Warning: Constant WPCF7_VALIDATE_CONFIGURATION already defined in /home2/ltg37jq5/public_html/wp-config.php on line 92 Search Results “Martin Ford” « Limits to Growth
One of the reactions to the dire predictions of mass unemployment in the automated future is to claim that it won’t be a problem at all. Just institute universal basic income (UBI), the pollyannas say, and everyone will be happy with their free money, and the machines will be doing all the work — utopia!
But organizing UBI is hardly a small thing. The pricetag will be very high and the emperors of automation might not cotton to being taxed to support the millions of workers that they have disemployed. And wouldn’t free money being handed out be an even bigger magnet to illegal aliens than American jobs?
Of course, when millions of simple jobs are taken over from humans by robots, most immigration will become obsolete and should be ended as an economic adjustment to the automation economy.
Human workers are impossible to find on some factory floors.
Plus, even if all parties were agreeable to UBI (doubtful), the set-up time might be lengthy because lawyers and politicians will want to be involved. Surely such a major transition away from the economic system of millennia will be difficult.
Following is an article from the optimistic school of thought:
Experts estimate about a quarter of American jobs could soon be automated. Looking further down the line, we may see a majority of jobs being done by robots. If 60 percent of jobs were to be eliminated, for example, a tremendous amount of people would be out of work, and we’d very likely have to adopt a program like Universal Basic Income (UBI). We don’t yet know how these changes will impact society, but a lot of people are trying to figure out just that.
“I think a very large number of jobs are going to be impacted — automated or deskilled. Eventually, it might be a majority,” Ford says.
Ford says just 20 percent of jobs disappearing would have a “staggering impact” on society and the economy. He says the jobs that will be safest, in terms of automation, will be the ones that require some level of creativity.
“The other areas are those things that require unique human qualities like empathy or building sophisticated human relationships with other people,” Fox says. That might include a job where you have relationships with clients, like in sales, or a job where you’re caring for others, he says.
Richard Baldwin, a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, tells Inverse that jobs that aren’t completely automated will still be affected by automation.
“Almost all occupations will still require some people to do the tasks that can’t be automated or offshored,” Baldwin says. He believes jobs that require human skills like empathy, motivating people, dealing with unexpected situations, curiosity, innovation, ethics will not be automated.
There are also simply jobs that won’t be automated for a long time because it will take so long for the technology to develop, Ford says. He thinks it would take a robot “like C-3PO” to replace an electrician, for example.
Once there are fewer jobs, and some kind of program like UBI that is keeping people financially stable, many believe we’ll simply have more time to do the things we want to do that don’t necessarily earn us much or any money. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang says on his campaign website that UBI will “enable all Americans to pay their bills, educate themselves, start businesses, be more creative, stay healthy, relocate for work, spend time with their children, take care of loved ones, and have a real stake in the future.” (Continues)
The book got my attention in particular about how insane it is to continue immigrating millions of low-skilled foreigners when many of the jobs they take will be obsolete for human workers in just a few years.
The word is gradually getting out that the technology of robots, automation and AI needs attention for the threat it poses, although today’s booming economy makes that future easy to ignore.
Disruption of the job market and the economy from automation and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the primary ideas animating Andrew Yang’s surprising campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Alone among the candidates, Yang is directly engaging with one of the central forces that will shape our futures.
Over the past ten years, I have written two books on the subject of artificial intelligence and its impact on the job market and the economy. I’ve spoken at dozens of events in more than 30 countries. The majority of my presentations were given to what you might call elite audiences — executives, technologists, Wall Street financiers, economists, government technocrats and so forth. I’ve found that, virtually without exception, these people take the specter of technological disruption seriously.
To be sure, not everyone buys into the possibility of widespread unemployment resulting from automation. But even the most skeptical generally recognize that the speed at which AI is advancing could create a stark divide, with a large and growing fraction of our workforce left struggling to maintain a foothold in the economy.
A recent report from the consulting firm Deloitte found that, among more than a thousand surveyed American executives, 63 percent agreed with the statement that “to cut costs, my company wants to automate as many jobs as possible using AI,” and 36 percent already believe that job losses from AI-enabled automation should be viewed as an ethical issue. In other words, while media pundits dismiss worries about automation, executives at America’s largest companies are actively planning for it. Continue reading this article
Martin Ford, the technology expert whose 2016 book Rise of the Robots woke up a lot of people to the automation risk, is continuing to speak to audiences warning them about the threat of a jobless future.
