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Good news! Automation capable of erasing white collar jobs is coming, but not for a decade or more. And that’s also the bad news because interest in automation accelerates during economic downturns, so once tech that can take your job arrives you’ll already have lived through another period of economic turmoil that may already have cost you your job.
That lovely scenario was advanced yesterday by professor Mirko Draca of The London School of Economics, who yesterday told Huawei’s 2018 Asia-Pacific Innovation Day 2018 that the world is currently in “an era of investment and experimentation” with technology. The effects of such eras, he said, generally emerge ten to fifteen years in the future.
Innovation in the 1980s therefore sparked the PC and internet booms of the mid-to-late 1990s, and we’re still surfing [SIC - suffering?] the changes they unleashed. “Our current era of mobile tech doesn’t measure up to the radical 1990s,” he said, as shown by the fact that productivity gains appear to have stalled for a decade or more.
[...] “We predict that AI and robotics will lead to some sort of productivity surge in ten to fifteen years,” he said, adding that there is “no clear evidence” that a new wave of technologies that threaten jobs has started.
But he also said that it will once businesses see the need to control costs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @05:01PM (1 child)
I'm not sure at what time or place accommodation in central London was possible at £5k a year (assuming you mean zone 1 when you say "central") but I've been living in the big smoke for over 20 years and never managed to spend so little except when I was in student halls.
I was lucky enough to be able to buy a house (well, a 2 bed flat) in London after living in the cheap house shares for 15 years. The only thing I've seen since becoming a homeowner is the disappearance of any houseshares that I could call cheap.
In the last place I was staying about eight years ago, I was paying £400pcm for a double room in a house share in a zone 3 suburb 10mins walk away from a tube station - that was a very good deal for the time and under 5k/yr, but not remotely central of course. The same sort of room on the same street is now going in the region of £1000-1200pcm. There are practically no "shithole" properties left where you can get anything anywhere near this cheap since they've all been bought and tarted up by private landlords or property management companies in order to justify large price/rental hikes.
In the zone 3 suburb I'm living in now, rents are cheaper but still in the order of £600-800pcm.
To put those prices in perspective, minimum wage earns you about £8.75 an hour and "London living wage" (a voluntary recommended level of minimum wage for London workers) earns you £10.20. Assuming an 8hr/day 5-days a week on London living wage (although thanks to zero hours contracts most people in this situation would work considerably less than the typical 40hr work week) then on average you've got ~£1770 a month income, of which you could expect to end up with £1500-1600 after tax (assuming you're taxed at 20% on the ~£10,000 or so that's in scope for income tax, and also assuming you don't have any student loan repayments etc).
You need to move a *long* way out into the suburbs before rents become reasonable for people who aren't on high wages, and then you're frequently dealing with a long and expensive commute (lots of my cow-orkers who live further out in e.g. Kent or Berkshire typically spend 5-10% of their annual salary on train travel).
Some links with pages showing the vastly disproportionate rise in house and rental prices:
http://www.cityam.com/259600/one-graph-explains-horrors-london-house-prices-and-why [cityam.com]
https://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/how-londons-property-market-has-changed-in-20-years-we-chart-average-house-prices-rental-trends-and-a106401.html# [homesandproperty.co.uk] (requires JS and access to jquery)
The second link in particular is especially revealing; house price increases of over 600% since 1996 are by no means unusual anywhere inside zone 3. Wages haven't remotely kept pace - if they had, the £18,000/yr I was earning soon after leaving university would be just shy of £100k/yr now. The same entry-level position today is actually more on the region of £25-30k.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 11 2018, @08:11PM
When I was at Uni in Miami, average low-end 1 bedroom apartment rent was $550/mo, and you could get that down by finding a roommate and renting a 2 bedrooom for $650 per month. I managed to do that one better and rent a room in a house that 6 of us got together to rent and my share was only $150 a month (average shares in that house were more like $200 per month, but my room lacked air conditioning - it wasn't as bad as that sounds.) Even when that lease was inconveniently non-renewed for the 6 of us I managed to find a studio apartment for myself alone advertised on a bulletin board for $250.
Point being: if you dig, you can find safe, clean accommodation even in big cities for quite a bit below "market rate." Of course, those two cheap spots I lived in had their good and bad points, but nothing terrible - I did look at dozens of potential cheap places to rent that I walked away from... lots of crazy out there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]