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On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to discuss his presidential campaign along with the issue of automation, specifically how it threatens the jobs of millions of Americans in the near future.
An article written by de Blasio appeared in Wired the same day, titled Why American Workers Need to Be Protected From Automation which is a topic more leaders should be addressing. The article is decent, but if anything, it underestimates the effect that the permanent removal of perhaps the majority of workers from the economy will mean. The adjustments to society will take decades.
The good news about the de Blasio interview was Tucker’s question to the mayor: “If you really believe that automation is a threat to low-skilled jobs, why are you for mass immigration?”
Which de Blasio dodged.
The bad news is how Tucker became distracted from the important discussion about America’s future under smart machines to badger de Blasio about his terrible management of New York City: one topic is of a transitory nature; the other is world changing.
At least there were several good minutes before the important topic of automation was mostly lost:
TUCKER CARLSON: So in the three or so years the show has been on the air, we’ve taken a bunch of different positions on a bunch of different topics, but one thing we’ve always been consistent about from the first day until today is making fun of Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York — on every topic. If you watch this show, you’ll know.
Then the other day, it came to our attention that de Blasio has raised an issue that too few in either party are talking about. It’s the question of automation. He has got a piece in “WIRED” magazine on it.
De Blasio, as you as you know is also running for President. Something else we’ve made fun of. But his position on automation really struck us is pretty interesting, so yesterday, we arranged a phone call and we talked about a very friendly conversation, invited Mayor de Blasio to come on the show to talk about that and other things and he was gracious enough to respond.
And so we’re happy to have Mayor Bill de Blasio join us tonight live. Mr. Mayor, thanks a lot for coming on.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D-NY): Thank you, Tucker and I appreciate that you care deeply about this issue of automation because it’s bearing down on all of us.
CARLSON: It is, it is and my praise of you on this question is totally sincere. Very few people are taking this seriously. Andrew Yang is one of them, you’re another. I can’t think of many others who are, and so God bless you.
So you’re basically saying that companies ought to have to — and I’m not sure how much of this I agree with, but I think I’m phrasing this correctly. You say companies ought to have to bear some of the cost of helping workers transition to something else when they lay them off in favor of robots.
DE BLASIO: That’s right. Tucker, right now, let’s just get the magnitude clear for all your viewers.
Middle-class Americans, working-class Americans whose jobs are not going to be there if we don’t do something different. Because right now, the recent estimate I saw, 36 million jobs that could be made obsolete. We’re talking as early as 2030 — 12 years ahead. Eleven to twelve years from now.
So here’s the reality. Right now, in fact the Federal Tax Code rewards companies that invest in the kind of technology that actually sheds jobs, destroys jobs.
Our tax dollars are helping companies — incentivizing companies to get rid of more and more American workers. So my plan is simple, it says, end that. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that we could use to actually address our bigger issues in this country and employ a lot of people.
CARLSON: I am completely with you on that one right there. I’m sure there’s a lot of details we disagree on, but I agree with you on that, for sure.
DE BLASIO: And by the way, South Korea is doing that right now. They recognize that if they don’t stop incentivizing companies, a lot of times these companies are making the decision simply because it’s better for their tax reality rather than what’s better for working people or even productivity.
The second point of my plan is, let’s institute something — Bill Gates actually was the first one I think to call for — which is a quote unquote “robot tax.” It says simply, you know a worker pays income tax. You take away millions and millions of workers, that’s a lot less revenue to take care of all the things we need in our society and it means of course, millions and millions of people who don’t have a livelihood.
I believe in work. I think you do, too. I believe we need a future that’s based on work. So if a company is going to put thousands of people out of work, they should bear responsibility for making sure that those folks get a new job, either in the same company or elsewhere.
But that tax is both an incentive to keep people on the job in a good way, in a productive way, it also provides money to help foster from the Federal level the kinds of things we need a lot more of. We need a lot more investment in renewable energy and recycling and environmental restitution. There’s all sorts of this.
CARLSON: Well, let me ask you this question though, okay, so I’m not sure I think of the second, but I don’t think it’s totally crazy. You know, I am happy to read and think about it more. So we’re together up until this point, but if you really believe that automation is a threat to low-skilled jobs, why are you for mass immigration?
What are all of these people going to do, we’re importing with your help?
DE BLASIO: Look, Tucker, I’m not finished on the point about what we’re trying to achieve here and I certainly want to answer that question, it’s an important one. Let’s just be clear about the central point here.
Right now, there is no American strategy, no Federal government strategy to address automation and it could be the single most disruptive force in our society that we’ve ever experienced.
If you talk about tens of millions of working-class and middle-class Americans who no longer have work or the prospect of work, that’s unacceptable.
So the Federal government has to step up. There is no strategy now. There’s no candidate in my opinion who is offering a coherent strategy. I respect Andrew Yang for raising the issue.