He recently spoke in Armenia to discuss the topic as described below — but perhaps he should be rattling some cages in America’s capitol city where awareness of coming technological job loss is near zero. One obvious point: it makes no sense to continue admitting thousands of unskilled illegal aliens from the south when there will be no jobs for them at all when automation hits hard in a few years.
Human workers have largely disappeared from some manufacturing floors after being replaced by robots.
Ford remarked in a recent tweet that the Star’s headline “is a bit over the top” but he did not deny that a severe economic disruption is likely.
Artificial intelligence will soon be widespread in the workforce
Robots will make half of the world’s workforce redundant in the next 10 to 20 years in a global unemployment crisis, an AI expert has claimed.
Top US futurist Martin Ford said automaton will soon be widespread, with all low-skilled jobs replaced by robots.
Ford, who focuses on the impact of AI and robotics on the job market, warned we need to be ready for widespread global unemployment.
He acknowledges the “long record of false alarms,” but argues that this time is different.
The pace of automation, he says, is no longer linear, but exponential, like the growth in computing capacity predicted by Moore’s Law.
The economy, Ford says, will not have time to create new professions to absorb the tens of millions of workers displaced by automation.
“My primary concern is that as AI and machine learning and robotics advance, a huge fraction of the jobs and tasks currently performed in the economy are going to be susceptible to automation,” he told the World Congress on Information Technology in Armenia today.
“Primarily it’s going to be those types of roles that are fundamentally routine, repetitive and, to some extent, predictable.
“That could be jobs in factories, but it could also be white collar jobs, the kind of job where you’re sitting in front of the computer doing something relatively routine – perhaps producing the same report again and again.”
White-collar jobs are also at risk for the first time, Ford says. On Wall Street, the number of financial workers has already plunged by 50,000 since 2000, as computers can process 100,000 transactions in a tenth of a second. (Continues)
Below is an excerpt from a new book, The Culture of AI, Everyday Life and the Digital Revolution. Unlike most books now available about the coming technological transformation, it is written by a sociologist rather than a Silicon Valley type. So it may address the cultural effects that arise from automation and smart machines taking a bigger place in the workplace and society generally.
The enormous changes about to descend upon the modern world should be considered more carefully by political leaders in Washington who now seem mostly asleep. America’s jobs economy is booming now, but tech experts think that a more widespread use of robots, automation and artificial intelligence is coming in a few years.
It’s likely that the US won’t need an extra million low-skilled Hondurans (which is current rate of inflow through America’s open border, more or less) in a decade or so when the smart machines become less expensive to hire than even the cheapest illegal alien.
With the AI-powered workplace of tomorrow arriving sooner than expected, what does this mean for us?
The debate about robotics on the future economy and job market is one divided squarely between transformationalists and sceptics, but that debate has in fact been increasingly undermined by the dynamics of AI and its relentless acceleration. Recent evidence indicates that robotics and AI are heavily impacting the economy, destroying low-wage jobs and increasingly eating away at higher-skill occupations as people are increasingly replaced by intelligent algorithms. There is evidence that the workplace of tomorrow, powered by AI and accelerating digital technology, is about to arrive much sooner than anticipated by many analysts.
A 2017 report from the World Economic Forum estimates the net loss of over 5 million jobs across 15 developed countries by 2020. Another report, published by the International Labor Organization, predicts that over 137 million workers in the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia are likely to be replaced by robots in the near future. Moreover, as this tipping point in robotic job deployment is reached, advancing technology is driving many developed economies towards higher inequality. The global digital economy is generating more monopolies and resulting in greater income gaps between rich and poor, with many workers ending up unemployed and many highly skilled professionals increasing their wealth.
Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs has explored the stunning historical impact of machines in reducing the overall burden of work, and also their adverse distributional consequences on wealth. Drawing on US census data, Sachs notes that, whilst agricultural workers comprised 36% of the American labor force in 1900, they made up less than 1% of the labor market in 2015.
There has also been a sharp decline in the numbers of production workers (those working in mining, construction and manufacturing), from 24% in 1900 to 14% in 2015 of the US labor force. For Sachs, mechanization and machines lie at the core of the global shift from rural to urban life.
