Tag: jobs

Fewer black US reporters than in 1968

America’s newspapers, including many that for years decried the lack of black representation in Congress, on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms, have not increased the percentage of African-Americans in newsrooms above 1968 levels — and may have even cut the numbers.

According to a report on the Columbia Journalism Review and census data from the American Society of News Editors, blacks in newsrooms represent 4.78 percent of the staff. In 1968, the year of race riots following the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., LBJ’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders put the number of blacks in newsrooms at “less than 5 percent.”

CJR’s Alex T. Williams said the numbers are higher when all minorities are included, according the ASNE survey, but still a tiny 13.34 percent.

“The percentage of minorities employed in daily newspapers (the ASNE looks at black, Hispanic, Asian American, Native American, and multiracial populations) has increased from 3.95 percent in 1978, when the ASNE began conducting the census, to 13.34 percent in 2014. The Radio Television Digital News Association estimates that in 2014, minorities made up 13 percent of journalists in radio and 22.4 percent of journalists in television,” wrote Williams.

“Still, these figures are a far cry from the 37.4 percent of Americans that are minorities,” Williams added.

The figures for Washington reporters aren’t much different. Secrets recently interviewed American Urban Radio Networks White House correspondent April Ryan who determined that just 10 percent of White House regulars are black.

The author of The Presidency in Black and White said, “I’ve come out of that lower press room door, past the podium, or walked by and looked into that crowd. It shocks me sometimes. I’m like, ‘Wow!'”

It’s not an education thing. Other figures in the report said that minorities account for 24.2 percent of journalism or communications majors at colleges and universities. And they accounted for 21 percent of graduates from those programs.

The problem seems to be that minorities don’t get the job offers.

Overall, 49 percent of minority graduates found jobs versus 66 percent of white graduates.

Source: The Examiner

In 20 years robots will take over almost half of all jobs

macrobotIn the early days of artificial intelligence research, it was commonplace for the well-educated academics in the field to (mistakenly) think that being “intelligent” meant being good at things that other well-educated academic researchers struggled at, like playing chess. We now know, however, that it’s far harder to get robots to do things that come naturally to us (like identify objects and pick them up) than it is to get them to prove logical theorems or find patterns in huge volumes of data—things we humans struggle at. This and other counter-intuitive trends in AI and research on the nature of human intelligence have discouraged researchers from trying to predict which jobs will be automated, but a provocative new study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University tries to do just that, and their findings are alarming.

In “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” Frey and Osborne estimate that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years. This does not mean that they necessarily will be automated, despite the way the study has been portrayed in some media outlets. Rather, the authors argue, it is plausible over the next two decades that existing and foreseeable AI technologies could be used to cost-effectively automate those jobs out of existence. Machines may not (and probably won’t) do the jobs the same way as people, however just remember the last time you used an automated check-out system at a grocery store. There’s a difference between machines doing something cheaply and doing it well. Frey and Osborne took into account the possibility of such “task simplification” in their analysis.

Which jobs are most at risk? According to The Jetsons, we should expect robots to clean our houses and do other working-class occupations that educated elites have historically looked down upon as “unskilled.” But anyone who has done such a job, or has watched an episode of Undercover Boss and seen highly-paid CEOs fumble while trying to carry out the demanding minimum wage jobs usually performed by their underlings, knows that there is no such thing as unskilled labor anymore (if there ever was), especially if you are comparing humans and machines in the same breath. The gap between humans and current AI is vastly greater than the differences between humans.

Frey and Osborne focus on “engineering bottlenecks” in AI and robotics, and compare these stumbling points with the requirements of jobs in order to determine which are most and least likely to be vulnerable to automation. The biggest bottlenecks are perception and manipulation, creative intelligence, and social intelligence, all of which computers struggle mightily at (but Rosie the Robot excelled at, by the way). While the trend in recent decades has been towards a hollowing out of “middle-skill” jobs and an increase in low-paying service sector jobs and high-paying, highly educated jobs, Frey and Osborne expect that automation in the future will mainly substitute for “low-skill and low-wage” jobs.

So who, specifically, should be worried? They write:

Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation.

This may turn out to be correct, though I’d note two reservations I have. First, the model uses (in part) the notoriously unreliable subjective estimates of AI researchers to assign values to whether tasks can be automated or not, and second, it uses lists of job requirements, that the authors acknowledge are not written to assess whether a job can be easily automated. Indeed, job ads don’t list things that are universal (or nearly so) across humans, such as rudimentary social intelligence, language understanding, and commonsense. As AI researcher Ernest Davis points out, there has been “only very limited progress” in equipping robots with commonsense reasoning skills.

What do the authors predict will happen to those whose jobs are automated out of existence? “Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerisation–i.e., tasks requiring creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.” Besides Undercover Boss, one could also consult Mike Rose’s excellent book The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker in order to lay to rest the notion that low wageworkers lack creative and social skills.

Still, Frey and Osborne are pointing toward a quite urgent and important issue: how we can best structure our education system and ensure ready access to retraining services so that everyone has a fair shot at thriving in the labor market of the future. And as Matthew Yglesias of Slate notes in his overview of Tyler Cowen’s latest book on related issues, Average Is Over, various policy changes could enable more equitable social outcomes from the spread of intelligent machines we can expect this century.

However, let’s keep in mind that technology does not proceed autonomously, detached from any human influence. It is our tax dollars that fund most of the basic research underlying automation technologies, humans are designing these systems, and consumers have at least some say in how well automated service technologies fare in the market. I can imagine, for example, that “made (or served) by humans” could be the “organic” or “fair trade” of the future. If we as a society collectively vote with our wallets for good customer service by real people, the future may just look different from the often gloomy predictions of science fiction. After all, if there’s one thing humans will always be better at than machines, it’s being human. – Slate.com

The rise of the machine

Early in his first term Barack Obama joked that he would “keep an eye on the robots in case they try anything”. He should have known resistance is futile. During Mr Obama’s presidency, IBM’s Watson has proved computers can outfox the most agile minds, drones have become America’s weapon of choice, the driverless car is now a reality and the word “app” has been detached from its origin. No longer the realm of science fiction, the rise of robots now poses the central economic dilemma of the Obama era.

