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Some robot companies build machines that can walk around, as opposed to those that stay put and perform precise tasks in manufacturing.
Boston Dynamics creates walk-about robots with two legs and four — both of which are good.
We humans walk around all the time and think nothing of it. But machines must be programmed to readjust constantly because of the changing effect of gravity on a moving physical object.
Early attempts at building ambulatory robots were not alway successful. Here’s a fun video dated 2015 from the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a demanding competition that focused on disaster and emergency-response scenarios — where not all contestants made the grade:
Six years have passed, and Boston Dynamics just released a video showing off some very impressive dance moves — indicating how much progress has been made in the world of robots:
The servants of the open-borders elite never sleep, as we see from the most recent attempt at illegal alien amnesty from the Congress, the so-called Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019, aka HR5038.
The idea that more foreign workers would be “modernization” on the farm is particularly ironic, since agricultural automation technology has been advancing rapidly for years: for example, John Deere developed GPS for its tractors in 1997 and has continued the improvement of autonomous farm equipment that is piloted by computers rather than drivers.
Numerous farmers prefer the dependability of farm machines to the problems finding human temporary workers. According to a 2017 survey of 762 farmers conducted by the California Farm Bureau Federation, 33 percent said they were turning to mechanization to assure the work gets done. Certainly when ag robots become even less expensive, many more farmers will gladly switch to machines.
Farm robots are also easier to develop than factory models because there are no safety concerns like those where humans work near the machines.
If anything, the importation of foreign farm labor should be ended entirely because smart machines can do the cultivation and harvesting much more efficiently than humans. And why should the government legalize many thousands who will be unemployable in a few years?
NumbersUSA has more details of the proposed bill here, and Tucker Carlson presented a thorough rundown on Friday:
TUCKER CARLSON: Bipartisan consensus in Washington has been that America ought to give amnesty to all illegal aliens within our borders, no matter how many there are. The leadership of both parties believes this.
The problem is that voters definitely don’t believe it: they strongly disagree and have for decades. They’ve said so in polling consistently. But instead of paying attention to what the public wants, as usual, the parties ignore it and instead work together to do what they want by stealth.
Their latest gambit is called HR5038, a bill called the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019. As usual, the name is Orwellian. The bill does not modernize America’s agricultural workforce, in fact, just the opposite — HR5038 is designed to keep our farming practices primitive and dependent upon low-wage manual labor.
The bill, which remarkably has a total of 24 Republican co-sponsors, would give amnesty to illegal immigrant farm workers in the United States, pretty much all of them. Even illegal aliens who’ve been convicted of crimes would be eligible for permanent residency here and eventually citizenship. Beneficiaries would not have to pay any back taxes that qualify even if they skipped court hearings or snuck back into the US after being deported.
Don’t you try something like that as a US citizen: Congress will have no mercy on you, but for foreign nationals — no problem.
How many foreign nationals would benefit from this act if it became law? Well in point of fact, nobody knows. The pro amnesty group Farmworker Justice estimates that at least 1.2 million illegal immigrants would be eligible — but if history is any guide, and it is — the actual number would be far far higher and that’s assuming the bill would restrict an amnesty to actual farm workers. Good luck with that.
HR5038 imposes very low document standards. Those applying for amnesty can submit all kinds of different documents. There’s no penalty for fraud — in other words there’d be no reason not to submit a bogus application. Needless to say, many people would just as they did thirty years ago during the Ronald Reagan amnesty.
That’s supposedly limited farm worker amnesty drew hundreds of thousands of fraudulent applications and here’s the key: most of them were approved anyway. in some cases even illegal immigrants who arrived in this country after amnesty became law were allowed to benefit from the amnesty. Think about that for a minute — it was a joke.
Now they want to do it again, but on a much larger scale. So to sum up — the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019 would reward law breaking, exacerbate the border crisis and undermine the already stalled wages of American blue-collar workers.
it’s pretty much the mirror image the exact opposite of what Donald Trump ran on just three years ago, and yet members of Congress like Elise Stefanik, Tom Cole, Fred Upton and more than twenty other Republicans are now fighting to make it law.