“Machines”, writes Sachs, “have dramatically eased the toil of most Americans and extended our lives, in stark contrast to the hard, long toil and lower life expectancies that continue for hundreds of millions of people around the world who are still trapped in subsistence agriculture”. Sachs argues that there is a clear disconnect between ongoing labor productivity growth and wages, which is leading to a decline in the share of labor in national income, and one principal reason for this is the displacement of workers by robots and smart machines. Workers most impacted by the astonishing growth in automation, according to Sachs, are those in jobs which are repetitive, predictable, and requiring only low to moderate levels of expertise.
But automation as a system should not be held to involve the progressive displacement of employment in toto. Sceptics have been quick to caution that robots cannot (at least as yet) reprogram or service their own operations. This point is often made by sceptics to underscore that technological innovation creates new, high-skilled jobs. The argument is that robotic automation, in fact, generates job creation for technicians, computer programmers and other newly generated digital workers. But the evidence for this claim looks increasingly brittle. Futurist Martin Ford convincingly shows that the US economy, for instance, has become progressively less effective at creating new jobs. This is largely because disruptive technological shifts are driving people out of the labor force. Most significantly, recent evidence demonstrates that every new robot entering the workplace leads to at least six job losses. Continue reading this article
That approach may have been too gloomy at a time when the jobs economy had been booming, so he is back with an offer of free money — a sure-fire attention getter.
When Fox News host Pete Hegseth asked his guest on Sunday what was up with the cash giveaway, Yang answered, “In my mind, the reason why Donald Trump is our president today is that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, and now we’re about to do the same thing to millions of jobs in retail, call centers, truck drivers, fast food and on and on through the economy. And this message is resounding loud and clear when I talk to Americans in early states around the country.”
Certainly, it is insane for America to continue admitting low-skilled foreigners from peasant economies when machines will be replacing them in a few years. It was disappointing to hear President Trump remark recently that he wanted “more people coming into our country” — a policy which won’t help citizen wages rise and does not recognize the technological train wreck coming our way.
In the roboticized, automated and artificially intelligent future that the world faces, Third World nations will have even fewer possibilities for coping than more advanced countries. Africa, for example, now offers cheap labor for manufacturing, and the Economist called the continent An awakening giant in 2014.
However, Africa’s industrial boomlet may be cut short by cheaper automation in the United States:
Automation in US factories could increase global migration by wiping out employment opportunities in Africa, according to a development industry expert.
Sara Pantuliano, acting executive director of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), told the Davos summit that unemployed Africans would be more likely to leave the continent if local manufacturing jobs dried up in the face of renewed US competition.
She highlighted recent ODI research which suggested operating robots in US factories could become cheaper than hiring Kenyan workers by 2033.
The cost of creating and using robots is expected to fall in wealthier countries, and could reach a tipping point where it becomes more efficient than using cheap labour in poorer countries.
On some manufacturing floors, human workers can be hard to find.
Of course, Africa won’t be the only underdeveloped region to be hit by automation; they will all be affected. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything other than severe social disruption arising from areas where severe job loss occurs.
Two problems developing countries face in an AI future
Artificial Intelligence is likely to make a dramatic impact on developing countries that rely on lower wages to generate a competitive advantage. This will include countries that provide low cost offshore manufacturing as well as countries like India, which are more focused on service offshoring.
There are two problems developing countries face in an AI future:
1. Much of the work available in developing countries is relatively unskilled and routine, repetitive and predictable in nature. Work of this type is destined to be automated. This will be true in both developed and developing countries, but some economists believe the impact could be especially hard on poorer nations because a greater fraction of their workforce is engaged in work of this type.
2. The traditional path to economic development has been to build factories which employ large numbers of unskilled workers. As AI and robotics advance there will be less and less need for such labor-intensive factories (or for service offshoring) of this kind. Much of this production will end up being “reshored” to developed countries where it will be produced using highly automated facilities.
As this traditional path to economic growth begins to evaporate, this will pose a real challenge. In fact economists have already identified what they call “premature deindustrialization” in many developing countries — in other words, companies are replacing their factory workers with automation before they have the means to do so.
It’s one thing to have an automotive factory filled with robots that perform specific simple tasks very precisely. However, the next step is adding machines with intelligence, and it’s hard to tell how far it will go ultimately, but AI promises even more disruption into the world of work and the economy.
The format of the book is a series of interviews with experts in the field which is probably the most promising approach to a topic that is still experimental and open ended.
