Latest news with #IndustrialRevolution
News18
9 hours ago
- Business
- News18
‘AI To Wipe Out Half Of Entry-Level Jobs': Trump ‘Silent', But Barack Obama Says...
Last Updated: Former US President Barack Obama's reaction came in response to an article that offers a blunt warning about the risks AI poses to the workforce. Former US President Barack Obama has raised concerns about the uncertain future that artificial intelligence (AI) could bring for jobs, especially white-collar ones. His reaction came in response to an article that offers a blunt warning about the risks AI poses to the workforce. Sharing the article on his X (formerly Twitter) account, he wrote, 'At a time when people are understandably focused on the daily chaos in Washington, these articles describe the rapidly accelerating impact that AI is going to have on jobs, the economy and how we live." At a time when people are understandably focused on the daily chaos in Washington, these articles describe the rapidly accelerating impact that AI is going to have on jobs, the economy, and how we live. — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 30, 2025 The article he shared, from features Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, who gives a stark warning to the US government. He said AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years and push unemployment to between 10 and 20 per cent. He urged both AI companies and the government to stop 'sugar-coating" what's coming. 'Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen. It sounds crazy and people just don't believe it," he said. Amodei explained how AI is no longer just helping workers by automating simple tasks but is starting to replace jobs in fields like technology, finance, law and consulting. He said, 'It's going to happen in a small amount of time—as little as a couple of years or less." Amodei is not alone who has raised the alarm. Steve Bannon, a top official during Trump's first term and host of the popular MAGA podcast 'War Room," says AI's impact on jobs is being ignored now but will become a big issue in the 2028 presidential campaign. 'I don't think anyone is taking into consideration how administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30 — entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s — are going to be eviscerated," Bannon told the outlet. Meanwhile, Obama's post caught attention online with many users agreeing that the issue needs more attention. One user commented, 'Good to see a former president raise awareness of the storm that is coming." Another added, 'This is a big deal. There are many jobs for which it is trivial for AI to replace. A sober warming that needs to be taken seriously." 'Agreed. Although this narrative has been present before – including during the Industrial Revolution – and we managed through it. Maybe this time is different," a person remarked. An individual pointed out, 'Undoubtedly, there will be certain repercussions. However, it is crucial not to underestimate the resilience and adaptability of humanity. Throughout history, in the face of any emerging technology, humanity has consistently demonstrated its capacity to adjust and navigate new challenges." While Obama agreed with Amodei's concerns, this isn't the first time he has spoken about AI's impact on jobs. Back in April, during an event at Hamilton College in New York, he shared his thoughts on how AI could affect job security. He pointed out that roles involving routine tasks are at higher risk. According to him, advanced AI models can code better than '60 per cent, 70 per cent of coders now." First Published:
The Guardian
13 hours ago
- Business
- The Guardian
In Hong Kong, my daughter was dazzled by futuristic tech – and I glimpsed the world she'll grow up in
A few months ago, I travelled with my six-year-old daughter to Hong Kong. As we made our way out of the airport and boarded a train, we shared a brief moment that gave me pause to reflect on how different her conception of the world will be from the one I grew up with. We sat down on immaculate seats, surrounded by LED screens. She looked around and said: 'Wow Daddy, we don't have trains like this back in London.' As the week wore on, and she pointed out other things that she had never seen back home, her comment about the high-speed train took on a broader resonance. Used to Britain's strained and crumbling public transport, my little girl had identified how economic power has migrated to a different model of capitalism over the past generation. When I was growing up in the heady, Cool Britannia era of the 1990s, Britain almost seemed like the apex of global civilisation. The only place ahead on its developmental trajectory was the US. And even if MTV or Hollywood presented it as the shining city on the hill, the smart kids knew it was really just Rome to Britain's Greece. In school, we learned how Britain, the birthplace of industrialised capitalism and parliamentary democracy and long the colonial ruler of places including Hong Kong, had created an ideal form of society that was the model for everywhere else. When we told the story of how capitalism emerged, it was through the enclosure of medieval English villages and the growth of the Industrial Revolution's 'dark satanic mills'. When we spoke of the rise of democracy, it was through the nobles holding King John to Magna Carta or Oliver Cromwell cementing the power of