CARLSON: So I agree. I would say that immigration — immigration is a close second as a force to transforming the country and the two are at cross-purposes. So immigrants come here overwhelmingly to work in low-skilled jobs, a lot of those jobs no matter how hard we try are going away. This is crazy, why are we doing this?
DE BLASIO: Well let’s face it, there’s a huge number of jobs right now and let’s take agriculture as an obvious example. We’re in the worst of all worlds. We don’t have enough workers to do the work among the people already in this country and we don’t have a coherent immigration system including something as obvious as a guest worker program, a legal guest worker program.
CARLSON: Okay, but Ag is a small sector.
DE BLASIO: That could actually take this some place.
CARLSON: Okay, Ag is — and that’s a separate debate. I disagree but that’s not — I mean, the much bigger picture is jobs in the service sector are going away that immigrants fill. We continue to import immigrants at over a million a year, why are we doing that? Continue reading this article
Sunday’s Los Angeles Times has an upbeat front-page article about a Guatemalan town that has been transformed for the better by illegal immigration. The residents love America for its jobs and free stuff, shown by a “proliferation of U.S. flags” and new houses built in a style called “remittance architecture.”
Indeed, the money sent back as remittances is a lifeline to the poor country: Guatemalans abroad, mostly in the US, sent $9.5 billion home last year — 12 percent of the country’s GDP.
The local priest is quoted as supporting illegal immigration because “it serves a fundamental human need to survive.”
Of course, the article has no mention of the harm caused by the influx of millions of Third-Worlders into the United States. The economy is booming, but wages are not rising because of the millions of foreign workers who compete against citizens by working cheap.
Plus, the Guatemalans now work as “menial laborers” but when automation becomes more widespread in a few years, they will not be cheap enough as the smart machines become even less expensive. At that point, their advantage as cheap illegal labor will evaporate and they will become jobless.
The foreigner invasion is also harmful to American students because schools are forced to reallocate their budgets to serve often illiterate, non-English-speaking foreigners.
Last year, the Palm Beach County school district enrolled 4,555 Guatemalan students in kindergarten through 12th grade, nearly 50% more than two years earlier. Many of the students come from the country’s remote highlands and speak neither Spanish nor English. The number of elementary school students in kindergarten through fifth grade more than doubled to 2,119 in that same period.
But the Los Angeles Times thinks that we Americans should celebrate the Third World invasion because it is a big benefit to Guatemala. The United States as the World Welfare Office is not questioned, nor is homemade reform abroad even considered.
This mist-shrouded mountain town in northwest Guatemala exudes a bustling air of good fortune, even prosperity, that may seem at odds with the landscape of subsistence cornfields and vegetable plots.
Concrete and stucco houses of three and even four stories tower over traditional dwellings crafted from adobe bricks and wooden planks.
The source of the housing boom isn’t income from crop sales or occasional tourism. Rather, Todos Santos runs on savings sent home from the United States.
“The United States helped me more than the Guatemala government ever did,” said Efrain Carrillo, 40, outside the three-story house he built with three years of savings from working in the north as a laborer a decade ago. “I was deported, but I am grateful to the United States.”
The house features a ground-floor grocery store to provide income, while Carrillo and his wife live upstairs and their two teenage children live with relatives in the United States.
Fluttering from a balcony is the Guatemalan flag, and next to it another common sight here: the Stars and Stripes.
The proliferation of U.S. flags is a testament to the importance of illegal migration here — and the difficulty of curtailing it.
For the moment, Mexican authorities, under pressure from the Trump administration, are cracking down on U.S.-bound migration from Central America, deploying Mexican National Guard troops along roads leading from the country’s southern frontier and stepping up deportations.
The effort appears to be yielding results, with apprehensions in June along the U.S. Southwest border down 28% compared with May.
But in the long term, such campaigns may do little to stop the exodus from places like Todos Santos.
Gang violence and political persecution — two of the most common reasons that Central Americans give when they claim asylum at the U.S. border — are not major problems here. The migration is driven by economics. Continue reading this article
Bloomberg reports that farm robots are coming on strong, and that assessment makes perfect sense. The tasks of smart agricultural machines are generally simple and distinct, like weeding, plowing, spraying and picking: unlike self-driving cars, safety issues are minimal because human workers have disappeared from automated fields.
In addition, recent robots have become increasingly autonomous, meaning there’s more intelligence in the cab making judgements about actions to take regarding the crop.
Below, picker robots are making human workers disappear from the fields.
As low-skilled jobs disappear with the increase of automation, there will be even less demand for foreign labor like the illegal aliens now streaming across our open borders at the rate of 100,000 per month. It is crazy for Washington to continue to allow such anarchy now, that will look even more insane from the coming years when low-skilled labor will be as common as horse-drawn carriages.
The near-future of agriculture is within view, and it’s all about machines and technology. Automation makes immigration obsolete, and particularly so in the agricultural sector.