Here’s a review, with a warning in the last paragraph that is rather chilling:
In Martin Ford’s last book, the best-selling “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” (Basic Books, 2015), the noted futurist explained how software that can leverage Big Data and predictive algorithms is poised to “transform the nature and number of knowledge-based jobs in organizations and industries across the board.” In other words, it’s not just blue collar workers whose jobs are threatened by the advent of AI and machine learning. If your white collar gig can be automated, add it to the endangered species list.
In his new book, “Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building It” (Packt Publishing), which just hit the shelves this month, Ford assembles a fascinating series of in-depth, one-on-one interviews with 23 of the world’s leading researchers and entrepreneurs working in various aspects of the fields of AI and robotics.
“Over the last decade, ‘AI’ has been primarily about deep learning,” Ford told Pure AI, “so I made sure to include the most prominent people I could find working on that technology. But I also picked a number of people who have been critical of it, as well as people researching other areas, such as emotional AI, and some people with serious entrepreneurial ambitions.”
Many of the interviews included in this book are high-level conversations with extremely smart engineers and scientists about a topic some readers might feel is beyond them. But even the techie talks in this book are surprisingly accessible — and Ford helps readers gear up with an introduction that includes a great basic AI/ML vocabulary list.
Among the marquee names on Ford’s interview list is inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who is probably best-known as the author of “The Singularity is Near” (Penguin Books, September 2006) and “How to Create a Mind” (Penguin Books, August 2013). Kurzweil is currently director of Engineering at Google, but his long resume is, well, Wikipedia-worthy. (He also maintains the Accelerating Intelligence Web site that’s well worth a look.) Another is Andrew Ng, the co-founder of Coursera who also led the Google Brain Team. Also, there’s a conversation with Jeffrey Dean, Google senior fellow and current head of AI and Google Brain.
[. . .]
One of the things about this book that will make it stand out from the sky-high-and-growing stack of publications on this newly popular subject is that it demonstrates, with compelling conversations that, at least for now, there’s really no consensus among AI mavens about where these technologies are leading us and when we’ll get there.
“Their differences on some very important things was truly striking,” Ford said. “For example, the one question I asked everyone, of course, was ‘When will we achieve human-level AI.’ It’s really the most fascinating question of all, and the predictions ranged from Rodney Brooks’ (chairman of Rethink Robotics) estimate of nearly 200 years to Ray Kurzweil’s estimate of 11 years.”
“One thing they all agreed on to some extent,” Ford added, “is that AI is going to be tremendously disruptive. Everyone agreed that its potential impact on jobs and the economy is not overhyped, but very real. If you look at the improving dexterity of the robots in, for example, the Amazon warehouses. Within five years or so, those environments are probably going to be a lot less human-labor-intensive. For people who can learn these technologies, the opportunities are there. Some of those folks are making millions, but it’s rare that you can take a fast-food worker and turn him or her into a deep learning expert.” (Continues)
America’s automated AI future does not need low-skilled, minimally educated Third-Worlders like the Hondurans now flooding the border demanding admittance as immigrants.
Monday’s Washington Post has an interesting report about a roboticized warehouse that requires just one human to keep an eye on things. Perhaps the Post thinks it’s less edgy to portray Red China as being a heartless job-killer than to show the same thing in this country.
In a facility where “most workers have been rendered obsolete,” the chief executive Richard Liu declares, “I hope my company would be 100 percent automation someday.”
Most western executives are less blatant about how they intend to abolish their expensive employees to save costs, but none of the big brains have explained how a future economy is supposed to work without customers to buy the more cheaply produced consumer goods. Because without paychecks, there are no shoppers.
Richard Liu is known in the People’s Republic as Liu Qiangdong. His company JD.com is one of the leading e-commerce industry leaders in China, so his industrial choices do not go unnoticed. Anyway, whenever machines become less expensive than human workers, the switch will happen because of basic market forces.
JD.com plans on an automated future as shown below.
There is not a lot that can be done in the face of the automated future, but it’s crazy to continue importing immigrant workers who will soon be totally unnecessary, even at their lower cost.
The Post article was reprinted in the Tulsa World, posted below:
SHANGHAI — Inside a warehouse the size of seven football fields, hundreds of robots pack roughly 200,000 boxes each day and ship them to customers across China. Four humans babysit.
