I'm jealous of anyone graduating college today. You are stepping as a newly-burnished adult into an era of unprecedented promise, innovation, and opportunity. The world you will witness and contribute to can be fairer, wealthier, and more peaceful than any that people have ever known. What makes all these glories possible is the exponential pace of change driven by technology. Your generation takes that for granted, and revels in it. But it makes those older than you deeply uncomfortable, and many simply refuse to see it. That puts a lot of responsibility on you. More
Tag Index / Showing 1 - 10 of 12 results for “jobs”
The Knives of Class Warfare Turn Towards Tech’s Plutocrats
I have lots of quibbles with Joel Kotkin's recent essay published at the Daily Beast and already echoing elsewhere. He gets numerous facts wrong, and some of his assumptions are silly. But anyone in tech better pay close attention to his thorough summing-up of the numerous ways that tech's billionaires and their often-wealthy allies increasingly aim to influence social policy at a time when more and more Americans (and others in the developed-world middle class around the world) find middle-class life out of reach, and poverty grows among the less educated. More
A High-Altitude Hack to Bridge the Skills Gap
Hamadoun Touré, Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union, spoke at Techonomy 2011 about why broadband access should be a universal human right. Now, Touré's United Nations agency is partnering with British Airways to look for ways to match emerging talent with new jobs in tech. The two organizations have formed the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and launched an initiative, called "UnGrounded," that aims to identify the engineering, science, and tech skills most needed for today's job market, and create opportunities for training and talent discovery. The project will literally take off this summer when a group of CEOs, founders, and investors use an 11-hour transcontinental flight as a high-altitude hackathon, taking them from San Francisco to London, where they will present their ideas at ISD's Decide Now Act (DNA) Summit. More
Why Robots Might Boost Industry While Killing Jobs
Globalization is an easy culprit for the recent wave of U.S. unemployment, with domestic jobs shipped overseas to be replaced by cheap labor, often without adverse impact on the quality of a company's products or services. Apple is just one high-profile example of this trend. But automation and robotics may be contributing even more to our stubborn unemployment figures. Paradoxically, robots could also help bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. The Jan. 13 broadcast of 60 Minutes featured several Techonomists to help explain how this might happen. More
Is Telecommuting Overrated?
The futurist Alvin Toffler predicted the rise of telecommuting, calling the home office an "electronic cottage" that could enhance family and community cohesion. A growing segment of today's workforce telecommutes—in a variety of ways and with varying frequency. But, as reported by Slate's Evgeny Morozov, research indicates that the outcomes of tech-enabled remote work arrangements are decidedly mixed. A Deloitte report about a flexible work pilot program at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management concluded that both employees and their managers had a hard time evaluating performance, and that the quality of work suffered. And while the insurance giant Aetna allows 47 percent of its employees to work from home, those workers tend to be heavier, spurring the company to hire an online personal trainer. More
Skills Don’t Pay the Bills
What is the biggest threat to jobs in American manufacturing: robots or a skills gap? Many manufacturing jobs are vanishing because of computer-driven machinery, as discussed at Techonomy 2012, and nearly as many jobs have been outsourced. Thus, the industry’s future seems to lie in a new generation of highly skilled manufacturing employees who can run the computer that runs the machine. This means they must have a basic understanding of metallurgy, physics, chemistry, pneumatics, electrical wiring, and computer code.Some say there’s a skills gap, and employees with the right training simply do not exist. But that may not be the whole problem. More
Meet Baxter: The Robot That Will Take Your Job
Who’s your biggest competition for that new job? Turns out, it could be a robot named Baxter. This humanoid robot, created by Rodney Brooks and his team at Rethink Robotics, is easy to program and costs only $22,000. At the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Ariz., Brooks joined MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee to talk about how robots will change our lives. More
In New Program, Microsoft Engineers Teach High School Computer Science
In a new approach to fixing the computer science skill gap, Microsoft is sending its own engineers to teach in high school classrooms. Volunteers for the program commit to teaching a computer science class for a full school year for at least two hours a week. More
Skills Gap Widening on Two Fronts, Deloitte Team Concludes
One interpretation of the skills gap is that the knowledge acquired to earn a college degree is becoming obsolete faster than ever before. But, according to research by William D. Eggers, John Hagel, and Owen Sanderson of Deloitte, workers in fields that require a college education aren't the only ones whose career opportunities are becoming harder to define. So-called blue-collar worker now also have to keep up with rapidly evolving technology, as new jobs require skills like fluency in CAD blueprints or LEED certification requirements. More
Business Jobs Techonomy Detroit
Why I Believe in Detroit
In this session from Techonomy Detroit, four Detroiters share perspectives on life and work in their city, and where Detroit may be in 10 years. The speakers are: Tonya Allen of The Skillman Foundation; Catherine Kelly, publisher of Michigan Citizen; and Bruce Schwartz, the Detroit Relocation Ambassador for Quicken Loans/Bedrock Real Estate. Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley moderates. More
