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Automation, robots and globalisation are rapidly changing the workplace and governments must act fast and decisively to counter the effects or face a worsening of social and economic tensions, the OECD warned. Almost half of all jobs could be wiped out or radically altered in the next two decades due to automation, the Paris-based group said in a report on Tuesday. According to OECD Labor Director Stefano Scarpetta, the pace of change will be “startling.” Safety nets and training systems built up over decades to protect workers are struggling to keep up with the “megatrends” changing the nature of work, the OECD said. While some workers will benefit as technology opens new markets and increases productivity, young, low-skilled, part-time and gig-economy workers are vulnerable. “ Deep and rapid structural changes are on the horizon, bringing with them major new opportunities but also greater uncertainty among those who are not well equipped to grasp them,” Scarpetta said. Rea...

Much of the push toward self-driving cars has been underwritten by the hope that they will save lives by getting involved in fewer crashes with fewer injuries and deaths than human-driven cars. But so far, most comparisons between human drivers and automated vehicles have been at best uneven, and at worst, unfair. The statistics measuring how many crashes occur are hard to argue with: More than 90 percent of car crashes in the US are thought to involve some form of driver error. Eliminating this error would, in two years, save as many people as the country lost in all of the Vietnam War. But to me, as a human factors researcher, that’s not enough information to properly evaluate whether automation may actually be better than humans at not crashing. Their respective crash rates can only be determined by also knowing how many non-collisions happen. For human drivers is it one collision per billion chances to crash, or one in a trillion? Assessing the rate at which things d...