One is Zou Rui, 25, a soft-spoken engineer who stands for much of his eight-hour shift in New Balance sneakers, monitoring a milky white mechanical arm. It plunges up and down like a pecking chicken, grabbing parcels with a suction-cupped hand and dropping them into containers on a conveyor belt.
If something looks odd, Zou rushes to fix it. Otherwise, he said, he jots notes in a binder, tracking the arm’s performance for his remote bosses. Or he chats online with his colleagues: two men and a woman, all about his age.
Here, Zou is far from his family’s cornfields in the eastern province of Anhui, far from the bustle of his old workspace with 100 or so people. But he doesn’t feel isolated.
“I don’t get lonely,” he said, “because of the robots.”
Zou works for the Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, which lauds this warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai as one of most automated in the world. Analysts say it’s a peek at the future of manual work in China and beyond — a place where a chosen few tend to the machines, while most workers have been rendered obsolete.
Thanks to a “strategic partnership” with Google, that future could be coming soon to the United States.
But chief executive Richard Liu wants to take the high-tech concept even further in a country once known as a hub for cheap labor.
“I hope my company would be 100 percent automation someday,” Liu said at an April retail conference in Madrid. “No human beings anymore.”
His facility near Shanghai serves as a learning lab for the company — which reported a slim $18 million in profit last year on revenue of $55.7 billion. Executives hope it will prove to be a not-so-secret weapon against competitors Alibaba and Amazon, which are also racing to develop the next generation of e-commerce super machines.
While in the United States on a business trip, Liu was arrested Aug. 31 in Minneapolis on suspicion of rape. He was released, and no charges were filed. Liu returned to China, and JD.com issued a statement Sept. 5 claiming that Minneapolis police found no misconduct by Liu. The police investigation, however, remains open.
JD aims to perfect its technology, spread it to the firm’s 500-plus other warehouses across China, Thailand and Indonesia, which still depend on thousands of people, and eventually sell the system to businesses that want to shrink their own labor costs.
As of today, JD employs roughly 160,000 full-time workers in Asia. Over the next decade, Liu said, he hopes to see that number dwindle to “less than 8,000” better-paid staffers who work two or three hours daily.
The jobs would be “easier, more fun and less dangerous,” the company head said this spring.
[. . .]
While people still outperform robots on a range of tasks — lifting objects of various shapes and sizes, for example — economists predict that JD and other e-commerce businesses are leading a shift that will displace millions of workers worldwide in retail and manufacturing.
“This is the kind of technology I expect will disperse everywhere,” said Martin Ford, author of “Rise of the Robots,” which explores how artificial intelligence could reshape the labor market. “It’s absolutely inevitable that this will be a lot more disruptive than people imagine.”
A swath of jobs that follow patterns will vanish, Ford said — the global consultancy McKinsey predicts that robots could replace almost a third of the American workforce by 2030 — and a new crop of highly skilled positions will emerge. (Continues)
In 2015, Martin Ford wrote the book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, a work that got a lot of attention because of its detailed warnings about an economy totally transformed by automation. Big tech, business and the general public continue to be interested in what Ford has to say, as shown by the ongoing media attention and appearances at conferences around the world. His book still appears on lists, such as Politico’s top 50 list for the last year. Follow his activities and observations on his Twitter account, @MFordFuture.
So paying attention to the coming automation revolution makes sense for our national plans about the future. For example, America won’t need to be importing a million immigrant workers a year when machines will soon be doing the jobs.
Martin Ford was recently interviewed by Retail Touch Points, a business website, about certain automation applications and an update about the technology.
In an exclusive interview with Retail TouchPoints, Ford identifies the advances in robotics and AI that are accelerating the fastest. He also identifies a selection of job categories that are safe from the march of automation — at least for now.
Retail TouchPoints (RTP): You write in Rise Of The Robots that warehouse work and fast food are two places where we’re already seeing the impact of robotics on employment. Has that trend continued since the book came out in 2015?
Martin Ford: There have been advances in both areas, but the progress has had the most practical applications in warehouse work. You can find videos on YouTube showing robots moving boxes around. Nearly all the main distribution warehouses are automated to some extent, for example by bringing shelves to workers who then reach in and grab the items they need. I really think Amazon’s warehouses will get more efficient and less labor-intensive, which directly impacts Walmart.
