What will 2017 bring you

How much Universal Credit you get will depend on your earnings. Your circumstances are assessed every month. Monthly standard allowances are decreasing from 6 October , when the temporary increase for the coronavirus COVID pandemic ends.

You can only get an extra amount for more children if any of the following are true:. You might get the extra amount if you start caring for another child, depending on when they were born and how many children you have.

You could get money to help pay your housing costs. How much you get depends on your age and circumstances. If you receive Universal Credit you may also be able to get other financial support depending on your circumstances.

If you've worked in the last 2 to 3 years, you may also be eligible for:. You must submit your claim within 28 days of creating your account. If you live with your partner, they will also need to set up an account.

You'll be given a code to link the accounts together. You'll need to have an interview with Jobcentre Plus. You'll be told how to arrange this after you submit your claim. It will be within 10 working days. If you have a disability or health condition you may need a work capability assessment. You'll be told if you need one after you claim.

If you need help with bills or other costs while you wait for your first payment, you can apply to get an advance. Your account will be updated to tell you how much it will be. Childcare costs will be included in your Universal Credit payments after you have paid the childcare provider and reported the amount you have paid.

If you are responsible for a child or in some cases a young person up to the age of 19 , you can get help with childcare costs if:. If paying upfront for registered childcare is preventing you from starting work, help may be available. Universal Credit can accept any of the following documents as evidence to confirm the details of your childcare provider. This factsheet is helpful and lists what you need to do.

As well as the monthly standard allowance, you may get more money if you have a health condition or disability which stops you from working or limits the work you can do. A disability or health condition that limits the work you can do and your claim was made before 3 April You may have to go to a Work Capability Assessment.

A Work Capability Assessment will check to see if you:. As well as your monthly standard allowance, you may get extra money called the housing element to help pay your housing costs if you:. The housing element will be paid directly to your landlord. If you meet certain conditions you can ask for it to be paid to you, so you can pay your own rent. If your housing element is paid to you and you stop paying your rent, your landlord can ask to have your future housing element, or any housing element they have not received, paid directly to them.

The housing element may not cover all of your rent. You will need to check this as you will have to pay the rest to your landlord. Your housing costs are calculated at the end of each assessment period, based on your circumstances at that date. If you move home, your housing costs will be paid to the landlord whose details are held by Universal Credit at the end of the assessment period. The housing costs can only be paid to one landlord and no part payments are possible.

It is your responsibility to make sure that your previous and current landlords receive the correct amount of rent you owe. To check how much your housing element will be, you need to know if your landlord is a Social Sector landlord or a Private Sector landlord. If you were getting Housing Benefit immediately before you claimed Universal Credit, you will continue to receive your Housing Benefit in the usual way for an extra two weeks after you claim Universal Credit.

If this extra Housing Benefit is paid to you and you owe your landlord rent, you must use it to pay off what you owe. If you do not owe rent, you can keep the extra Housing Benefit. If your regular Housing Benefit is paid to your landlord, they will receive the extra Housing Benefit. Your landlord may put this towards any rent you owe, or you can ask them to pay it to you.

Your Universal Credit payment will not include money towards your rates. If you are getting Universal Credit, you may be able to claim a Rate Rebate. Supported accommodation is accommodation provided by Northern Ireland Housing Executive NIHE , a housing association, registered charity or voluntary organisation that provides you with care, support or supervision.

Temporary accommodation may be a hostel which does not provide care, support or supervision , a short term rented property or short term bed and breakfast. In these circumstances, you may be able to apply for Housing Benefit. The housing element will be your actual housing costs and any service charges Universal Credit can cover, but not charges for utilities such as electricity or gas. If you meet certain conditions you can request that your housing element is paid to you, allowing you to pay your own rent.

If your home is larger than you need, you will get less housing element. If you are affected by the SSSC, you will automatically be entitled to supplementary payments known as mitigation payments. These mitigation payments will normally be paid to your landlord, unless you pay your own rent to your landlord. And not a simple who, where, or when question.

And it did. In less than a second. With nothing more than a cheap little microprocessor and a slow link to the internet. Still not impressed? When Watson famously won a round of Jeopardy! That was only seven years ago. Consider: Last October, an Uber trucking subsidiary named Otto delivered 2, cases of Budweiser miles from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Colorado Springs—without a driver at the wheel.

Within a few years, this technology will go from prototype to full production, and that means millions of truck drivers will be out of a job. After many years of nothing much happening, suddenly robots can play chess better than the best grandmaster. They can play Jeopardy! They can recognize faces well enough that Welsh police recently made the first-ever arrest in the United Kingdom using facial recognition software. After years of plodding progress in voice recognition, Google announced earlier this year that it had reduced its word error rate from 8.

All of this is a sign that AI is improving exponentially, a product of both better computer hardware and software. However, if you keep up the doubling for a while, eventually one of those doubling cycles takes you from the brainpower of a lizard who cares? Once that happens, human-level AI is just a short step away. During the first 70 years of the digital era, computing power doubled every couple of years—and that produced steadily improving accounting software, airplane reservation systems, weather forecasts, Spotify, and the like.