parliament. Britain, the US and some parts of western Europe were the 'developed world'. Everywhere else was 'developing'. And development was a one-way road. The various crises we saw on the news engulfing distant lands in Africa, Asia or the Middle East were framed as a painful step in the maturing process that countries passed through in order to become societies like Britain. This is not the world that British children growing up in the 21st century are now experiencing. Our trip to Hong Kong was a stark reminder of this. Back in 2014, the Chinese island city-state was named the overseas destination that most young British professionals wanted to relocate to. In second place was Dubai. Today, entire television programmes are devoted to the subject of young Brits moving to 'DXB', alongside other Arab cities such as Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. In Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman is pushing forward with his sci-fi vision for the Line – a futuristic, AI-powered linear city, where smart technology will connect inhabitants moving between two parallel mirrored skyscrapers that stretch across 170km of desert. Meanwhile multiple UK governments have been trying and failing for years to advance plans for a high-speed rail line, HS2. The affection young British influencers show for places that are still ultimately autocratic, no matter how much gloss and ring-lighting they use, is hardly surprising. The football clubs British kids support might be owned by Gulf royalty. The films they watch might look as though they take place in LA but are shot in the UAE. The idea that these are the places you now go to if you want to 'make it' has become almost as ubiquitous as the idea of following the 'American dream' was a generation ago. What does this shift in the axis of our global order mean politically? As the historian Quinn Slobodian detailed in his 2023 book Crack-Up Capitalism, Hong Kong long functioned as a utopian ideal for free-market radicals who sought to push a vision of capitalism that worked best without the constraining demands of mass democracy. Even Donald Trump, in his nativist justification for a trade war with China, often betrays the envy he feels towards its ability to crush dissent and suppress wages in a way that US constitutional traditions make more difficult. In Britain, it has become more common for our politicians and journalists to cite their admiration for the emergence of technologically advanced, politically repressive states in what was once called the 'developing world'. The former British prime minister Boris Johnson travelled to Riyadh in February and stated: 'Saudi Arabia is a country where things are happening with incredible speed and decisiveness. Frankly, we need to learn that in the UK.' About the same time, the Telegraph journalist Isabel Oakeshott wrote a gushing piece about moving to Dubai for cheaper private school fees, saying that 'unlike angry, divided Britain, Dubai is the ultimate multicultural success story'. The idea that capitalism might work best with limited, or even nonexistent, democracy is quietly becoming more acceptable. Just last week, Oakeshott's partner, Reform UK's deputy leader, Richard Tice, said Britain should 'aspire to' the low crime rate and widespread national pride found in Dubai. That the Emirati city is an absolute monarchy – regularly criticised by human rights organisations for imprisoning journalists, lawyers and political dissidents with little concern for the public's right to freedom of expression – appeared to be of little concern to Tice or others on the conservative right who celebrate the city's 'booming metropolis'. With our political and media elites now openly celebrating draconian regimes, it is likely that my daughter's generation will grow up receiving a different message about the importance of Britain's democratic 'traditions'. According to a Channel 4 study from earlier this year, 52% of gen Zers felt the UK would be a better place 'if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections'. Unless our leaders start to promote an alternative vision of how society could function, and Britain's place in a world where the west is no longer 'best', more and more of our young people will have the feeling that the future lies elsewhere. Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire
Indian Express
17 hours ago
- Business
- Indian Express
India may soon become the third-largest economy in the world. But there is more to it
In a bout of professional enthusiasm, the chief executive officer of NITI Aayog, the Union government's policy body for transforming India, announced that the Indian economy had overtaken Japan to become the world's fourth-largest economy, following the USA, China and Germany. He jumped the gun because, as NITI Aayog member Arvind Virmani pointed out, this is likely to happen a few months down the road. With a nominal GDP of $4.187 trillion, India is set to move ahead of Japan's GDP of $4.186 trillion by the end of 2025. However, as many have pointed out, the vast gap between Japan's per capita GDP of $33,900 and India's per capita GDP of $2,880 sets the two apart. India remains a low-middle-income economy, a developing economy with a modest per capita income but demographics that will sustain the growth process. Japan is a developed, if an ageing, industrial and trading power. The sustained growth