In order to respond, traditional retailers with stores also will have to become more efficient. Walmart and others have been testing robots for taking store inventory by counting the things that are on the store shelves. Part of the nature of robotics is that it’s easier to make one designed just to observe something, versus building a robot that physically does something like pick up a box. Eventually, however, robots will be unloading trucks or putting items on shelves, particularly in areas where the products are standardized. That’s probably inevitable.
In the fast food area, there are at least three startups in terms of actually preparing food. Momentum Machines, now called Creator, has a robot that shapes burgers from freshly ground meat and grills them to order, and it can produce 360 burgers per hour. They just opened a storefront in San Francisco in order to test the technology. There’s also a company called Zume that is using robots to make pizzas. Their business model is to put the uncooked pizzas in a van equipped with an oven and have it cooked while it’s on the way to the delivery destination, so that it’s virtually right out of the oven when you get it.
RTP: You also write about the impact of cloud robotics, which migrates the intelligence needed to animate mobile robots to a centralized hub, as a technology that’s likely to affect jobs. Why is this technology important?
Ford: Some people say ‘Well, I might lose my job doing such-and-such, but I can get a job fixing the robots.’ It’s true that repair and maintenance will create some jobs, but certainly not as many as will be lost. Take the Redbox video boxes, which can sense when there’s a mechanical or software issue with one of them and send an alert about that. All of these types of systems will be built in a way that’s very modular and easy to maintain, probably remotely and in some cases autonomously. That’s a part of the business model.
RTP: Are there jobs where we might be surprised to see robots, AI or other technologies replacing humans?
Ford: People have been biased toward the idea of robots taking away blue-collar jobs, like warehouse workers, or truck drivers with self-driving vehicles. There’s not enough focus on the person that sits in a cubicle, whose job is a lot easier to automate in many ways. For one thing, as opposed to a self-driving car, if the machine makes a mistake, nobody gets injured or killed. People who are analysts cranking out reports, or putting data into an understandable format, in areas like accounting, finance and banking — all of these jobs will be increasingly susceptible to becoming automated.
We’re already seeing it in customer service. When you call a company for technical support, it’s increasingly likely that you will be talking to a machine, and it’s not clear whether that will be disclosed to the consumer. These solutions could get good enough so that people wouldn’t be able to tell, especially when the conversations are limited in terms of the topic areas.
RTP: Are there retail jobs that might be considered “safe” from automation?
Ford: Jobs involving creative and strategic thinking are one area. Another is jobs involving interacting with people, particularly if you need to build a sophisticated relationship, as in high-end retail. Another area is jobs where there’s a lot of mobility and dexterity involved. Outside of retail that would be electricians and plumbers, but even something like stocking shelves — particularly in a smaller store that has a lot of different products and different-sized shelves — will still need people. Also, the person that goes into the fitting room to restock shelves with clothes that are all in a jumble — pretty much anything that requires flexibility and dexterity in unpredictable environments is fairly safe.
RTP: What are some of the likely effects of a jobless future?
Ford: Workers are consumers, and the main way we get money into the hands of these consumers is their jobs. As these jobs go away or as wages fall, things become increasingly unequal. We’re already seeing the impact of inequality — I’ve seen surveys saying that the average person would not be able to come up with $500 in case they needed to fix a car or had medical expenses. If people have no discretionary income, they’re not driving the economy, because these people are really only buying essentials. (Continues)
CBS’ Sunday Morning show has reported sensibly on robotics, as I reviewed in a blog a year ago: CBS Imagines the American Future as Automation Nation. Last Sunday’s segment took up the topic of what might be done in response to the enormous unemployment forecast, specifically a universal basic income.
Below, at Zume Pizza in Silicon Valley, specialized robots help make the pies. Eventually, “the company plans to replace the remaining humans on the line,” according to last year’s report.
The idea of the government handing out money to everyone is pretty revolutionary in a capitalist nation like America. But the automation-caused mass unemployment projected for our future requires that drastic measures must be considered.
And the story didn’t mention that AUTOMATION MAKES IMMIGRATION OBSOLETE because we certainly won’t need foreign workers when machines are doing many of the low-skilled tasks.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich may be a little optimistic when he says that of the jobs displaced by smart machines, “most of those will be replaced by new jobs.” He must be thinking of the very near-term future.
Technology is changing the kinds and number of jobs we have in this economy, so there’s a push to give people who lose out a guaranteed minimum income. How big would that check be? And who would it come from? Questions for Lee Cowan to answer in our Cover Story:
Sometimes a sign in a window can be a sign of the times. And the one emblazoned outside Cafe X in San Francisco says it all: “Robotic Coffeebar.”