Are we really this close to true AI? Even with all this doubling going on, until recently computer scientists thought we were still years away from machines being able to win at the ancient game of Go, usually regarded as the most complex human game in existence. But last year, a computer beat a Korean grandmaster considered one of the best of all time, and earlier this year it beat the highest-ranked Go player in the world. Far from slowing down, progress in artificial intelligence is now outstripping even the wildest hopes of the most dedicated AI cheerleaders.

Unfortunately, for those of us worried about robots taking away our jobs, these advances mean that mass unemployment is a lot closer than we feared—so close, in fact, that it may be starting already. Many who work in the software industry—people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk—have been sounding the alarm for years.

But their concerns are largely ignored by policymakers and, until recently, often ridiculed by writers tasked with interpreting technology or economics.

There are several pretty good reasons to dismiss this claim as a roadblock. To start, hardware designers will invent faster, more specialized chips. Google, for example, announced last spring that it had created a microchip called a Tensor Processing Unit, which it claimed was up to 30 times faster and 80 times more power efficient than an Intel processor for machine learning tasks. Other chips specialized for specific aspects of AI image recognition, neural networking, language processing, etc.

Your brain is not a single, superpowerful computing device. At the lowest level, neurons operate in parallel to create small clusters that perform semi-independent actions like responding to a specific environmental cue.

Finally, all these sub-brains operate in parallel, and the resulting overall state is monitored and managed by executive functions that make sense of the world and provide us with our feeling that we have conscious control of our actions. Modern computers also yoke lots of microprocessors together. As of , the fastest computer in the world uses roughly 40, processors with cores each. Each one of these cores has less power than the Intel processor on your desktop, but the entire machine delivers about the same power as the human brain.

Far from it. You guys keep predicting full-on AI, but it never happens. It was a humbling realization, and the entire field has been almost painfully realistic about its progress ever since.

This is just a tedious philosophical debating point. We only care if it can act like a human being well enough to do anything we can do. But waves of automation—steam engines, electricity, computers—always lead to predictions of mass unemployment. Instead they just make us more efficient. The AI Revolution will be no different.

This is a popular argument. The Industrial Revolution was all about mechanical power: Trains were more powerful than horses, and mechanical looms were more efficient than human muscle. At first, this did put people out of work: Those loom-smashing weavers in Yorkshire—the original Luddites—really did lose their livelihoods.

This caused massive social upheaval for decades until the entire economy adapted to the machine age. When that finally happened, there were as many jobs tending the new machines as there used to be doing manual labor. The eventual result was a huge increase in productivity: A single person could churn out a lot more cloth than she could before.

In the end, not only were as many people still employed, but they were employed at jobs tending machines that produced vastly more wealth than anyone had thought possible years before. Once labor unions began demanding a piece of this pie, everyone benefited. The AI Revolution will be nothing like that. When robots become as smart and capable as human beings, there will be nothing left for people to do because machines will be both stronger and smarter than humans.

No matter what job you name, robots will be able to do it. They will manufacture themselves, program themselves, repair themselves, and manage themselves.

In addition to doing our jobs at least as well as we do them, intelligent robots will be cheaper, faster, and far more reliable than humans. And they can work hours a week, not just No capitalist in her right mind would continue to employ humans.

If you want to look at this through a utopian lens, the AI Revolution has the potential to free humanity forever from drudgery. In the best-case scenario, a combination of intelligent robots and green energy will provide everyone on Earth with everything they need. But just as the Industrial Revolution caused a lot of short-term pain, so will intelligent robots. Several sharp observers have made this point, including James Surowiecki in a recent issue of Wired.

Productivity has actually stalled since and jobs have gotten steadily more plentiful ever since the Great Recession ended. True enough. All those trends are consistent with job losses to old-school automation, and as automation evolves into AI, they are likely to accelerate.

Remember that artificial intelligence progresses in exponential time. Then, in the relative blink of an eye, the final few doublings take place and robots go from having a thousandth of human brainpower to full human-level intelligence. In another 10 years or so, it will. Economists generally break employment into cognitive versus physical jobs and routine versus nonroutine jobs.

This gives us four basic categories of work:. Routine cognitive: accounts-payable clerk, telephone sales. Nonroutine physical: short-order cook, home health aide. Routine tasks will be the first to go—and thanks to advances in robotics engineering, both physical and cognitive tasks will be affected. Two-thirds said progress in machine learning had accelerated in recent years, with Asian researchers even more optimistic than North American researchers about the advent of full AI within 40 years.

The machine-learning researchers estimate that speech transcribers, translators, commercial drivers, retail sales, and similar jobs could be fully automated during the s.

Within a decade after that, all routine jobs could be gone. Nonroutine jobs will be next: surgeons, novelists, construction workers, police officers, and so forth. These jobs could all be fully automated during the s. By , AI will be capable of performing any task currently done by humans. And normal jobs are what almost all of us have.

That represents nearly half the US labor force.