of the Indian economy over the past three decades, with its ups and downs, has, without doubt, slowly but surely increased the size of the economy. Way back in July 1991, the then finance minister of India, Manmohan Singh, told Parliament, prefacing his forecast with Victor Hugo's famous words that 'no power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come', that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea. It became an idea that gained international recognition a few years later when the British historian Angus Maddison published his masterly survey of the world economy pointing to the resurgence of China and India. Maddison's classic study of The World Economy (OECD, 20023) made the point that in 1700, China and India accounted for almost half the world income and that two centuries of colonialism, combined with the fact that the Industrial Revolution had occurred mainly in Europe, contributed to the decline of these ancient and large Asian economies. The Maddison study kindled hope in Asia that China and India were on the way to recover their lost space in the global economy and that the 21st century would once again be an Asian century. Since China was by then rising at a faster pace, it overtook Japan in 2010. This event happened soon after the transatlantic financial crisis (usually referred to as the global financial crisis), of 2008-09. The crisis had helped China overtake Japan and Europe and reduce the gap with the USA. It created a global flutter and marked the turning point in China's global rise. It is instructive to recall that in 2010, China overtook Japan when Japan's GDP was still $5.474 trillion. China's emergence as the world's second-largest economy sent Japan into a funk. Japan had already lived through a decade of low growth and low expectations, and China overtaking it became a wake-up call. It would not be incorrect to speculate that the return of Shinzo Abe as prime minister of Japan in 2012 (his first term of 2006-07 was truncated by poor health) was partly on account of Japan's yearning for a strong and charismatic leader focused on economic revival. Abe began his second tenure launching the 'three arrows' programme that came to be known as 'Abenomics' — of aggressive monetary easing, liberal fiscal policy and structural reforms aimed at enhancing productivity and growth. This gave Japan hope that, despite being pushed to third place by China, it could still remain a globally important economy. The exit of Abe, followed by a string of lacklustre leadership and the challenges posed by the return of President Donald Trump, have depressed Japan once again. To add to its woes, Germany recently overtook Japan, becoming the third-largest economy, pushing Japan to fourth place. Germany, too, has been slowing down, and so Japan and Germany could see themselves swapping places from time to time, depending on their relative performance. Also, recall that China overtook a still-growing Japan, India is overtaking a slowing Japan and a slowing Germany. It is against this background that news has come from the International Monetary Fund that India is now poised to overtake Japan. It is interesting to note that while there was much hand-wringing and widespread concern in Japan when China overtook it, the news about India has not made any impact in Japan. There was, according to my friends in Japan, little news coverage and no expression of any concern. This could be on account of the fact that while China is viewed as a challenge in Japan, India is viewed as an opportunity. Good diplomatic and economic relations have, in part, contributed to a benign response in Japan to the news of India's rise. Equally, the fact that India in no way poses any challenge to Japan, either as an economic competitor or as a geopolitical rival, would also explain the subdued reporting of the IMF news. When China overtook Japan, the former was viewed as a significant competitor in the global market as well as a geopolitical rival. Export-dependent Japan viewed with concern the rise of China as a global trading power. India, on the other hand, is still not viewed as a competitor in the trading world, much less a geopolitical rival. It is still possible that exchange rate changes, new challenges in global trade and seasonal performance of the three economies — India, Japan and Germany — may keep the rank race alive for some time. After all, the gap between the three is not much. If the Indian economy forges ahead over the next few years and crosses the $5 trillion mark, it would place some distance between itself and Japan and Germany. If not, these rankings could keep changing. What is, however, certain is that once India clearly establishes itself as the third-largest economy, it will remain in that place for a long time to come, given the distance it has to travel to catch up with China, whose nominal GDP is currently around $18 trillion. With the US and China in a race for economic space and geopolitical influence, India's best bet would be to focus on its own economic performance and ensure that it is able to sustain an inclusive growth process that makes the economy more competitive and improves peoples' lives. The writer is founder-trustee, Centre for Air Power Studies and distinguished fellow, United Service Institution of India
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
How Soon Should Companies Prepare for a 2°C World?
