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EU legislators today (12 January) called for a universal basic income to combat the looming risk of job loss by the onward march of robots, as well as concerns about European welfare systems. Technological progress is no longer seen as safe path toward prosperity. A new generation of robots and the development of artificial intelligence may improve how we manufacture goods or how we spend our leisure time. But this new wave of intelligent gadgets and autonomous robots could also destroy thousands of jobs without creating new ones in the same proportion, warned a non-legislative report adopted by the European...

In South Africa, people who speak Afrikaans use the word "robot" to mean the same thing it means in English. But it is also the word for "traffic light." Why? Before automated signals, motorists on busy streets were directed by police officers standing on platforms. Those cops were automated out of a job. This bit of trivia comes from the dazzling new book "Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World," by University of Illinois at Chicago economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey. She points out that automation and robots are nothing new, that they are crucial to...

A French woman has revealed she is in love with a robot and determined to marry it. Lilly’s partner is a robot called InMoovator, who she 3D-printed herself and has been living with for a year. On her Twitter page, where she goes by ‘Lilly InMoovator,’ she says: ‘I'm a proud robosexual, we don't hurt anybody, we are just happy.’ . . . She insisted the idea is not ‘ridiculous’ or ‘bad’ but simply an alternative lifestyle.

Those who oppose outsourcing work to other countries -- or to robots - usually justify their opposition as a desire to protect Americans. But it actually reflects a lack of respect for working Americans, and for people in general - a failure to realize that skilled people, not the jobs they happen to occupy, are among the most valuable resources an economy can have.Think of an economy as a double-entry balance sheet, with columns for assets and liabilities. Many look at the balance sheet and see jobs on the asset side of the ledger, in effect consigning people to...

Chinese robots appear to be bringing to an end a path of "serial industrialisation" across Asia that has run for 60-odd years, says Hong Kong-based Bernstein analyst and ex-pat Kiwi Michael Parker. In a research note entitled Adam Smith vs Chinese Robots...The end of The Wealth of Nations, in one chart (not ours), Parker points out that instead of shedding low cost manufacturing as it develops, China is getting rid of the workers but not the work. Parker notes that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, remained broadly relevant to capital allocation decisions globally for 240 years. Basically,...

In what some Chinese news sites are calling a “first of its kind”, a person has been injured by a robot that malfunctioned, causing him to be sent to hospital. It happened Thursday afternoon at the 18th annual Shenzhen High-Tech Fair, where much of the country’s newest technology gets put on display. A robot nicknamed “Little Tubby” is being blamed for getting out of control and smashing a glass display case and injuring a person who had to be taken to hospital on a stretcher.

A robot went out of control at a technology fair in southern China’s Guangdong province Thursday, smashing a glass window and injuring a visitor.... An employee at Shenzhen Spreadview Century told Sixth Tone by phone that the staffer tried to pick up the robot, but that Fabo’s weight — 25 kilograms — was too much to handle, and the operator accidentally pushed the wrong button. Fabo’s automatic mode was turned off, which meant it could not avoid collisions by itself, he said... . The company had visited the injured person in the hospital and had paid compensation, the statement added.

The device is said to be employed at the border and can be used from anything to detecting low-flying drones to targeting a vehicle from six miles away. Chief project engineer Dmitry Perminov said: "In its structure there is a radar unit that detects a target: human - to about 7km distance, the car - up to 10km. "After detection, the target is in engaged using an optical system." And he confirmed that interest in the robot has already been significant. Perminov added: "This system can be applied not only as a military interface , but also for the protection...

<p>Foxconn has deployed 40,000 robots in its factories in mainland China as it aims to reduce the number of workers at its plants creating digital devices.</p> <p>Dai Chia-peng, general manager of the automation technology development committee of Foxconn, said during an interview with local Chinese media that those robots are basically made by Foxconn itself, except for some parts like servo motors and reducers that come from other parties.</p>

Did robots help make your pizza? f you ordered it from Silicon Valley's Zume Pizza, the answer is yes. The startup, which began delivery in April, is using intelligent machines to grab a slice of the multibillion-dollar pizza delivery market. Zume is one of a growing number of food-tech firms seeking to disrupt the restaurant industry with software and robots. "We're going to eliminate boring, repetitive, dangerous jobs, and we're going to free up people to do things that are higher value," said co-founder Alex Garden, a former Microsoft manager and president of mobile game maker Zynga Studios.

