Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Technology And The Future Of Jobs

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BATR  April 30 2014

EmploymentProductivityDecoupled

Quite a stir occurred with the academic presentation, How Technology Is Destroying Jobs, by Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee. Both “have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.”

“Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence, according to Brynjolfsson, is a chart that only an economist could love. In economics, productivity—the amount of economic value created for a given unit of input, such as an hour of labor—is a crucial indicator of growth and wealth creation. It is a measure of progress. On the chart Brynjolfsson likes to show, separate lines represent productivity and total employment in the United States. For years after World War II, the two lines closely tracked each other, with increases in jobs corresponding to increases in productivity. The pattern is clear: as businesses generated more value from their workers, the country as a whole became richer, which fueled more economic activity and created even more jobs. Then, beginning in 2000, the lines diverge; productivity continues to rise robustly, but employment suddenly wilts. By 2011, a significant gap appears between the two lines, showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call it the “great decoupling.” And Brynjolfsson says he is confident that technology is behind both the healthy growth in productivity and the weak growth in jobs.”

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Michael A. Bedar ~ Is Choice Lost? Microchips To Administer Drugs, Replace Pills

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NaturalNews  April 25 2014

MicrochippingAccording to reports from CNN, people who use pharmaceutical drugs, but who don’t like having to remember, think, exercise their personal agency, or make their own proactive choices throughout their day, may soon be able to get their medications automatically administered via an implanted chip.

MIT researchers and a company called MicroCHIPS are developing a chip smaller than a square inch in area, which can be preloaded with drugs. It can release drugs into your body in given doses and time intervals, programmed according to “doctor’s orders” – while your mind wanders on “more important” things.

When the dosage or intervals need to be changed, the microchips would be able to be adjusted remotely by the doctor, says the report. The chips, already tested in patients withe osteoporosis since 2012, will have the ability to transmit real-time information to create a permanent record of exactly what dose was administered when, along with other medical information. Expected to be released in 2017, the chips may be able to function wirelessly in the body for 16 years.

When “at risk for a heart attack,” this device can “rescue” you, says the report. MicroCHIPS CEO Bradley Paddock says, “The MicroCHIPS implantable drug delivery device is the greatest advancement in delivering medicine since the first tablet pill was developed in 1876.”

What could possibly go wrong?

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Bacteria Removed From Water With Simple Pine Tree Filter

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BeforeItsNews  February 28 2014

Image courtesy of the researchers
Image courtesy of the researchers

MIT group shows xylem tissue in sapwood can filter bacteria from contaminated water.

If you’ve run out of drinking water during a lakeside camping trip, there’s a simple solution: Break off a branch from the nearest pine tree, peel away the bark, and slowly pour lake water through the stick. The improvised filter should trap any bacteria, producing fresh, uncontaminated water.

A false-color electron microscope image showing E. coli bacteria (green) trapped over xylem pit membranes (red and blue) in the sapwood after filtration.

In fact, an MIT team has discovered that this low-tech filtration system can produce up to four liters of drinking water a day — enough to quench the thirst of a typical person.

In a paper published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, the researchers demonstrate that a small piece of sapwood can filter out more than 99 percent of the bacteria E. coli from water. They say the size of the pores in sapwood — which contains xylem tissue evolved to transport sap up the length of a tree — also allows water through while blocking most types of bacteria.

Co-author Rohit Karnik, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, says sapwood is a promising, low-cost, and efficient material for water filtration, particularly for rural communities where more advanced filtration systems are not readily accessible.

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More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People

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By Steve Lohr | The New York Times
October 24 2011

Erik BrynjolfssonA faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.

“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.

Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal research scientist at the center, are two of the nation’s leading experts on technology and productivity. The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair, whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology.

Indeed, they were originally going to write a book titled, “The Digital Frontier,” about the “cornucopia of innovation that is going on,” Mr. McAfee said. Yet as the employment picture failed to brighten in the last two years, the two changed course to examine technology’s role in the jobless recovery.

The authors are not the only ones recently to point to the job fallout from technology. In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work. “This last repository of jobs is shrinking — fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs — and we have a problem,” Mr. Arthur writes.

The M.I.T. authors’ claim that automation is accelerating is not shared by some economists. Prominent among them are Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern and Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, who contend that productivity improvement owing to technological innovation rose from 1995 to 2004, but has trailed off since. Mr. Cowen emphasized that point in an e-book, “The Great Stagnation,” published this year.

Technology has always displaced some work and jobs. Over the years, many experts have warned — mistakenly — that machines were gaining the upper hand. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes warned of a “new disease” that he termed “technological unemployment,” the inability of the economy to create new jobs faster than jobs were lost to automation.

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