A billboard shows the current temperature over 100 degrees in June 2024 in Phoenix. Credit - Photo byLook through the new five-year outlook from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and you won't see the U.N. atmospheric science body use the words 'emergency' or 'disaster.' And yet it would be hard for anyone even semi-literate in the science of climate change to flip through it without a sense of urgency and alarm. The report, released earlier this week, finds that global temperatures will continue at or near record levels with a possibility that the temperature-rise since the Industrial Revolution nears 2°C by 2030. Already, warming momentarily breached 1.5°C of warming in 2024. It's a big marker: decades ago policymakers settled on 2°C as an ideal cap of sorts. That's because, at some point between 1.5°C and 2°C, we might expect to begin seeing climate effects that are both dire and, perhaps more importantly, irreversible. The WMO report reaffirms that the world has entered that danger zone—and the risks posed by the planet's warming are on the verge of growing dramatically. The increasingly dire atmospheric reality, underscored by this new report, might lead to some urgent calls for companies to cut their emissions. Indeed, reducing emissions is the only way to keep the problem from getting worse. But our temperature-rise trajectory should also push companies to take a hard look at how prepared they are for the changes that will come on the road to 2°C—not decades from now but in the next five years. 'We are in a climate emergency, and the situation worsens every year,' Sonia I. Seneviratne, a professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science of the ETH Zurich, told me earlier this year. 'It's not necessarily making the headlines, because there are also many other crises, but we shouldn't forget it.' The WMO report outlines a number of alarming predictions for the next half-decade. For the summer season in the Northern Hemisphere, temperatures are expected to exceed averages in previous decades 'almost everywhere.' In the Arctic during the Northern winter season, the warming is expected to be particularly extreme, with the temperature anomaly more than 3.5 times as large as the global anomaly. And sea ice is expected to continue to decline across the Arctic. Perhaps more importantly, and left uncovered by the report, are the second-order effects of a warmer planet. Between 1.5°C and 2°C, heat waves become more frequent and intense, according to the U.N.'s climate science body. Crop yields decline. And coral reefs may be wiped out completely. This spells trouble for a wide range of companies. Infrastructure faces increased flood and fire risk. Demand for air conditioning will stretch electric utilities thin. Farmers and agriculture companies not only face crop losses but also declining worker productivity in the heat and other extreme weather. All of this adds up to a massive headwind poised to slow economic growth. A 2021 report from Swiss reinsurance giant Swiss Re found that 2°C of warming would lead to global GDP that is 11% lower by the mid-century. Don't get me wrong. Sophisticated companies are aware of the challenges on the horizon. Research has shown that a growing number of firms are disclosing the risks posed to their business by the physical effects of climate change. Nonetheless, many companies are still early in grappling with these challenges. Few are able to quantify the risk in financial terms and most lack comprehensive plans to even for the most forward-thinking firms, the problem with this new atmosphere in which we find ourselves is that it's impossible to fully understand what destruction these hotter temperatures will bring—and, therefore, what can be done to prepare. With each fraction of a degree that global temperatures rise, the further we get into uncharted territory that stretches our scientific analysis. Climate deniers use uncertainty to argue that we should slow our efforts to reduce emissions: why should we spend trillions to address something we don't fully understand? But the truth is that the present uncertainty is far scarier than even potentially hyperbolic messaging about climate change ending the world. The new climate reality means we can expect a variety of extreme weather events, seemingly unpredictably. Over the next half-decade, we will get a good sense of who has prepared effectively. To get this story in your inbox, subscribe to the TIME CO2 Leadership Report newsletter here. Write to Justin Worland at
Time Magazine
a day ago
- Science
- Time Magazine
How Soon Should Companies Prepare for a 2°C World?