SwarmFarm robot spraying on a farm in Australia. Photographer: David Stringer/Bloomberg
Robots are taking over farms faster than anyone saw coming.
The first fully autonomous farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means machines will be able to completely take over a multitude of tasks. Tractors will drive with no farmer in the cab, and specialized equipment will be able to spray, plant, plow and weed cropland. And it’s all happening well before many analysts had predicted thanks to small startups in Canada and Australia.
While industry leaders Deere & Co. and CNH Industrial NV haven’t said when they’ll release similar offerings, Saskatchewan’s Dot Technology Corp. has already sold some so-called power platforms for fully mechanized spring planting. In Australia, SwarmFarm Robotics is leasing weed-killing robots that can also do tasks like mow and spread. The companies say their machines are smaller and smarter than the gigantic machinery they aim to replace.
Sam Bradford, a farm manager at Arcturus Downs in Australia’s Queensland state, was an early adopter as part of a pilot program for SwarmFarm last year. He used four robots, each about the size of a truck, to kill weeds.
In years past, Bradford had used a 120-foot wide, 16-ton spraying machine that “looks like a massive praying mantis.” It would blanket the field in chemicals, he said.
But the robots were more precise. They distinguished the dull brown color of the farm’s paddock from green foliage, and targeted chemicals directly at the weeds. It’s a task the farm does two to three times a year over 20,000 acres. With the robots, Bradford said he can save 80% of his chemical costs.
“The savings on chemicals is huge, but there’s also savings for the environment from using less chemicals and you’re also getting a better result in the end,” said Bradford, who’s run the farm for about 10 years. Surrounding rivers run out to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s eastern cost, making the farm particularly sensitive over its use of chemicals, he said.
Costs savings have become especially crucial as a multi-year rout for prices depresses farm incomes and tightens margins. The Bloomberg Grains Spot Index is down more than 50% since its peak in 2012. Meanwhile, advances in seed technology, fertilizers and other crop inputs has led to soaring yields and oversupply. Producers are eager to find any edge possible at a time when the U.S.-China trade war is disrupting the usual flow of agriculture exports.
Farmers need to get to the next level of profitability and efficiency in farming, and “we’ve lost sight of that with engineering that doesn’t match the agronomy,” said SwarmFarm’s Chief Executive Officer Andrew Bate. “Robots flip that on its head. What’s driving adoption in agriculture is better farming systems and better ways to grow crops.” (Continues)
Do you still think of picking fruits and vegetables as an occupation that requires migrant workers to do the hard work? That industry, along with many others, is being transformed by the introduction of smart machines.
The latest in pickers can now detect degrees of ripeness to suit the market — more ripe for local and less so for distant markets where shipping is needed.
Below, the Virgo robot chooses which tomatoes to be harvested, then picks them.
In case anyone in Washington is paying attention, the increased use of robot pickers means even fewer low-skilled migrants are needed to work the crops. In a few years, when machines are cheaper than workers, the vegetable field may become the agricultural equivalent of modern automotive manufacturing — a workplace devoid of humans.
Remember that automation, robots and artificial intelligence are about to change the workplace fundamentally, but our political leaders remain on snooze mode about the threat to the economy.
Farmers spend more than $34 billion a year on labor in the U.S., according to the USDA. And many would like to hire more help. But the agriculture industry here faces labor shortages, thanks in part to the scarcity of H2B visas, and an aging worker population. Older workers can’t necessarily handle the hours or repetitive physical tasks they once might have.
That’s where Root AI, a start-up in Somerville, Massachusetts, comes in. The company’s first agricultural robot, dubbed the Virgo 1, can pick tomatoes without bruising them, and detect ripeness better than humans.
The Virgo is a self-driving robot with sensors and cameras that serve as its eyes. Because it also has lights on board, it can navigate large commercial greenhouses any hour of the day or night, detecting which tomatoes are ripe enough to harvest. A “system-on-module” runs the Virgo’s AI-software brain. A robotic arm, with a dexterous hand attached, moves gently enough to work alongside people, and can independently pick tomatoes without tearing down vines.
The robot’s “fingers” are made of a food-safe plastic that’s about as flexible as a credit card, and easily cleaned. Josh Lessing, founder and CEO of Root AI, says that easy-to-clean trait is important.
“People don’t think about this — you have to manage disease on a farm. Just as if I picked with my own hands, there’s a risk of spreading around mold, viruses or insects with a robot. That’s why you want these to be washable. It is part of the work you do to keep the plants safe.”
One of the most unique things about the Virgo, he notes, is that the company can write new AI software and add additional sensors or grippers to handle different crops. “It’s a complete mobile platform enabled to harvest whatever you need,” says Lessing. (Continues)
It’s a rare thing to hear anyone in politics discuss the threat of automation to the economy — certainly no candidates did in the 2016 presidential campaign, and I watched closely. You would think that a genuine leader would have a plan to lessen the shock of massive job loss when it becomes cheaper to use a robot than hire a human over a wide swath of the jobs economy.