Now we all know robots are coming for our jobs, eventually, and maybe that’s why no one here seemed particularly surprised at being handed their machine-made macchiato.
That said, it is pretty remarkable. one-armed barista can crank out about 120 drinks an hour — with few, if any, mistakes. If you’re lucky, you might even get a wave.
It’s not a bad-looking future, unless you’re a human barista, that is, in which case this all might have you feeling a little insecure about your job.
“The best estimate is about 30% of all jobs that people now do will be lost to technology,” said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “But most of those will be replaced by new jobs. The real problem is that the new jobs won’t pay as much as the jobs that are lost.”
Just like he says, even at Cafe X there are humans being paid to work alongside technology.
But a seismic shift is coming, warns Reich, that will force us to look at work in a whole new way:
“Work gives structure and meaning to people’s lives. And if we don’t have to work, are people going to become philosophers, painters, artists? Are they going to be involved in their communities, do voluntary work? Or are they going just sit around, watching television?”
The New York Times had an interesting cultural analysis about automation in Sweden, where the workers appear not to fear they will be made unemployed by smart machines. Americans, by contrast, are suspicious about the effects of automation according to a recent Pew poll, with more than 70 percent admitting they worried about job loss, social disruption and worsened economic equality.
The Times put the story on its front page December 28, including a photo of a modern miner using a remote control to run a loading machine.
Socialism looks like a good fit with the automated future if governments adopt the program of a guaranteed basic income, as recommended by Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. The lefty countries are already set up to distribute free stuff, so the transition to a robot economy with cash for all would be no big deal. Certainly the Swedish miner Persson was agreeable and comfortable with the change. Still, the Times reporter seems to have become a little beguiled by Swedish socialism.
Yet as Sweden absorbs large numbers of immigrants from conflict-torn nations, that support may wane. Many lack education and may be difficult to employ. If large numbers wind up depending on government largesse, a backlash could result.
“There’s a risk that the social contract could crack,” said Marten Blix, an economist at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm.
That’s one way to describe the civil war that’s brewing.
The Times story was reprinted in the Anchorage Daily News:
GARPENBERG, Sweden — From inside the control room carved into the rock more than half a mile underground, Mika Persson can see the robots on the march, supposedly coming for his job here at the New Boliden mine.
He’s fine with it.
Sweden’s famously generous social welfare system makes this a place not prone to fretting about automation — or much else, for that matter.
Persson, 35, sits in front of four computer screens, one displaying the loader he steers as it lifts freshly blasted rock containing silver, zinc and lead. If he were down in the mine shaft operating the loader manually, he would be inhaling dust and exhaust fumes. Instead, he reclines in an office chair while using a joystick to control the machine.
He is cognizant that robots are evolving by the day. Boliden is testing self-driving vehicles to replace truck drivers. But Persson assumes people will always be needed to keep the machines running. He has faith in the Swedish economic model and its protections against the torment of joblessness.
“I’m not really worried,” he says. “There are so many jobs in this mine that even if this job disappears, they will have another one. The company will take care of us.”
In much of the world, people whose livelihoods depend on paychecks are increasingly anxious about a potential wave of unemployment threatened by automation. As the frightening tale goes, globalization forced people in wealthier lands like North America and Europe to compete directly with cheaper laborers in Asia and Latin America, sowing joblessness. Now, the robots are coming to finish off the humans.
But such talk has little currency in Sweden or its Scandinavian neighbors, where unions are powerful, government support is abundant, and trust between employers and employees runs deep. Here, robots are just another way to make companies more efficient. As employers prosper, workers have consistently gained a proportionate slice of the spoils — a stark contrast to the United States and Britain, where wages have stagnated even while corporate profits have soared.
“In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, ‘Are you afraid of new technology?’ they will answer, ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology,'” says the Swedish minister for employment and integration, Ylva Johansson. “The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers.”
It’s getting harder all the time to be a parent with all the negative influences in society and media today. But a new problem is how to provide guidance to a young person considering a career in a future that looks to have profoundly different work opportunities because of automation, advanced software and robots.
A few decades ago, a kid might follow his father into a decent paying manufacturing job in a Ford or Chevy plant, but then many factories were outsourced to cheap-labor Asian countries. Now some production is moving back to the US to save money on transportation costs, but with automation added which means fewer workers are needed.
