Machine revolution to snatch away 5 million jobs from humans

Robots are waiting to takeover your job.

The "Fourth Industrial Evolution" is already happening, according to a report from the World Economic Forum, which focuses on how technological change is influences the workplace and global economies at its meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland. Advancement in fields such as robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence will alter workplaces and the necessary new skills from workers in the years to come, according to "The Future of Jobs" report.

Not everyone will be affected the same way, with the report confirming that the jobs at high risks are office and administrative roles. Other industries with negative job forcast includes manufacturing and production, the arts and entertainment, construction and extraction, and installation and maintenance. In all, automation and robotics will result in 5.1 million job losses over the next five years, the researchers found.

"As all industries adjust,all occupations are moving through a fundamental change," wrote World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab and managing board member Richard Samans in the report. "While certain jobs are under threat by redundancy and others emerge rapidly, existing jobs are also passing through a change in the skill sets needed to do them."

The findings are based on a survey of 371 global companies with more than 13 million employees in 15 major advanced and emerging economies.

Office and administrative jobs will face what the report calls "a perfect storm of technological trends." Mobile internet and cloud technology will make some jobs redundant, while big data analytics and the Internet of things will also reduce the need for workers in these roles, the research found.

Around 7.1 million jobs will be cut down, with two-thirds of those losses centered on office and administrative categories. That will be somewhat offset by the gain of 2 million new jobs in areas such as business and financial operations. The net result? About 5.1 million fewer jobs overall by 2020, the report noted.

While that might seem frightening, especially to office managers, the World Economic Forum's forecast is hardly predicting the kind of doom that Oxford researchers predicted last year. According to that report, almost half of U.S. jobs are at risk, with household service robots and automation projected to sharply reduce the need for workers.

The job market is already changing rapidly in response to the Fourth Industrial Evolution, with employers seeking workers with STEM-related skills and experience. But almost four out of 10 employers report having difficulties finding qualified workers, which suggests that the education system isn't retooling quickly enough to provide students with the skills they'll need to survive in the labor market.

"It is simply not possible to weather the current technological revolution by waiting for the next generation's workforce to become better prepared," the report noted. "Instead it is critical that businesses take a commanding role in supporting their current workforces through re-training, that individuals take a proactive approach to their own lifelong learning."

While "The Future of Work" doesn't delve into economic inequality, their forecast has troubling implications for how the robotics revolution may aggravate already widening gaps between the haves and have-nots, based on issues ranging from gender to geographic location.

Any industrial revolution comes with growing pains, and among those most likely to feel the brunt of it are women, given that some of the fields with the highest projected growth -- such as in computers and math -- have the lowest rates of female workforce participation. That underscores the need to reexamine why women aren't pursuing so-called STEM fields, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Because STEM-related jobs tend to pay higher salaries than other industries, it means fewer women may reach earnings parity with their male cohorts in the coming years.

And then there is the widening gap between rich and poor countries. The Fourth Industrial Revolution could make that worse, with poor countries losing jobs to automation, increasing the jobless rates there and creating even bigger refugee waves. The Middle East and North Africa have the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, and many of the countries in those regions are failing to equip their youths with the skills necessarily to thrive in a world driven by AIs, robots, and automation, the report noted.

"The region runs the risk of worsening unemployment and talent shortages if skills gaps are exacerbated due to technological changes that further disrupt business models and labour markets," it warned.

Pocket-Sized Device Charges Your Phone using Water

 A sleek new device could help you charge your phone without an electric outlet.

Swedish startup MyFC unveiled its amazing technology, dubbed JAQ, at CES on Jan. 6. The device, small in size can easily slip into your back pocket, is a fuel cell charger. It uses saltwater and oxygen to convert chemical energy into electricity. Then it uses that electricity to charge your phone's battery.

The charger consists of a credit card-shaped "power card" and a hollowed out port that's about the size of a smartphone. The card contains saltwater, which fuels electricity-producing chemical reactions when you slip the card into the port. To get that electricity to your phone's battery, you simply plug your phone into the port with a standard cable. [Smartphones With the Longest Battery Life]

One JAQ power card produces about 1,800 milliampere-hours' (mAH) equivalent of electricity — that's nearly enough energy to fully charge an iPhone 6S. Larger devices, like tablets, can also be charged with the fuel cell, but it'll take more than one power card to get them fully loaded. The saltwater-containing power cards are good for just one use. After that, they stop producing the chemical reactions necessary to generate electricity.

The device works by combining two reactants, in this case hydrogen and oxygen, inside an enclosed space. Hydrogen atoms from the saltwater in the power card enter the fuel cell (there are 10 fuel cells in the card) at the anode, where a "chemical reaction removes their electrons,"MyFC explains on its website. These electrons then produce the current that powers the phone or tablet that's connected to JAQ

Once the hydrogen atoms are stripped of their electrons, they become positively charged hydrogen ions and are able to move through the fuel cell's electrolyte — a membrane like substance that limits the movement of ions in the cell. At the cathode end of the cell, oxygen from the air enters and combines with the hydrogen ions that made it through the electrolyte and electrons returning from the electrical circuit. This reaction results in a totally harmless byproduct: water (H2O).

JAQ isn't available for purchase just yet, but the company anticipates that the product will be ready to ship later this year. When it does go up for sale, MyFC hopes to implement a subscription service. Customers would sign up to receive a certain number of power cards every month. Individual cards would also be available for purchase and will likely cost about $1.50 each, a company spokesperson said.

Female engineers write better journals but get lesser citations

In this changing world, nothing is certain except death, taxes and gender disparity in tech and science. A number of studies have acknowledged this disparity; just as many women play games as men, but only men are thought of as gamers, said a recent Pew 

Research Centre study. Women are less easily seen as leaders, and more commonly seen as good assistants, another study found. Now, a study of close to one million engineering papers has discovered that despite publishing in more prestigious journals, female engineers are receiving less attention than their male counterparts. 

Gita Ghiasi and her team at Concordia University, Canada, used data drawn from Web of Science, a huge database of academic publications. Filtering for engineering journals from 2008 to 2013, the team gathered 679,338 articles with one million co-authors, assigning gender using a separate database of male and female first names. The journals selected from this database were then ranked by prestige, using Web of Science's 'Impact Factor'. 

The research garnered good news and bad news... and some more bad news. Women made up only 20 percent of the authors on the papers - approximately less than the 30 percent rate across all scientific disciplines. It also found, even though these women were publishing in more prestigious journals on average than their male counterparts -- a 2 percent increase in Impact Factor. Despite this, however, women's papers were cited 3 percent less frequently. 

This kind of gendered skewness is part of a wider phenomenon in science and tech, something far too complex to be explained away simply. But Ghiasi's team have a few ideas on how to reduce the gap. Women should collaborate more often, for example. 

"Women engineers are complying with the male-dominant engineering scientific system instead of changing its structure," Ghiasis says.

Research conducted at Emerson College supports this thesis, finding a similar pattern of gender bias in collaboration.