More than 70 percent of manufacturing jobs and more than half of jobs involving data collection might be rendered obsolete by automation and robots, according to a report from McKinsey & Company. One study estimated up to 80 percent of current jobs may be threatened by automation, which could become a critical economic issue for policy makers and global leaders in the coming decades. While Americans celebrate Labor Day weekend, it is a good time to contemplate the rise in artificial intelligence and how it can threaten jobs in all types of industries....

Investors in Cambodia’s garment industry are increasingly purchasing modern equipment as they look to produce higher value-added products to compete in the international market and counter rising labour costs, an industry insider said yesterday. Ly Tek Heng, operation manager at the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia (GMAC), said rising factory worker wages were thinning margins on the production of low-value garments and footwear in the face of fierce global competition.

We are such an anxiety-ridden society that we worry about problems that haven't happened, and, almost certainly, won't. Robots are an apt example. Even McKinsey and Co., the high-powered management consulting firm, professes to be concerned. We imagine hordes of robots destroying jobs, leaving millions of middle-class families without work and income. Relax. Unless we adopt self-destructive policies, this is one doomsday we'll avoid. One thing that the U.S. economy excels at is creating jobs. You might doubt this listening to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who promise personally to create millions of high-paying jobs. This is misleading. The overwhelming...

The surreal fact in the human tragedy in Dallas is that the sniper who murdered five police officers was not killed by another officer, but by a mechanical robot. This conjures science fiction images of killer robots deployed against man. It's not altogether reassuring. Technically, of course, the actual killing officer was not the robot, but the man operating the robot. The human element was very much in play, detonating an explosive carried by the robot. Sci-fi buffs might draw disturbing analogies to movies such as "Robocop," the popular 1987 film set in a near-future dystopian world in which a...

It is the worst of times — well no, not really. This past week we had shootings of police and shootings by police. The world economy and political situation is a mess. It is a time of crisis — without an apparent Churchill, Thatcher or Reagan. Yet, in many ways, things have never been better. In 1930, 304 American police officers were killed in the line of duty; last year it was 122. In 1930, the U.S. population was a little over one third of what it is today, so, on a population adjusted basis, there were about seven times...

 Are the Luddites staging a comeback? In the early 1900s, it was the British weavers and textile workers in the early 1900s, who destroyed machinery to protest newly developed manufacturing machinery they feared would rob them of their livelihoods. Recently, there appears to be a growing chorus of voices sounding the alarm on automation stealing all of our jobs to those invoking doomsday prophecies of a Hollywood-style "Rise of the Machines" taking over our world as we know it. This begs the question of whether we're seeing a resurgence of Luddite sentiments.Critics of automation are quick to cite a...

Robin Chase and Martin Ford explain why at a White House roundtable. Automation is going to make universal basic income a necessity sooner rather than later, a White House panel discussed today. Technology entrepreneur and Zipcar founder Robin Chase and author Martin Ford (Rise of the Robots) today during a Facebook Live discussion with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. “We need to start thinking about universal basic income,” Chase said, referring to the concept of a base-level of income each person would get just for being alive. “If people had that platform, that basic minimum, we could be...

A robot escaped from a testing area in Perm, a city not far from the Urals, and made it on to a busy junction, baffling passersby, but also disturbing traffic. “The robot was learning automatic movement algorithms on the testing ground, these functions will feature in the latest version of the Promobot.” The co-founder of the robot’s maker, Oleg Kivokurtsev, told ura.ru news agency. “Our engineer drove onto the testing ground and forgot to close the gates. So the robot escaped and went on his little adventure.” Kivokurtsev explained.

A new estimate says that robots will perform more than half of all jobs by 2045, leaving the frightening prospect that millions of once solidly middle-class people will be left idle and jobless. [snip] So: Is this it for human labor? Hardly. Since the Industrial Revolution, jeremiads about the end of human labor have been sounded with great frequency. They’ve never come true.

...“Had horses had an opportunity to vote and join the Republican or Democratic Party,” Leontief wrote, they might have been able to get “the necessary appropriation from Congress.”... ...what happens if the job market stops doing the job of providing a living wage for hundreds of millions of people? How will the economy spread money around... ...if the bottom quarter of the population in the United States and Europe simply couldn’t find a job at a wage that could cover the cost of basic staples? What if smart-learning machines took out lawyers and bankers? Or even, God forbid, journalists and...