Coppola Comment

NESTA's book " Our work here is done: visions of a robot economy " was launched yesterday. I had the honour to contribute a chapter to the book, and also to speak at the launch yesterday. The launch, hosted by Stian Westlake, featured presentations by Ryan Avent, Izabella Kaminska, Ellie Truitt, Nick Hawes and the awesome Carlota Perez, and demonstrations of real live robots. I think the robots rather stole the show - perhaps that is a sign of things to come! The text of my speech at the launch is below. Robots and the future of work Last September, a research paper by Frey and Osborne scared the world. It concluded that as many as half of all American jobs could be automated. Not content with the loss of jobs from offshoring, the capitalist system now threatened further destruction of the American way of life. Not surprisingly, the “robots will eat your job” movement went into overdrive. The Atlantic listed some of the jobs most at risk: telemarketers...

My latest post at Pieria considers the impact of "smart" technology in city development, and warns that although technology brings considerable benefits, there are also significant dangers. I recently had the pleasure of attending The Economist's conference on the future of cities. At the heart of the conference was a thoughtful presentation by Richard Sennett of the LSE on "smart cities". "Smart cities" are a much-hyped phenomenon. Technology providers have promoted "smart" solutions to urban challenges, with varying degrees of success. All too often, their ideas have foundered on political and bureaucratic obstacles, or have proved unworkable because of conflict between the vision of clean technological solutions and what Sennett describes as the "messiness" of people's lives.... Read on here .

Germany is exporting people. Well, Eurozone countries exporting people is hardly news . But Germany isn't exporting the same sort of people as other Eurozone countries. Other countries are exporting their young and their skilled. Germany is exporting its old . Economically this makes complete sense. Germany has a lot of old people and a relative shortage of the young & skilled. So it imports young & skilled people and exports old ones. After all, exporting old people is surely better than killing them . There's nothing new about this, of course. Britain has been exporting old people for years. Relatively well-off pensioners like to retire to the sun after years of tolerating British weather. The southern countries of Europe contain substantial populations of expatriate Brits, many of them retired and living on savings. The economic collapse of the southern European states has taken its toll on them, of course: many British retirees in Cyprus lost substantial amoun...