Some tech experts estimate that time is only a few years off, as indicated by the chart below from a PwC report concerning How will automation impact jobs?
So it’s a relief to see a technology-cautious candidate appear for 2020, and I have written several times about Andrew Yang because he says things like:
“We automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, and those communities have never recovered. Where if you look at the numbers, half of the workers left the workforce and never worked again, and then half of that group filed for disability.
Now what happened to the manufacturing workers is now going to happen to the truck drivers, retail workers, call centers and fast-food workers and on and on through the economy as we evolve and technology marginalizes the labor of more and more Americans.”
On Friday, Carlson commented about a few 2020 candidates on Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream. The first one of them discussed was Andrew Yang:
SHANNON BREAM: You have talked with a lot of these 2020 contenders: I want to play a little back and forth with Andrew Yang and then we will discuss:
ANDREW YANG (in March 1 interview): My friends in Silicon Valley are working on trucks that can drive themselves because that’s where the money is, where we can save tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars by trying to automate that job. But I was just with truck drivers in Iowa last week. . . it will be a disaster for many American communities.
TUCKER CARLSON: You are one of the only people I have met who is honest about the effects of de-industrialization.
BREAM: I’m not assuming you’re going to vote for him, but you agree with him on this point.
CARLSON: I definitely would vote for a candidate like that, but I don’t agree with everything he says. I don’t know all of his views, but I can’t think of many more people on either side who are thinking more deeply about what the actual problems are.
Automation by every estimate will eliminate a huge percentage of jobs in the United States at exactly the moment when we’re importing millions of new people every year to fill jobs that probably won’t exist three years from now or ten years from now — it’s lunatic.
Indeed. Automation makes immigration obsolete — and certainly of low-skilled Hondurans et al trooping here over America’s open border at the rate of 100,000 per month. What will happen when millions of non-tech Third-Worlders find themselves priced out of the coming robot jobs market in a few years? There will likely be increased crime and possibly civil unrest.
The transition to whatever economic system is next won’t be easy even without millions of low-skilled illegal aliens — but Washington is worsening an already bad future problem with its crazy sovereignty failure.
CARLSON: And nobody is saying anything about it other than Andrew Yang. I’m not sure why it’s falling to him, but I don’t care. I want somebody to tell the truth about it.
BREAM: You are worried about the jobs, not this whole AI worry that people have that robots are going to come eat us and kill us.
CARLSON: Of course, anybody running a business wants to eliminate labor costs or reduce them to the extent possible. That’s the imperative of the market. There is no sin in that, but it’s real and we can’t pretend otherwise.
And so we often hear ‘We need more workers for agriculture’ — we don’t know anything about agricultural really; very few parts of the ag economy aren’t automated now. It’s a completely real thing.
Lawyers, physicians — huge sectors of white collar America are about to be overturned by AI, and nobody is talking about it because RUSSIA!
The recent New Yorker Magazine has a thorough story about automated agriculture, with strawberry picking getting particular attention. The magazine does like its articles long and rambling, so the reader learns about assorted agro-facts like grower complaints about the H-2A visa, the manual skills required to pick delicate strawberries (“a wristy twist that prevents bruising around the calyx”) and even some background on the general history of modern farming:
Picking strawberries takes speed, stamina, and skill. Can a robot do it?
[. . .] At the beginning of the twentieth century, about a third of the U.S. population lived on farms; today, less than one per cent does. Mechanization brought tractors and combine harvesters, which were initially used for grains, such as wheat, rye, oats, and barley. They automated the manual labor formerly done by small armies of threshers and bundlers. Mechanical harvesters made industrial farming possible, and led to the consolidation of small family acreages into the megafarms that dominate U.S. agriculture today.
The author opines that the hundreds of thousands of new illegal aliens from Central America won’t be interested in doing farm work because they have better things in mind. Good luck with that:
Migrants coming more recently from Central America, many of them also looking for better jobs and opportunities for their families, and often fleeing violence in their home countries, haven’t traditionally entered the crop-farm workforce in enough numbers to compensate for the loss of those Mexican workers—they’ve instead found jobs at meatpacking plants and in the service industries.
However, this article examines automation, and the farmers want smart machines that will reliably do the jobs so they needn’t worry about finding foreign workers when crops need picking. In fact, the strawberry grower featured, Gary Wishnatzki, helped raise investment money to develop the machines that will free him from depending on humans, and other growers have joined him. The technology people are happy to oblige — it’s a win-win for both.
The tech keeps improving, as suggested by a look at the new gadgets coming online. The upshot is that low-skilled workers will be replaced by robots when the machines become cheaper to use than humans. So it is crazy for Washington to continue admitting a hundred thousand menial laborers per month from Central America — the United States is not the welfare office for the Third World; it is the home of citizens.
