The Covid-19 Pandemic Spurred Growth in Automation


Book Description

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated trends in automation as many employers seek to save on labor costs amid widespread illness, increased worker leverage, and market pressures to onshore supply chains. While existing research has explored how automation may displace nonspecialized jobs, there is typically less attention paid to how this displacement may interact with preexisting structural issues around racial inequality. This analysis updates that of a 2021 Brookings paper by the authors, finding that Black and Hispanic workers continue to be overrepresented in the 30 occupations with the highest estimated risk of automation and underrepresented in the 30 occupations with the lowest estimated risk of automation. The updated analysis also includes new attention to automation's impact on wage structures, consideration of the broader implications of automation for global economics, and a discussion of the potential interplay of automation with recent developments in artificial intelligence.




Pandemics and Automation: Will the Lost Jobs Come Back?


Book Description

COVID-19 has exacerbated concerns about the rise of the robots and other automation technologies. This paper analyzes empirically the impact of past major pandemics on robot adoption and inequality. First, we find that pandemic events accelerate robot adoption, especially when the health impact is severe and is associated with a significant economic downturn. Second, while robots may raise productivity, they could also increase inequality by displacing low-skilled workers. We find that following a pandemic, the increase in inequality over the medium term is larger for economies with higher robot density and where new robot adoption has increased more. Our results suggest that the concerns about the rise of the robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified.




The Automation Advantage: Embrace the Future of Productivity and Improve Speed, Quality, and Customer Experience Through AI


Book Description

From the global automation leaders at Accenture—the first-ever comprehensive blueprint for how to use and scale AI-powered intelligent automation in the enterprise to gain competitive advantage through faster speed to market, improved product quality, higher efficiency, and an elevated customer experience. Many companies were already implementing limited levels of automation when the pandemic hit. But the need to rapidly change business processes and how organizations work resulted in the compression of a decade’s worth of digital transformation into a matter of months. Technology suddenly became the essential element for rapid organizational change and the creation of 360-degree value benefiting all stakeholders. Businesses are faced with the imperative to embrace that change or risk being left behind. In The Automation Advantage, global enterprise technology and automation veterans Bhaskar Ghosh, Rajendra Prasad, and Gayathri Pallail give business leaders and managers the action plan they need to execute a strategic agenda that enables them to quickly and confidently scale their automation and AI initiatives. This practical and highly accessible implementation guide answers leaders’ burning questions, such as: How do I identify and prioritize automation opportunities? How do I assess my legacy systems and data issues? How do I derive full value out of my technology investments and automation efforts? How can I inspire my employees to embrace change and the new opportunities presented by automation? The Automation Advantage goes beyond optimizing process to using AI to transform almost any business activity in any industry to make it faster, more streamlined, cost efficient, and customer-focused—vastly improving overall productivity and performance. Featuring case studies of successful automation solutions, this indispensable road map includes guiding principles for technology, governance, culture, and leadership change. It offers a human-centric approach to AI and automation that leads to sustainable transformation and measurable business results.




Artificial Intelligence for COVID-19


Book Description

This book presents a compilation of the most recent implementation of artificial intelligence methods for solving different problems generated by the COVID-19. The problems addressed came from different fields and not only from medicine. The information contained in the book explores different areas of machine and deep learning, advanced image processing, computational intelligence, IoT, robotics and automation, optimization, mathematical modeling, neural networks, information technology, big data, data processing, data mining, and likewise. Moreover, the chapters include the theory and methodologies used to provide an overview of applying these tools to the useful contribution to help to face the emerging disaster. The book is primarily intended for researchers, decision makers, practitioners, and readers interested in these subject matters. The book is useful also as rich case studies and project proposals for postgraduate courses in those specializations.