Generac Power Systems, which shifted some of its work from abroad, can now make an alternator with one worker in the time it took four workers in China. Above, an employee at its Whitewater, Wis., plant.
The main strategy for future employment is to choose a career that is creative and non-repetitive, according to Martin Ford, quoted later in the article posted below, who wrote Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future — an excellent, eye-opening book.
When it comes to kids and careers, what’s a parent to do when the robots are coming for all the jobs, anyway?
Like a lot of children, my sons, Toby, 7, and Anton, 4, are obsessed with robots. In the children’s books they devour at bedtime, happy, helpful robots pop up more often than even dragons or dinosaurs. The other day I asked Toby why children like robots so much.
“Because they work for you,” he said.
What I didn’t have the heart to tell him is, someday he might work for them — or, I fear, might not work at all, because of them.
It is not just Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking who are freaking out about the rise of invincible machines. Yes, robots have the potential to outsmart us and destroy the human race. But first, artificial intelligence could make countless professions obsolete by the time my sons reach their 20s.
You do not exactly need to be Marty McFly to see the obvious threats to our children’s future careers.
Say you dream of sending your daughter off to Yale School of Medicine to become a radiologist. And why not? Radiologists in New York typically earn about $470,000, according to Salary.com.
But that job is suddenly looking iffy as AI gets better at reading scans. A startup called Arterys, to cite just one example, already has a program that can perform an MRI analysis of blood flow through a heart in just 15 seconds, compared with the 45 minutes required by humans.
Maybe she wants to be a surgeon, but that job may not be safe, either. Robots already assist surgeons in removing damaged organs and cancerous tissue, according to Scientific American. Last year, a prototype robotic surgeon called STAR (Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot) outperformed human surgeons in a test in which both had to repair the severed intestine of a live pig.
So perhaps your daughter detours to law school to become a rainmaking corporate lawyer. Skies are cloudy in that profession, too. Any legal job that involves lots of mundane document review (and that’s a lot of what lawyers do) is vulnerable.
Software programs are already being used by companies including JPMorgan Chase & Co. to scan legal papers and predict what documents are relevant, saving lots of billable hours. Kira Systems, for example, has reportedly cut the time that some lawyers need to review contracts by 20 to 60 percent.
As a matter of professional survival, I would like to assure my children that journalism is immune, but that is clearly a delusion. The Associated Press already has used a software program from a company called Automated Insights to churn out passable copy covering Wall Street earnings and some college sports, and last year awarded the bots the minor league baseball beat.
What about other glamour jobs, like airline pilot? Well, last spring, a robotic co-pilot developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, flew and landed a simulated 737. I hardly count that as surprising, given that pilots of commercial Boeing 777s, according to one 2015 survey, only spend seven minutes during an average flight actually flying the thing. As we move into the era of driverless cars, can pilotless planes be far behind?
Then there is Wall Street, where robots are already doing their best to shove Gordon Gekko out of his corner office. Big banks are using software programs that can suggest bets, construct hedges and act as robo-economists, using natural language processing to parse central bank commentary to predict monetary policy, according to Bloomberg. BlackRock, the biggest fund company in the world, made waves earlier this year when it announced it was replacing some highly paid human stock pickers with computer algorithms.
So am I paranoid? Or not paranoid enough? A much-quoted 2013 study by the University of Oxford Department of Engineering Science — surely the most sober of institutions — estimated that 47 percent of current jobs, including insurance underwriter, sports referee and loan officer, are at risk of falling victim to automation, perhaps within a decade or two.
Just this week, the McKinsey Global Institute released a report that found that a third of American workers may have to switch jobs in the next dozen or so years because of AI.
Fair Use: This site contains copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues related to culture and mass immigration. We believe this constitutes a "fair use" of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information, see: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000107----000-.html. In order to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond "fair use", you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
The debate about robotics on the future economy and job market is one divided squarely between transformationalists and sceptics, but that debate has in fact been increasingly undermined by the dynamics of AI and its relentless acceleration. Recent evidence indicates that robotics and AI are heavily impacting the economy, destroying low-wage jobs and increasingly eating away at higher-skill occupations as people are increasingly replaced by intelligent algorithms. There is evidence that the workplace of tomorrow, powered by AI and accelerating digital technology, is about to arrive much sooner than anticipated by many analysts.
In 2015, 
