The spread and rapid development of AI-related technologies are influencing many aspects of our daily lives, from social to educational, including the labour market. Many researchers have been highlighting the key role AI and technologies play in reshaping jobs and their related tasks, either by automating or enhancing human capabilities in the workplace. Can we estimate if, and to what extent, jobs and related tasks are exposed to the risk of being automatized by state-of-the-art AI-related technologies? Our work tackles this question through a data-driven approach: (i) developing a reproducible framework that exploits a battery of open-source Large Language Models to assess current AI and robotics' capabilities in performing job-related tasks; (ii) formalising and computing an AI exposure measure by occupation, namely the teai (Task Exposure to AI) index. Our results show that about one-third of U.S. employment is highly exposed to AI, primarily in high-skill jobs (aka, white collars). This exposure correlates positively with employment and wage growth from 2019 to 2023, indicating a beneficial impact of AI on productivity. The source codes and results are publicly available, enabling the whole community to benchmark and track AI and technology capabilities over time.

Japan's labor market may be at an inflection point as the nation braces for a shortfall of millions of workers, the rise of generative AI and risks to economic security. The spotlight is increasingly on the sustainability of wage growth, which has been accelerating at the fastest pace in three decades. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida now wants to see pay hikes that will be "several percentage points higher" than the country's inflation rate. Japan's widespread seniority-based employment system, low labor productivity, and workers' reluctance to hop from one job to another have been among the factors behind its tepid wage growth for years.

Robots aren't going to take everyone's jobs, but technology has already reshaped the world of work in ways that are creating clear winners and losers. And it will continue to do so without intervention, says the first report of MIT's Task Force on the Work of the Future. The supergroup of MIT academics was set up by MIT President Rafael Reif in early 2018 to investigate how emerging technologies will impact employment and devise strategies to steer developments in a positive direction. And the headline finding from their first publication is that it's not the quantity of jobs we should be worried about, but the quality. Widespread press reports of a looming "employment apocalypse" brought on by AI and automation are probably wide of the mark, according to the authors.

NEW DELHI: As newer technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) take over, workers need to upskill or face the risk of lower wages and unemployment, ADB warned today. ADB's'Asian Development Outlook, 2018' has called for government action on skill development coupled with steps in labour regulation, social protection and income redistribution. It said jobs which require repetitive, routine tasks and workers who do not have the education or training to move easily to other occupation, may face slow growth in wages. "New technologies alter the skills required of the workforce and may cause unemployment as some firms downsize or close. They make the less-skilled more likely to experience lower wage growth, exacerbating income inequality," it said.

Despite the longest growth run in nearly three decades, Japan's economic outlook remains far from robust as uncertainty abounds over wage growth and business investment. Under Abenomics, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's program of radical monetary easing, fiscal spending and vows of structural reforms, the economy grew at an annualized rate of 0.5 percent in the October-December period, marking the eighth straight quarter of expansion. It slowed from a revised 2.2 percent increase in the previous quarter and was below the potential growth rate of around 1.0 percent. Many economists expect the economy to keep growing at a moderate pace this year, but the biggest wild card could be volatility in financial markets after the recent global stock market rout. The key question now is whether domestic demand -- private consumption and corporate spending -- can pick up further and help the world's third-largest economy sustain its recent growth momentum, economists said.

The government will aim to double the country's labor productivity to 2 percent in the three years through 2020 from 0.9 percent, the average in the five years through 2015, informed sources said. The government is set to include the target in a package of policy measures it plans to adopt on Friday to help realize a "productivity revolution," an initiative designed to ensure sustainable wage growth and overcome deflation, the sources said. The policy package is also expected to call for increasing corporate capital spending by 10 percent in fiscal 2020 from the fiscal 2016 level and achieving wage growth of at least 3 percent every year during the three-year intensive reform period through 2020. The government is set to pledge that it will utilize all policy measures to improve productivity, including the greater use of big data and artificial intelligence technology. Also in the package, the government plans to reduce corporate tax burdens to internationally competitive levels for companies actively boosting their wages and capital expenditures.

While industrial robots are predicted to replace millions of U.S. workers and suppress wage growth in the next decade, reforms in education and social safety net largely lag behind, said a renowned U.S. economist. "There's a real mismatch between our institutions and the technologies coming on board," Daron Acemoglu, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Axios Media, an American news website, in an interview published on Sunday night. Industrial robots have taken over routine work from human hands in the past several decades. A paper published in March by Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, an economist at Boston University, estimated that the U.S. had already lost between 360,000 and 670,000 jobs to robots since 1990. "Economists are trained to think of technology as always increasing employment and raising wages," said Acemoglu, "but there's no theoretical justification for believing this."