Dave Heatley • Jul 17, 2019 •
The nice thing about forecasts is that you have so many to choose from.1 For the weather, you can choose between MetService, metvuw, yr, the Weather Channel and many others. It’s best if they agree to guarantee a perfect day in the mountains… … Read More
Dave Heatley • Jul 01, 2019 •
“Machines take jobs” cry the headlines. A journalist friend once said the media only publish two stories: “it’s that terrible” and “isn’t that wonderful”. “Machines take jobs” is clearly “terrible”. But its logical opposite, “machines create jobs”, is unlikely to make the grade as “wonderful”. Such selection effects mean that bad news crowds out the good. Today I’m going to … Read More
Dave Heatley • Jun 19, 2019 •
career (v) move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way. My good friend Mariska tells me that’s a better description of her work life than the more traditional definition… career (n) an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress. In the interests of science, and despite the small sample size, I thought I’d … Read More
Guest Author • May 20, 2019 •
Nik Green Many people worry about the impact of new and emerging technologies like robots and artificial intelligence on the number and quality of jobs. But we tend to overlook how frequently the labour market changes in the ordinary course of events, and the role that technology plays in this change. We can see these developments in a couple of … Read More
Robert Hickson • Feb 28, 2018 •
I’ve written previously about how no one really has any idea about the effect of automation on jobs. Erin Winick has done the hard work to illustrate that by compiling the predictions of numbers of jobs created or destroyed by various pundits and studies. Mostly these predictions focus on the US, with a few … Read More
John Pickering • Oct 16, 2017 •
Newshub decided to do an “AI” piece today. Expect much more of this kind of “filler” piece. They will go thus… “X says AI will take all our jobs, Y says AI will save us.” These pieces are about as well informed and informing as a lump of 4×2 – good for propping up a slow news day, … Read More
Elf Eldridge • Jul 08, 2012 •
As PhD students, we often don’t do a great job communicating a lot of things: our science, what supervision we want, what our dreams for our field and research are, or how we feel about our job prospects. After playing Pounamu at the Transit of Venus forum, another failure of communication came to my attention: the failure to … Read More