And anyway, the US needs skilled workers, not backward rustics.
Continuing with a slice of the article:
All these prototypes rely on a handful of converging technologies—artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, G.P.S., machine vision, drones, and material science—that have been slowly finding their way onto the farm. Many row-crop farmers in the U.S. employ G.P.S.-guided tractors to lay out their fields. John Deere has been offering G.P.S. for its tractors since 1997. At first, satellite-assisted steering was simply a way for a farmer to keeps his rows straight, rather than rely on a tractor driver’s dead-reckoning skills. But for forward-thinking farmers G.P.S. offers much more than straight lines. A G.P.S.-planted farm provides a foundation on which to build a whole new class of automated farm tools that can use artificial intelligence to solve the hard problems that twentieth-century agricultural automation could not.
Berry 5.1’s Pitzer wheel features “obtainers,” which can cup and pick berries.
To get an idea of what might be possible, I arranged to visit Professor David Slaughter in his office at the University of California at Davis. Slaughter leads the university’s Smart Farm Initiative, which explores how future farmers might employ emerging technologies. Drones, for example, can automate the inspection of fields for pest or weed outbreaks, and can use high-resolution cameras and algorithmic processing of the images to pick up incipient problems before a farmer or a hired hand might spot them. Another possible application is plant breeding. Breeders currently rely on humans to evaluate seedlings produced by new combinations of already existing varieties. At a large operation, such as the University of Florida’s strawberry-breeding program, which is run by Vance Whitaker, people must manually inspect thousands of seedlings each year to see if any carries the desirable traits that the breeder is looking for. A robot, equipped with machine vision and enough artificial intelligence to recognize the traits the breeder is seeking, could automate the laborious process.
Slaughter showed me a prototype of a robotic weeding machine in the engineering department’s lab. His students built it and trained it to weed a field of tomato plants, each of which has its own G.P.S. coördinates. Because the robot knows exactly where the tomato plants are and has the machine vision and intelligence to know the difference between a tomato plant and a weed, it can navigate around the tomatoes and kill the weeds either with a miniature hoe or with a micro-jet of herbicide, which Slaughter described as “an inkjet printer for agriculture.” The farmer saves the cost of weeding the field by hand, and spares it a coating of herbicide that many of the tomato plants might not need. It was the nearest thing I saw in what venture capitalists call “digital agriculture” to a Roomba, the indoor robotic vacuum cleaner—a Farmba, maybe?
Summarizing the potential, Slaughter said, “For the first time, farmers can know what’s going on in their fields on the level of the individual plant. The idea is that you can run a farm with the same intimate care you would use on a back-yard garden, where you know each plant individually.” Farmers could irrigate and fertilize only those plants that needed it, and not waste resources on the current one-size-fits-all approach. Agriculture accounts for seventy per cent of fresh-water consumption worldwide, and, in the U.S. alone, farms use more than a billion pounds of pesticide each year; strawberry farms are especially heavy users. “Precision agriculture,” the name given to this slowly unfolding revolution, could dramatically reduce such wasteful and chemical-dependent practices.
Selective-harvesting machines are another application of smart-farm technology. But as a practical matter a farmer would need a different harvesting machine for each crop. As Slaughter’s colleague Stavros Vougioukas, an associate professor with the department of biological and agricultural engineering at U.C. Davis, pointed out, “building a machine to harvest watermelons is totally different from building a machine to harvest apples.” This is not the case with commodity-crop combines: the same machine can be adapted to harvest different crops. The capital investment required to develop the machine also has to make sense economically, and only a few specialty crops have a high enough value to justify a large outlay of funds. (For example, the harvest of peaches, a small-market crop that requires delicate handling, is unlikely to be automated anytime soon, if ever.) Vougioukas ticked them off: “Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big enough to justify automation.
So far, Berry 5.1 has cost nearly ten million dollars to develop; Wishnatzki raised most of the money from investors, many of whom were other strawberry growers, including the industry giant Driscoll. “My closest competitors realize we’re all in the same boat,” he told me. . .
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
Monday’s Washington Post noted the continuing improvement of agricultural automation with a front page story about a machine that can handle the requirements of delicate strawberry picking:
It’s impossible to see what’s going on inside the big machine since the working parts aren’t visible, so here’s an explanatory video from the company Harvest CROO Robotics from last fall:
In the near future, American farmers definitely won’t need illegal alien pickers because the robots will do the job more cheaply. Automation may have its downside for some American workers, but the technology is all good in the agriculture realm: the US will no longer need unskilled welfare-using foreigners to pick crops.
In short,
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete.
The Post article was reprinted in the New Orleans paper, linked below:
Human and machine have 10 seconds per plant. They must find the ripe strawberries in the leaves, gently twist them off the stems and tuck them into a plastic clamshell. Repeat, repeat, repeat, before the fruit spoils.
