Thursday 19 September 2013

Oxford researchers say that 45 percent of America’s occupations will be automated within the next 20 years


'Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people. A recent report from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades. The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support.

Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.

These results were calculated with a common statistical modeling method. More than 700 jobs on O*Net, an online career network, were considered, as well as the skills and education required for each. These features were weighted according to how automatable they were, and according to the engineering obstacles currently preventing computerization.

'Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization — tasks that required creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.'


Really?

Spoken like true academics and the vision of bat. My new book which will be out early next year, has a number of chapters on just this issue. Those automation systems, industrial and service robots and ubiquitous computerization will cull 90 percent of blue collar jobs in under a decade. And eventually march into white collar, more complex care, and higher thinking roles over the following decade.

For example, here's some jobs that will not exist after 2025.
  • Domestic robot maintenance.
  • Domestic instant production technology maintenance fitters.
  • Fast food servers.
  • Office administrators.
  • DJs.
  • Taxi drivers.
  • Pilots.
  • Dog walkers.
  • Painters and Decorators.
  • Trawler Fishermen.

Basically, tasks that can be simply repeated, robots and smart systems will undertake them.

But it is not all doom and gloom, and for many quite good:

10s of millions of new, unheard of jobs will be invented over the next 20 years. Many of the jobs created will not even look as though people are working, but having fun, adventure and theatrics. 

But more, the majority of the new fangled jobs will be further and further up the food value food chain, meaning better pay and conditions. And further, these new jobs will be in industries most have no idea of now, such as Consumer Tourist Space Travel Agent, Deep Ocean Marine Farmer, F1 Flying Car Grand Prix Racing Drivers; Life Extension Therapists, Solar Energy Engineers, Nanomanufacturing Design Engineers, Cognitive Enhancement Clinicians, and countless more!... It is gonna be existing even way before the Singularity is here!

The core issue, as you can see, is our kids, today's mid career professionals and blue collar craftsman must re-imagine their work life-cycle. Innovation, Entrepreneurism, and Enterprise must shoot up the agenda!

Keep in reading, I will be rolling out snippets of my new book toward the end of the year.
Entrepreneurship taught in schools?

This is a Bee on my bonnet issue. I have talked to much officials in the UK about getting Innovation, Enterprise and (below) Entrepreneurism in high school curriculum.

 Tyler Falk, writes a buzz article about the ‘E’ in Smartplanet.blog

'“Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest growing subjects in today’s undergraduate curricula,” according to the Kauffman Foundation. 

On college campuses in the United States, the number of courses on entrepreneurship have increased from 250 in 1985 to more than 5,000 by 2008 (PDF). 

But should the U.S. education system offer more of these courses earlier on in a student’s academic life?...

...NFTE’s conclusion from the results: “Entrepreneurship education is the fundamental tool for helping young people from low-income communities see a bigger future for themselves.”'

I will be head butting this into the public domain next year.

See Tylers whole article.


    Why electric car prices could plummet by 2020

    If car companies are true to their word, 2020 is set to be a good year. That’s because numerous car companies — including NissanGM, and Mercedes — say they expect to have fully-driverless (or nearly-driverless) cars on the market by the end of the decade. Now, an executive of one of the largest lithium-ion battery makers in the world says that he sees the cost of expensive batteries used in electric vehicles decreasing by half by 2020, as the Wall Street Journal reports:
    “We have an internal target to go down by at least a factor of two by 2020,” said Prabhakar Patil, chief executive officer of LG Chem Power Inc., a division of one of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery makers, LG Chem Ltd. “I am very positive in terms of the slope that I see.”
    But while it’s a positive outlook, there will be some things that need to change before we can start seeing truly significant price cuts on EVs and hybrids.
    Brian Kesseler, the president of Johnson Controls Inc.’s JCI Power Solutions division said cell costs may indeed fall by half, but overall costs of battery packs, which include the control systems that surround the energy source, are unlikely to decline that quickly without standardization across different auto makers.
    Still, it’s news that companies like GM and Tesla are betting on. Both say they are working on along-range electric car that will sell for around $30,000. Reducing battery costs will be key to making that a reality.
    The first private mission to Mars will launch in 2018 and use poop for radiation shielding



    'Dennis Tito, the world’s first space tourist, plans to send a married couple to Mars in 2018. The married couple will leave Earth in January, orbit Mars at an altitude of 100 miles (160km) in August, and then return home. The entire journey will last a total of 501 days; the longest continuous time ever spent in space. Spending so long in space will result in the astronauts being bombarded by a lot of solar radiation, increasing their risk of developing cancer by 3% — but Tito’s CTO has a plan: creating a radiation shield out of the astronauts’ poop.....'

    Wednesday 18 September 2013

    NASA discusses its warp drive research, prepares to create a warp bubble in the lab


    Harold White's possible warp drive, and star ship
    'Late last year, it emerged that a small team of NASA researchers were working on warp drive technology in the lab. Led by Harold “Sonny” White, the team devised a variation of the Alcubierre warp drive that could almost be feasibly produced — if we can work out how to produce and store antimatter. Now, White is ready to discuss some other facets of his warp drive, such as the energy requirements, what a spacecraft with a warp drive would look like, and what it would be like to travel at warp speed.'
    It's 2023 in London. You can make a phone call on your watch and report a traffic jam with a button on your glasses. But how will we really live, work and play? What kinds of constraints and opportunities will future Londoners face?

    This series of imaginary Londoners was produced for a workshop in September 2013 by a collaboration between Arup, Social Life, Re.Work, Commonplace, Tim Maughan and Nesta. They build on the team's knowledge, from urban neighbourhood engagement to smart technologies in the city. These profiles can never be perfect or all inclusive. They are a tool for exploring the needs and desires we should consider when designing a smarter London. More details: background information and the key urban trends we developed.   




    Sessions 2 and 3 of TEDCity2.0 in New York will be streamed live at Nesta on the evening of 20 September. 



    Consulting industry braces for disruption 


    By 



    'It was only inevitable that the consulting industry — which has long been telling everyone else they were being disrupted — would be disrupted itself.
    Photo credit: Joe McKendrick
    Photo credit: Joe McKendrick
    Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor who defined the disruption paradigm, teamed up with co-authors Dina Wang and Derek van Bever to look at the near future of the consulting industry.
    Until now, consulting firms, which are structured to be agile, have been relatively immune from disruptive forces, unlike more rigid businesses such as automobiles and steel. This is about to change, Christensen and his co-authors write in The Harvard Business Review. Typically, industry leaders tend to cede the lower ends of their markets to upstarts, while they are chased upstream to the higher-margin customers.
    Accordingly, Christensen and his co-authors observe, the biggest consulting companies — McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) — are seeing fewer large strategic engagements, and more “value-based pricing” arrangements.
    For a prime example of what will likely happen to consulting, look to the legal industry in recent years, Christensen and his co-authors point out.  A new generation of upstart legal services, offering 24-hour service and menus of commodity-priced items, has already usurped large segments of the market.
    Consulting businesses face competition from upstart firms which subcontract project work to freelancers, who are often experienced consultants themselves. These alternative firms also take on smaller clients not served by the large consulting firms.
    The authors see four scenarios unfolding for the consulting industry: consolidation, growing bases of smaller clients, more cross-disciplinary firms (such as the big four accounting firms offering a wide range of professional services}, and increasing adoption of big data analytics.'
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