Automation Anxiety


Book Description

"This book confronts the hotly-debated prospect of mounting job losses from automation, and the divergent hopes and fears that prospect evokes, and proposes a strategy for mitigating the losses and spreading the gains from shrinking demand for human labor. Leading economists have concluded that automation is already exacerbating inequality by destroying more decent middle-skill jobs than it is creating. As ongoing innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics continue to chip away at the comparative advantages of human labor in a range of work tasks, those innovations are likely to yield growing job losses in the foreseeable future. Faced with this prospect, the book argues that we should set our collective sights on ensuring broad access to adequate incomes, more free time, and decent remunerative work even in a world with less of it. That will require not a single "magic bullet" solution like universal basic income or a federal job guarantee, but rather a multifaceted strategy centered on conserving, creating, and spreading work. The book elaborates that strategy in the U.S. context, but much of it is broadly relevant to other advanced economies. And while the proposed strategy is designed to address a foreseeable future of job scarcity, it will also help to rebalance lives already plagued by either too much work or not enough and to counter both economic inequality and racial stratification. The proposed strategy makes sense here and now, and especially as we face up to a future of less work"--




Automation and the Future of Work


Book Description

A consensus-shattering account of automation technologies and their effect on workplaces and the labor market In this consensus-shattering account of automation technologies, Aaron Benanav investigates the economic trends that will shape our working lives far into the future. Silicon Valley titans, politicians, techno-futurists, and social critics have united in arguing that we are on the cusp of an era of rapid technological automation, heralding the end of work as we know it. But does the muchdiscussed “rise of the robots” really explain the long-term decline in the demand for labor? Automation and the Future of Work uncovers the deep weaknesses of twenty-first-century capitalism and the reasons why the engine of economic growth keeps stalling. Equally important, Benanav goes on to salvage from automation discourse its utopian content: the positive vision of a world without work. What social movements, he asks, are required to propel us into post-scarcity if technological innovation alone can’t deliver it? In response to calls for a permanent universal basic income that would maintain a growing army of redundant workers, he offers a groundbreaking counterproposal.




Automation 2021: Recent Achievements in Automation, Robotics and Measurement Techniques


Book Description

This book contains 38 papers authored by both scientists and practitioners focused on an interdisciplinary approach to the development of cyber-physical systems. Recently our civilization has been facing one of the most severe challenges in modern history. The COVID-19 pandemic devastated the global economy and significantly disrupted numerous areas of economic activity. Only radical increase of efficiency and versatility of industrial production, with further limitation of human involvement, paralleled by the decrease of environmental burden, will enable us to cope with such challenges. We hope that the presented book provides input to the solution of at least some problems brought about by this challenge. This approach relies on the development of measuring techniques, robotic and mechatronic systems, industrial automation, numerical modeling and simulation as well as application of artificial intelligence techniques required by the transformation leading to Industry 4.0.




The Technology Trap


Book Description

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping account of the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society's members. As the author shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were devastating for large swaths of the population.These trends broadly mirror those in our current age of automation. But, just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the potential to do the same. Benedikt Frey demonstrates that in the midst of another technological revolution, the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present. --From publisher description.




The Rise of the Robots


Book Description

Intelligent algorithms are already well on their way to making white collar jobs obsolete: travel agents, data-analysts, and paralegals are currently in the firing line. In the near future, doctors, taxi-drivers and ironically even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by ‘robots’. Without a radical reassessment of our economic and political structures, we risk the very implosion of the capitalist economy itself. In The Rise of the Robots, technology expert Martin Ford systematically outlines the achievements of artificial intelligence and uses a wealth of economic data to illustrate the terrifying societal implications. From health and education to finance and technology, his warning is stark – all jobs that are on some level routine are likely to eventually be automated, resulting in the death of traditional careers and a hollowed-out middle class. The robots are coming and we have to decide – now – whether the future will bring prosperity or catastrophe.




Emerging Technologies During the Era of COVID-19 Pandemic


Book Description

This book tackles the recent research directions in using the newly emerged technologies during the era of COVID-19 pandemic. It mainly focuses on using emerging technologies and their impact on health care, education, and society. It also provides insights into the current challenges and constraints in using technologies during the era of COVID-19 pandemic and exposes new opportunities for future research in the domain.