With each month, the US economy becomes steadily more automated. In January the US economy added just 4,000 manufacturing jobs, and the net increase since July is zero. Yet last month, manufacturing activity rose by its fastest rate since April, according to the Institute for Supply Management. The difference boils down to robots, which pose an increasingly nagging paradox: the more there are, the better for overall growth (since they boost productivity); yet the worse things become for the middle class. US median income has fallen in each of the last five years.

Things cannot continue as they are. Yet change is speeding up. Manufacturing employment is shrinking around the world. Among other countries, China is moving even faster towards industrial robotics, an area in which German and Japanese manufacturers dominate. Last year Foxconn, the Shenzhen-based assembler for Apple, Nokia and others, said it was buying 1m robots in the next three years to substitute for workers performing repetitive manual tasks. At the other end of the spectrum, a restaurant in Harbin, northern China, last year became the first to be entirely waited on by robots. Last month, China opened the world’s first museum of 3D printing.

The potential is huge. But in the developed world, the distribution of the benefits is unsustainable. The bulk of US jobs growth since mid-2009 has been in low-skilled areas, such as food preparation and domestic aides. In the second place is jobs growth in high-end services. Middle income jobs have cratered. According to the National Employment Law Project, low wage jobs (that pay between $7.69 and $13.83 an hour) formed 22 per cent of job losses in the recession but 58 per cent of recovery jobs since then – a mirror image of the picture for middle income jobs ($13.84 to $21.18).

Unsurprisingly, people are reverting to borrowing to stay in the game. Last week, Hero Wallet, a financial advisory firm, showed that one in four US workers were dipping into their retirement funds to meet current spending needs – in spite of the penalties that accrue. This usually involves taking out loans against their retirement accounts. The median income is almost 9 per cent lower today than when Mr Obama took office. It is unclear what he can do to prevent it from falling further, even if the US returns to a higher rate of economic growth.

The effects of technology are only just beginning to be felt in education and healthcare – the two most labour-intensive areas of the US economy that both suffer from productivity stagnation. Online education is beginning to spread. The mid-level private universities do not know what is about to hit them.

Even in healthcare, which reliably added jobs when every other sector was shedding them, technology is starting to look labour-saving.

But the spread of the robots will leave a large and growing chunk of the US labour force in the lurch. In their excellent primer, Race Against The Machine , Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point out that in the contest between changing technology and education, the former is winning. Too few Americans are prepared. Some, such as Mr Cowen, fear many never will be. He believes the federal government should pay a basic guaranteed income to all Americans – a despairing view that accepts there will be permanent losers.

Mr Obama is more optimistic. In his first term, he set a target that the US should graduate every American by 2020. Even if that were possible, it may not be a panacea. Incomes for those with only a college degree have also stagnated since 2000 (and fallen for men). Yet a healthy economy cannot for long be upheld by a minority of its workforce.

At some point, policy makers will be forced to grapple with what is intuitively obvious – that sustained growth is inconsistent with declining middle class incomes. In their book, Brynjolfsson and McAfee cite a meeting between Henry Ford and Walter Reuther, the union leader. Pointing at his new robots, Mr Ford says, “How will you get union dues from them?” Mr Reuther replied: “How will you get them to buy your cars?” – FT

African invader could threaten food, jobs

Africa Cup of Nations visitors could introduce an unwanted and potentially economically crippling visitor – the African invader fly.

Issuing an urgent alert, the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries yesterday announced steps it was taking to ensure visitors would not bring in any unwanted food or animal products that could be contaminated with the fly.

The fly – which has caused millions of rands worth of damage to the economies of South Africa’s neighbours – has already been detected in Limpopo, threatening food security.

Mpho Sekgala, the department’ s assistant director for plant health promotion , said: “Our appeal is not to bring any foreign food products, especially fruit.”

Jan Hendrik Venter, the department’s early warning systems manager, said Afcon posed a serious threat to the spread of the fly.

“It is imperative travellers do not travel with fruit from infected areas. One infected mango can contain 30 fly larvae and if this spreads we have serious problems.”

It is the third time since 2010 that the fly – whose larvae destroy fruit and vegetables – has been detected in Limpopo. In Botswana, it has caused more than R11-million damage on fruit farms.

“Our eradication programmes in the past have been successful. Eradication processes are under way in Limpopo,” Sekgala said.

Although it had been detected, it had yet to reach infestation phase.

“Our biggest concern is the spread of this fly and the threat to Mpumalanga and North West.

“All of our neighbouring countries have reported the fly’s occurrence … which is of major concern,” Sekgala said. Once infected, fruit had to be destroyed.

“The biggest challenge is the movement of infected fruit and education of hawkers and subsistence farmers.

“While infected areas have been quarantined, there is a danger of the fly spreading through vendors selling fruit to motorists.”

If the infestation is not curbed, it could have detrimental effects, especially to the economy.

Venter said: “We have established containment areas and are eradicating the insect through organic pesticides and specialised bait traps in villages, orchards and production zones.

“The financial loss is on multiple fronts. It can cause large production loss for small-scale farmers, threatening food security, and can lead to international trade bans.

“Trade restrictions could see market loss and difficulty in accessing new markets.

“The direct financial impact is in terms of production losses, while the indirect impact is market losses. Studies show that a 10% production loss can lead to the potential loss of 75000 jobs.” timeslive.co.za