Compared with booming profits, rich-country workers have lost out, as Chinese factory workers, Indian software engineers and the spread of computer automation undermine bargaining power and wage growth.

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This problem was solved by Dr Chua's collaborator, Tamas Roska, and his group at the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

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He switched from factory automation to computer-assisted surgery in the late 1980s.

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Even more disconcerting is the fact that for what ever automation, and computer science has given us, it has also taken away from us.

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David Autor, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out that the main effect of automation in the computer era is not that it destroys blue-collar jobs but that it destroys any job that can be reduced to a routine.

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My own background teaching Computer Science brings a precision, discipline, and automation to the financial planning process.

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Any action can be recorded and fed to a companion computer program, where tweaks can can be made to the automation.

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