option.
Germany is known for its generous labor practices, including paid sick days. But to encourage workers not to use too many of these, Amazon has instituted a controversial policy that relies on peer pressure to encourage better employee attendance.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently convened a committee to investigate the impact of technology on jobs. In its 184-page paper, published yesterday, 13 experts in economics and computer science reported that, well, they don’t have enough data to determine exactly how automation, robots, and innovations like the on-demand economy are affecting employment.
You’d never mistake Baxter and Sawyer for humans, though they were designed to work alongside them. Each has programmable robotic arms that swivel and twist at the joints, bright red plastic exteriors, and rigid mechanical movements.
As fierce competition for workers with tech-related skills has become the norm, so has high pay.
Amazon, the largest US ecommerce company, has about 45,000 robots working in its warehouses, but so far they don’t seem to be taking jobs from people. That’s partly because today’s commercially feasible robots are only capable of doing a small piece of the work involved in packaging an order.
There’s a new Snapchat filter at McDonald’s (“Macca’s,” as it’s known locally) in Australia, and its purpose is to encourage young people to apply for a job. The filter lets potential employees virtually “try on”a McDonald’s uniform–a hat and nametag– and record a 10-second video about themselves.
General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt says the fear of robots taking jobs in the short term is overblown.
Cars are already driving themselves on roads in California, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Though they are still restricted to specific test areas and driving conditions, it’s pretty clear that at some point in the future, completely driverless cars will be a mainstream reality. When that future will arrive, though… depends on who you ask.
A beta version of Amazon’s cashier-less convenience store, opened to the company’s employees in December, has been functioning flawlessly–as long as there are fewer than 20 people in the store and those people are walking slowly.
There are 1.8 million heavy truck drivers and 800,000 light truck drivers in the US. Driving a truck is the most common occupation in 29 states, and a high-paying one relative to other jobs that require similar levels of education.
When it comes to avoiding bad days, running a business might pay better than owning one.
Less than a year into her tenure as IBM’s chief marketing officer, Michelle Peluso prepared to make an announcement that she knew would excite some of her 5,500 new employees, but also, inevitably, inspire resignation notices from others. She had already briefed managers and the leaders of small teams on the news, which had been set in motion before her arrival in September. The rumor mill had already informed most other employees. All that was left to do was to make it official. “It’s time for Act II: WINNING!” read the subject line of Peluso’s blog post on the company intranet.
For SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City CEO Elon Musk, the “harder challenge” presented by an automated future is not how to replace incomes lost by machines taking over jobs. It’s how to help people find meaning in a life without work.
Automation often replaces human labor, but very rarely in the last sixty years has it eliminated an entire occupation.