One February afternoon, they work about an acre apart on a farm the size of 454 football fields: dozens of pickers collecting produce the way people have for centuries — and a robot that engineers say could replace most of them as soon as next year.
The future of agricultural work has arrived here in Florida, promising to ease labor shortages and reduce the cost of food, or so says the team behind Harv, a nickname for the latest model from automation company Harvest CROO Robotics.
Harv is on the cutting edge of a national push to automate the way we gather goods that bruise and squish, a challenge that has long flummoxed engineers.
Designing a robot with a gentle touch is among the biggest technical obstacles to automating the American farm. Reasonably priced fruits and vegetables are at risk without it, growers say, because of a dwindling pool of workers.
“The labor force keeps shrinking,” said Gary Wishnatzki, a third-generation strawberry farmer. “If we don’t solve this with automation, fresh fruits and veggies won’t be affordable or even available to the average person.”
The problem is so pressing that competitors are banding together to fund Harv, which has raised about $9 million from corporate behemoths like Driscoll’s and Naturipe Farms, as well as from local farmers.
Wishnatzki, who created Harv with former Intel engineer Bob Pitzer, one of the minds behind the television hit “BattleBots,” has invested $3 million of his own money.
The electronic picker is still pretty clumsy.
During a test run last year, Harv gathered 20 percent of strawberries on every plant without mishap. This year’s goal: Harvest half of the fruit without crushing or dropping any. The human success rate is closer to 80 percent, making Harv the underdog in this competition.
But Harv doesn’t need a visa or sleep or sick days. The machine looks like a horizontally rolling semitruck.
Peek underneath and see 16 smaller steel robots scooping up strawberries with spinning, claw-like fingers, guided by camera eyes and flashing lights. (Continues)
Sunday’s San Jose Mercury-News had a big spread on automation with photos and two articles. One is of the Don’t-Worry style — Robot-made coffee and burgers in SF? How automation is affecting jobs — produced by the SJM and appropriate to the tech-friendly view of the Silicon Valley town.
Below, a front page photo asks the big question of job displacement:
The other article is from the New York Times and it takes a more critical view of the brave new world that technology is creating. It looks realistically at the bifurcated workforce of the future, where a small techno-literate group is financially safe and the remaining millions of ordinary workers are left out to dry.
The article is filled with facts about historical trends arising from mechanization and bears careful reading. It notes how the 2018 Brookings study (Is Automation Labor-Displacing?) found that “over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.” So now “productivity” is a buzzword that may indicate potential job loss.
Certainly the workplace is about to change fundamentally, and low-skilled people like the thousands of Central American aliens claiming asylum will not be needed at any wage because the machines will soon be cheaper and more efficient. Indeed, the United States will not need any low-skilled immigrant workers, because:
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
The New York Times article is reprinted in another paper, linked below:
PHOENIX — It’s hard to miss the dogged technological ambition pervading this sprawling desert metropolis.
There’s Intel’s $7 billion, 7-nanometer chip plant going up in Chandler. In Scottsdale, Axon, the maker of the Taser, is hungrily snatching talent from Silicon Valley as it embraces automation to keep up with growing demand. Startups in fields as varied as autonomous drones and blockchain are flocking to the area, drawn in large part by light regulation and tax incentives. Arizona State University is furiously churning out engineers.
And yet for all its success in drawing and nurturing firms on the technological frontier, Phoenix cannot escape the uncomfortable pattern taking shape across the U.S. economy: Despite all its shiny new high-tech businesses, the vast majority of new jobs are in workaday service industries, like health care, hospitality, retail and building services, where pay is mediocre.
The forecast of an America where robots do all the work while humans live off some yet-to-be-invented welfare program may be a Silicon Valley pipe dream. But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.
Automation is splitting the U.S. labor force into two worlds. There is a small island of highly educated professionals making good wages at corporations like Intel or Boeing, which reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per employee. That island sits in the middle of a sea of less educated workers who are stuck at businesses like hotels, restaurants and nursing homes that generate much smaller profits per employee and stay viable primarily by keeping wages low.
Even economists are reassessing their belief that technological progress lifts all boats, and are beginning to worry about the new configuration of work.
Recent research has concluded that robots are reducing the demand for workers and weighing down wages, which have been rising more slowly than the productivity of workers. Some economists have concluded that the use of robots explains the decline in the share of national income going into workers’ paychecks over the last three decades.
[. . .]
In 1900, agriculture employed 12 million Americans. By 2014, tractors, combines and other equipment had flushed 10 million people out of the sector. But as farm labor declined, the industrial economy added jobs even faster. What happened? As the new farm machines boosted food production and made produce cheaper, demand for agricultural products grew. And farmers used their higher incomes to purchase newfangled industrial goods.
