The Future of Work

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The Future of Work

By School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Date and time

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 18:00 - 20:00 GMT

Location

Informatics Forum, G07

10 Crichton Street Edinburgh EH8 9AB United Kingdom

Description

Second in a series of public discussion, the event will cover ethical aspects of automation and the future of work.

About the event

In 2013 researchers from the Oxford University predicted that 47% of US jobs were at risk of computerisation within the next two decades.
In the near future, many jobs may become obsolete and an unprecedented number of people may become unemployed. The public are faced with two narratives: the future will be dark and oligarchical with a number of smaller tech companies controlling all, and the society will suffer from inequality and poverty. But optimists claim that AI will take over the mundane everyday tasks as well as the dangerous jobs and people will have more leisure time to pursue their own passions. But which scenario is more likely, it’s impossible to tell.
There’s a lot to discuss here: does AI already impact workforce and how? What are the jobs that are most likely to become automated? Are there jobs that are uniquely human and cannot be automated? Will changes in workforce impact economic and political systems and how? Come and join us for a discussion.

Panel:

- Paul Mason is a British commentator, journalist, writer and documentary film-maker. He was Culture and Digital Editor of Channel 4 News, becoming the programme's Economics Editor - a post he formerly held on BBC Two's Newsnight programme. He is an author of several books; his upcoming book “Clear Bright Future: A radical defence of the human being” will be published in May 2019, where he writes about the impact of algorithmic control and artificial intelligence on our future. He also writes a weekly column for the New Statesman, contributes to Novara Media, The Guardian, iNews, Le Monde Diplomatique and Freitag, and speaks to audiences across the globe about the impact of networks and automation on politics and society. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Wolverhampton.

- James Stewart is a lecturer and research fellow at the University of Edinburgh in the Institute for Science, Technology and Innovation. He works in the field of technology studies, concentrating on the appropriation, consumption and use of new ICTs and the co-evolution of large scale systems of technology and culture. He is a former Scientific Officer at the Institute for Prospective Technology Studies at the European Commission. He is currently working on projects about how new forms of digital information and evidence are incorporated and used in practice, such as digital mobility, crowdsourcing and inclusivity.

- Subramanian Ramamoorthy is a Reader in the School of Informatics at The University of Edinburgh. He leads the Robust Autonomy and Decisions research group, whose focus is on building robustly autonomous robotic systems and other decision making agents, capable of intelligently working with humans and other robots. Furthermore, he is the research leader in prediction and motion planning at the rapidly growing self-driving car start-up FiveAI, which is already testing its cars on the busy roads of south London. He is also an Executive Committee Member of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.


NB This event might be streamed live, recorded and/or photographed.

Organised by

Edinburgh’s School of Informatics is the largest academic centre of its kind in Europe and the UK’s most successful informatics research institution. We have consistently been a leader in the field since the 1960s, when our first Professor of Computer Science was appointed and the Department of Artificial Intelligence was founded. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 ranked us first in the UK for computer science and informatics. We produce more world leading and internationally excellent research in this field than any other UK university. We're also ranked 14th for Computer Science in the THES Rankings by Subject 2018. Our size and strength support unparalleled breadth in our taught courses, which are consistently ranked excellent in external assessments.

Our students rate us highly too. Members of staff are proud to have received EUSA Teaching Awards on the basis of student nominations and votes. We provide outstanding facilities. Computer laboratories are available to all Informatics students 24 hours a day. Our city centre premises include both teaching and research centres.

We lead the way in an exciting discipline that is central to a new enlightenment in scholarship and learning. Informatics is critical to the development of science, technology, culture and society. Our academics include Fellows of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Academy of Engineering. We boast recent winners of the most prestigious awards in the field, including the Herbrand Award, the Blaise Pascal Medal and the Yangtze River Scholar award.

Graduates from our programmes enjoy career success in a wide array of roles that shape our society, from developing the latest mobile technology to creating intelligent infrastructure. Many go on to work as project managers, researchers, software developers and consultants in the commercial sector (at firms such as Google, Amazon, Skyscanner or Adobe) or take up academic posts, often in Russell Group and US research universities such as MIT and Stanford. Some of our graduates have found success through start-up companies.

PRIVACY STATEMENT

Information about you: how we use it and with whom we share it.

We will use your personal data to allow us to process your registration, communicate with you and obtain your feedback about the event. We are processing the information about you for these purposes because by registering for the conference, you are entering into a contractual agreement for us to do so. In order to facilitate online bookings for our events, we use Eventbrite - a third party service which is not operated by the University of Edinburgh. Details of Eventbrite's privacy policy can be found at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/support/articles/en_US/Troubleshooting/eventbrite-privacy-policy?lg=en_GB

We will not share information about you with any other third party. We will hold the personal data you provided us for 6 months. We do not use profiling or automated decision-making processes.

If you have any questions about the privacy policy for this event, please contact Ms Kasia Kokowska, Communications and Outreach Manager, School of Informatics on kasia.kokowska@ed.ac.uk

If you have queries about the University of Edinburgh's privacy policy go to: https://www.ed.ac.uk/records-management/notice

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