I have been occasionally commenting on the nature of workforce in the United States. I was browsing around BLS Data and this fact surprised me, even though this trend has been happening for a decade, right under my nose, but I hadn’t noticed.
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I wrote about Workampers, old retirees that move around the country in search of work, in my earlier blog post that discussed the excellent book, Nomadland by Jessica Bruder. In that post I mentioned that: So, it is very likely that it was not a young person that picked, packed or shipped the gift that you bought online this Holiday season. Instead, it is very likely that it was an old retiree… Increasingly e-commerce channels rely on retirees to pick products in the warehouse, which are then shipped to customers. (Picking is the lowest entry-level job in warehouses). Much of such retirees were people who lost their savings during the 2008 recession. Recently, one of the best reporters writing on operational issues in…
Leave a CommentHow to think about the role of Artificial Intelligence in Operations? Many people talk up AI, IoT, automation, etc, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (following steam power, electricity, and computerization). Here is an example. I am more persuaded by the counter-arguments. For example, see a post by Luke Muehlhauser arguing there was only one industrial revolution, because one of the revolutions is substantively larger than, and different from the others, as exhibited in the figure below (data from the site). The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, which ironically, I read on paper, explores the effects of the rapid digitization and information technological advances (AI, Automation, etc) on the nature of work, wealth and society. Brynjolfsson and McAfee…
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