The new industries were highly productive and also subject to furious technological advancement. Weavers lost their jobs to automated looms; secretaries lost their jobs to Microsoft Windows. But each new spin of the technological wheel, from plastic toys to televisions to computers, yielded higher incomes for workers and more sophisticated products and services for them to buy.
Something different is going on in our current technological revolution. In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.
The only reason employment didn’t fall across the entire economy is that other industries, with less productivity growth, picked up the slack. “The challenge is not the quantity of jobs,” they wrote. “The challenge is the quality of jobs available to low- and medium-skill workers.”
Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work does not grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.
“Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject: The Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right,” Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary and presidential economic adviser, said in a lecture at the National Bureau of Economic Research five years ago. “I’m not so completely certain now.”
There are many American cities and towns that have been worn down by crime, open borders and globalization to utter devastation, so it is no small achievement to be judged as Number 1 Worst.
Below, Mendota in California’s Central Valley was 98.6 percent hispanic according to 2010 Census, with 50.3 percent foreign-born persons, 2013-2017.
Therefore the California Valley community of Mendota deserves attention, and it got a good look by Tucker Carlson on Friday. He observed that the town is dirt poor in the middle of an important agricultural area where a third of residents are farm workers, yet both parties in Washington want more cheap labor for the fields. He could have mentioned that more foreign workers are even less needed now and in the future because of agricultural robots coming on the scene.
If there’s one thing America doesn’t need, it’s more unskilled foreign workers of any legality.
And regarding the crime topic, it’s easy for foreign gangsters like the MS-13 bunch to get by in California, a sanctuary state where lawbreakers are normally left alone by the crime-friendly Democrats in charge.
Spare Audio:
TUCKER CARLSON: If you read the USA Today this morning, you may have seen the list of the 50 worst cities in America. In the highly non-coveted number one spot was a place called Mendota, California. It’s a town of about 11,000 outside Fresno in the Central Valley. It used to be the cantaloupe capital of the world but now, sadly in Mendota, pretty much all the numbers are depressing. The unemployment rate there is maybe the highest in the country. Half the city lives below the poverty line. The per capita income in Mendota is about $9,000 a year. Crime, not surprisingly, is completely out of control.
The former city manager of Mendota says the city is ground zero for MS-13 on the west coast. Last August the feds made more than two dozen arrests of MS-13 members. This was primarily in response to 16 recent murders in the area — it’s bad. The local police department is so outmatched by MS-13 that according to local media, gang members have been threatening individual cops by name and with impunity. It’s like another country.
So what’s so striking about this and so sad about it is it’s the opposite of what they promised. Here’s how — a third of Mendoza’s population is temporary farm workers. Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington are telling us right now that we need many more of those, and they’re pushing for it in secret talks at the White House. But if what they’re claiming is true, then why are there so many unemployed people in Mendota?
This is a city at the center of America’s most productive farmland. if you can’t get farm work in the Central Valley of California, there is a huge problem. We clearly have a major oversupply of low-skilled labor — we do — but we’re planning to import much more anyway because Democrats and the Chamber of Commerce want it?
Okay, we know what the net results are gonna be — more sad poor cities like Mendota. It’s lunacy. It’s horrible for the people who live there and for everyone else. Someone who cares about the country should say that because it’s true.
It’s a rare thing for the massive job loss associated with future automation to be discussed on television, but Wednesday’s coverage on Fox Business followed the Sixty Minutes report last Sunday — a two-fer in one week. But unlike CBS’ Scott Pelley, who seemed afraid to confront the idea that artificial intelligence would displace 40 percent of world jobs within 15 years, Charles Payne waded right in to the thorny topic of technology-caused unemployment in the millions.
Payne’s guest was Karen Harris, Bain & Company’s Macro Trends Group managing director, who is knowledgeable on the topic of the automated future. She was one of three authors in a major paper, Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality from that company, which reports that “automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs.”
Below, a chart from Bain & Company’s report Labor 2030 showing that 40 million US jobs are at risk from automation:
So America won’t be needing any more low-skilled immigrants, like the thousands streaming here from Honduras etc. Think of all the billions of dollars we could save on various benefits for the uninvited moochers. But Washington remains asleep to the social and economic earthquake facing the nation from the jobless automated future.
Here’s the conversation from Fox Business:
CHARLES PAYNE: The long anticipated age of robots and artificial intelligence is upon us, and as we cheer innovation many wonder what the eventual human toll would be? I was hoping it would blow up the so-called supply chain, the excuse for offshoring American jobs, but then this morning I read about a US camera-equipped robot patrolling grocery store aisles, looking for spills. Now what happens is the robot will detect one and alert a human worker in the control center — in the Philippines. Joining me is managing director of Bain and Company’s Macro Trends Group, Karen Harris. Thanks for joining us.
KAREN HARRIS: Thanks for having me.
