1 Robots to take 800m jobs by 2030 (BBC) Up to 800
million global workers will lose their jobs by 2030 and be replaced by robotic
automation, a new report has found. The study of 46 countries and 800
occupations by the McKinsey Global Institute found that up to one-fifth of the
global work force will be affected.
It said one-third of the workforce in richer nations
like Germany and the US may need to retrain for other jobs. Machine operators
and food workers will be hit hardest, the report says. Poorer countries that
have less money to invest in automation will not be affected as much, according
to McKinsey.
India, the authors write, will only have about 9% of
jobs replaced by emerging technologies. The authors see tasks carried out by
mortgage brokers, paralegals, accountants, and some back-office staff as
especially vulnerable to automation.
Jobs requiring human interaction such as doctors,
lawyers, teachers and bartenders are seen by McKinsey as less prone to
automation. Specialised lower-wage jobs, such as gardening, plumbing and care
work, will also be less affected by automation, the study predicted.
In developed countries, the need for a university
education will grow, as jobs that require less education shrink. In the US
alone, 39 to 73 million jobs may be eliminated by 2030, but about 20 million of
those displaced workers may be able to easily transfer to other industries,
according to the McKinsey report.
2 Canada tests ‘basic income’ effect on poverty (San
Francisco Chronicle) Former security guard Tim Button considers how a sudden
increase in his income from an unusual social experiment has changed his life
in this Canadian industrial city along the shore of Lake Ontario.
Sipping coffee, Button says he has been unable to
work because of a fall from a roof, and the financial boost from Ontario
Province's new "basic income" program has enabled him to make plans
to visit distant family for Christmas for the first time in years. It has also
prompted him to eat healthier, schedule a long-postponed trip to the dentist
and mull taking a course to help him get back to work.
"It's making a huge difference for me,"
Button said of the almost 60 percent increase in monthly benefits he started
receiving in October from the Ontario government. Ontario intends to provide a
basic income to 4,000 people in three different communities as part of an
experiment to evaluate whether providing more money to people on public
assistance or low incomes will make a significant difference in their lives.
How people like Button respond over the next three
years is being closely watched by social scientist, economists, and policy
makers in Canada and around the world. "Does it produce better outcomes in
terms of education for the kids? Does it produce better health status after
three years of this kind of living? Does it produce better affinity with the
workplace if there is not a total disincentive to work?" said Hugh Segal,
a former Canadian senator consulted by the Ontario government for the pilot
project.
Technology leaders such as Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg and Tesla founder Elon Musk have promoted the idea as a way to
address the potential loss of jobs to automation and artificial intelligence. Ontario
Premier Kathleen Wynne said the experiment is rooted in a fear there will be a
mass dislocation of jobs not seen since the Industrial Revolution that
governments will have to address.
3 Just Eat enters FTSE 100 (Rupert Neate in The
Guardian) Just Eat, the online takeaway company, has been officially promoted
into the FTSE 100 list of Britain’s blue chip companies, with a valuation of
£5.5bn – making it worth half a billion pounds more than the UK’s second
biggest supermarket chain .
The UK’s love affair with having pizzas, curries and
kebabs delivered to their door has spawned a mobile food business with no
products and no outlets that is more highly valued than Sainsbury’s, which
sells 90,000 products through 1,400 stores – and also owns the Argos chain.
Just Eat is also worth more than Morrisons and Marks & Spencer.
Little-known Danish technology entrepreneur Bo
Bendtsen is the single-biggest shareholder in Just Eat with a 13% stake in the
business now worth just over £730m. But Bendtsen, who had just 88 followers on
Twitter at the time of writing, did not found the company, which provides
takeaways to 19 million people.
The man who came up with the idea was another Dane,
Jesper Buch. He hit upon the idea of Just Eat when he was on a diplomatic
internship in Norway in 2000 and set the company up with four friends in his
basement. He sold his entire Just Eat stake to a private equity firm for £3m in
2008.
Buch, now 44, came up with the idea for Just Eat
when he couldn’t find a phone number online to order pizza when he was hungry
in Olso. Realising there was a “massive gap in the market” he created his own
website which would list all nearby restaurants. He had hit on “the perfect
business model”, he told Money Week. “I did not need to handle any product – I
could just charge a commission for every transaction.”
Those commissions (13% for existing restaurants and
14% for newcomers, plus a £699 sign-up fee for restaurants joining the service)
added up fast. The company now works with 28,000 restaurants in the UK,
delivering more than 2m meals a week. It boasts that “nobody offers more
variety when it comes to bringing people food”.
More than 800 of Just Eat’s 2,500 staff from across
the world (Sainsbury’s, by comparison, has 195,000 staff) came together to
celebrate the company’s success last week by creating the world’s biggest human
image of a pizza.
