Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

data from recent US recessions and found that the jobs mostly likely to permanently disappear are the good middle-class jobs, while the jobs that tend to get created during recoveries are largely concentrated in low-wage sectors like retail, hospitality, and food preparation and, to a lesser extent, in high-skill professions that require extensive

Georgia Tech’s partnership with Udacity to offer a MOOC-based computer science degree and the University of Wisconsin’s experiment with competency-based credentials may offer previews of what is soon to arrive on a far more massive scale.

Narrative Science,

personal consumption amounts to only about 35 percent of China’s economy—roughly half the level in the United States.

A basic income program might help revitalize many of the small towns and rural areas that are losing population because jobs have evaporated.

Upending that traditional approach to problem solving, and unleashing all the information trapped in individual minds or published in obscure medical journals, likely represents one of the most important potential benefits of artificial intelligence and big data as applied to medicine.

A basic income would be efficient and would have relatively low administrative costs. A bureaucratic expansion of the welfare state would be far more expensive on a per capita basis, and far more unequal in its impact.

deflation is typically associated with soaring unemployment,

The most important factor in designing a workable guaranteed income scheme is getting the incentives right. The objective should be to provide a universal safety net as well as a supplement to low incomes—but without creating a disincentive to work and to be as productive as possible. The income provided should be relatively minimal: enough to get

Japan’s Kura sushi restaurant chain has already successfully pioneered an automation strategy.