PAYNE: We’re all excited about all the automation right there; we’re in the midst of it, right? We are making that transition right now, and there’s a lot of questions about how it impacts jobs, and don’t worry about it, but this time it feels different, doesn’t it?
HARRIS: I think you’re absolutely right. We’re early in the phase of robotics and automation, especially in the service sector. When Bain looked at this project, what we see with machine learning, the kind of sensors you have and human hand dexterity that’s available today — between now and 2030, we could lose 30 to 40 million jobs, which is about 20 to 25 percent of the workforce. So, the most disruptive thing that’s happened to the labor pool in 100 years.
PAYNE: In the past of course, the fears were overcome by productivity, the different jobs that were opened up. I mean, there won’t be a parallel 20 or 30 million jobs that replace those that are lost?
HARRIS: Eventually — I believe in the innovation of the American economy — but eventually we’ll be better off.
PAYNE: But if a robot builds a robot, if a computer gets smarter and smarter — where do we fit in that equation?
HARRIS: Good question. We know there are jobs that humans are better at doing: for example, if you think about elder care. There is a physical labor of helping a older person, but also the cognitive stimulus, playing games, listening to stories. . .
PAYNE: Reading a teleprompter.
HARRIS: Reading a teleprompter, that forestalls dementia. We’ll see innovation, I think to your point, the transition, this is twice as broad and twice as fast as the transition from agriculture to industry — so it’s going to be a turbulent period while we go through this.
PAYNE: It’s interesting, we’re in the midst of a big dispute with China, and a lot of big businesses are arguing, hey, you’re disrupting supply chain. To me it’s a euphemism for cheap labor. And if robots are doing so many jobs, wouldn’t the supply chain change in and of itself, and shouldn’t we be bigger beneficiaries of that?
HARRIS: The sequencing is something really important here. So when Bain looked at this work, we looked at demographics, automation and the impact on inequality. And what we saw was, right now we’re in a period where for the first time in decades, the labor pool is getting smaller globally. So to your point, as the labor pool is expanding, labor got cheaper overseas, we built the long supply chains.
Now that the labor pool is shrinking in China and Germany, growing more slowly in the US, costs rise, robotics get cheaper, and we see this uptick of automation replacing workers. And so that should and will bring more and more production onshore in developed countries like America and create some real strengths for emerging markets that count on shipping to us.
PAYNE: That’s tough for the emerging markets, great news for America, but in the transition period — in the minute we have left — in your report, you talk about the 10- or 15-year boom, but you also talk about highly skilled or high income labor. When General Motors announced that they were closing a plant, they couldn’t say, hey, we know the people are working at this plant have been working here 30 or 40 years, they couldn’t say but they don’t have the skillset to do what we need them to do, and yet that is really probably what is going on here. How do we get Americans those skillsets?
HARRIS: That is the third step, the demographics, inequality and automation, that the early phases of this go to highly skilled workers. . .
PAYNE: Who is responsible — government or business or a combination of both?
HARRIS: It has to be combination. Our clients are really worried about helping people who work for them find new jobs and new opportunities, but each individual company can’t help everyone, so we all need to participate in that.
Is it really true that farmworkers are in short supply? America’s southern border has been wide open for decades, but we are still told that there aren’t enough pickers — perhaps at the wage that farmers want to pay.
Automation can solve the problem here, if one exists. Machines are coming into the marketplace that can do all the farming tasks that will very soon make foreign or domestic farmworkers completely unnecessary, as documented here.
In fact, it’s wrong-headed to continue mass immigration based on the idea that America’s need for inexpensive labor will continue. When machines become cheaper, they will replace human employees, from agricultural pickers to financial analysts.
Technology will soon put an end to much unpleasant physical labor — and the paychecks that accompany it. Just how that effect of advanced machines will be handled in society has gotten little attention from our political leaders.
Below is a video of a new farm robot being tested — warning, the musical audio is a little cloying.
Farming worker shortages are getting worse. In a survey by the California Farm Bureau Federation last year, 55 percent of the 762 farmers surveyed said they had experienced employee shortages. That’s why researchers are now trying to tackle this problem with robots.
Researchers from Europe and Israel have built a robot that can pick ripe peppers in a greenhouse. The prototype, called Sweeper, is backed by the European Union as part of its Horizon 2020 innovation program.
To do its job, Sweeper uses a camera that can recognize the color of a pepper. Computer vision then helps the robot decide if the fruit is ripe for picking. If it is, Sweeper uses a small razor to cut the stem before catching the fruit in its “claws” and dropping it into a collection basket below.
To pick a single pepper takes about 24 seconds, though the researchers say they purposefully slowed down the robot’s movements for safety reasons. Sweeper is also equipped with LED lights so that it can work regardless of the time of day, for about 20 hours/day. Still, the robot is far from perfect, with only 61 percent accuracy in picking ripe fruit. (Continues)
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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.