Look through the new five-year outlook from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and you won't see the U.N. atmospheric science body use the words 'emergency' or 'disaster.' And yet it would be hard for anyone even semi-literate in the science of climate change to flip through it without a sense of urgency and alarm. The report, released earlier this week, finds that global temperatures will continue at or near record levels with a possibility that the temperature-rise since the Industrial Revolution nears 2°C by 2030. Already, warming momentarily breached 1.5°C of warming in 2024. It's a big marker: decades ago policymakers settled on 2°C as an ideal cap of sorts. That's because, at some point between 1.5°C and 2°C, we might expect to begin seeing climate effects that are both dire and, perhaps more importantly, irreversible. The WMO report reaffirms that the world has entered that danger zone—and the risks posed by the planet's warming are on the verge of growing dramatically. The increasingly dire atmospheric reality, underscored by this new report, might lead to some urgent calls for companies to cut their emissions. Indeed, reducing emissions is the only way to keep the problem from getting worse. But our temperature-rise trajectory should also push companies to take a hard look at how prepared they are for the changes that will come on the road to 2°C—not decades from now but in the next five years. 'We are in a climate emergency, and the situation worsens every year,' Sonia I. Seneviratne, a professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science of the ETH Zurich, told me earlier this year. 'It's not necessarily making the headlines, because there are also many other crises, but we shouldn't forget it.' The WMO report outlines a number of alarming predictions for the next half-decade. For the summer season in the Northern Hemisphere, temperatures are expected to exceed averages in previous decades 'almost everywhere.' In the Arctic during the Northern winter season, the warming is expected to be particularly extreme, with the temperature anomaly more than 3.5 times as large as the global anomaly. And sea ice is expected to continue to decline across the Arctic. Perhaps more importantly, and left uncovered by the report, are the second-order effects of a warmer planet. Between 1.5°C and 2°C, heat waves become more frequent and intense, according to the U.N.'s climate science body. Crop yields decline. And coral reefs may be wiped out completely. This spells trouble for a wide range of companies. Infrastructure faces increased flood and fire risk. Demand for air conditioning will stretch electric utilities thin. Farmers and agriculture companies not only face crop losses but also declining worker productivity in the heat and other extreme weather. All of this adds up to a massive headwind poised to slow economic growth. A 2021 report from Swiss reinsurance giant Swiss Re found that 2°C of warming would lead to global GDP that is 11% lower by the mid-century. Don't get me wrong. Sophisticated companies are aware of the challenges on the horizon. Research has shown that a growing number of firms are disclosing the risks posed to their business by the physical effects of climate change. Nonetheless, many companies are still early in grappling with these challenges. Few are able to quantify the risk in financial terms and most lack comprehensive plans to prepare. And, even for the most forward-thinking firms, the problem with this new atmosphere in which we find ourselves is that it's impossible to fully understand what destruction these hotter temperatures will bring—and, therefore, what can be done to prepare. With each fraction of a degree that global temperatures rise, the further we get into uncharted territory that stretches our scientific analysis. Climate deniers use uncertainty to argue that we should slow our efforts to reduce emissions: why should we spend trillions to address something we don't fully understand? But the truth is that the present uncertainty is far scarier than even potentially hyperbolic messaging about climate change ending the world. The new climate reality means we can expect a variety of extreme weather events, seemingly unpredictably. Over the next half-decade, we will get a good sense of who has prepared effectively.