Why is that? You’ve got to wonder — maybe they’re not bright enough to know what’s in the bill. Maybe there’s some other motive. Maybe someone should ask them.
A major reason why Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world ($132B in 2018) was his early adoption of robots in his warehouses — see my 2016 article Amazon Robotics in The Social Contract for background.
Below, the Kiva robots of Amazon scoot under the appropriate rack of merchandise and bring it to a human packer for shipment.
Therefore it’s not surprising that knock-off machines have been designed to fill the desire of business owners to run their warehouses as cheaply as possible. One is from the GreyOrange company of Asia:
Keep in mind that whenever robots become less expensive than workers, the humans will be replaced. So it makes no sense to continue importing low-skilled foreigners via immigration when it has become clear that the future will be operated by smart machines. In fact. . .
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
Here’s a story about the knock-off warehouse robots:
Padmanabhan Raman, chief production manager, shows off charging station at Project Verte in McDonough, Georgia, on May 2.
ATLANTA — Tephnee Usher stands in a McDonough, Georgia, warehouse, separated from the stored goods by a black chain-link fence, and waits for robots to deliver the goods to her.
Human workers are confined to opposite edges of this 17-acre roofed space: delivery bays and shipping bays about a football field apart. The vast concrete area between them belongs to 225 electric powered, eerily silent robotic Butlers that perform tasks people used to do.
E-commerce, growing at 15 percent a year, is driving a second boom in Georgia’s robust warehousing and logistics industry, which employs about 118,000 packers and material handlers across the state. Companies setting up ready-to-ship warehouses here last year included Target’s furniture line, Wayfair home furnishings and Dynacraft bikes and scooters. Amazon has four “fulfillment” centers scattered from Braselton to Macon.
It’s clear the industry is changing. What’s less clear is how much that will translate into a jobs boom or bust as automation and artificial intelligence increasingly take over the work.
The robot-powered warehouse in McDonough just south of Atlanta will begin operations in June after test runs. It belongs to Verte, a Sandy Springs, Georgia, start-up aiming to compete with Amazon. Verte targets mom-and-pop to midsize sellers, offering to help them track, keep inventory, sell and move their goods ranging from shoes to cosmetics from manufacturer to home.
The low-slung Butlers are manufactured by GreyOrange in Alpharetta, Georgia, the American headquarters of the Singapore company. It can retrofit any warehouse with a flat floor into a roboticized one that can endlessly reconfigure its movable shelves for maximum efficiency. Products that arrive at one door can be stocked and on their way to buyers in as little as two hours, touched by human hands only two or three times.
The Butlers at the McDonough warehouse look like giant Roombas, the disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaners. They glide among 6,000 refrigerator-size shelving units lined up in rows 85 deep between the delivery and shipping bays. They roll precisely under a unit holding an item someone has ordered, jack it up with enough electric power to lift more than 3,000 pounds, and move it to the waiting Usher, a human picker.
Usher then grabs the item out of one of its bins, scans it and hands it to team members who pack it and label it for shipping to a customer’s home.
The warehouse is cutting edge when it comes to automation. But it isn’t alone. E-commerce giant Amazon is adding highly roboticized warehouses across the nation similar to Verte’s. The closest one to Georgia is in Jacksonville, Florida, which uses movable shelving units and scooter-like robots that look like GreyOrange’s.
Repetitive work, like warehouse jobs, is widely predicted to be among those more vulnerable to disappearing thanks to robots and artificial intelligence.
At the same time, new jobs are created through the industry’s growth and adoption of technology.
Programmers and robot mechanics are now on staffs, but they typically take more education or skills. There is unsettled debate about whether continuing technological and social changes will create as many jobs as those shorn off.
“I think there’s definitely going to be fewer workers in warehouses, but warehouses are also experiencing labor shortages,” said Nancey Green Leigh, a Georgia Tech professor who studies robots and works with a National Science Foundation grant.
Packing goods for shipping is often tedious work at low pay, which has led to employee turnover and unfilled jobs. With the unemployment rate below 4 percent, there also are fewer available workers. Indeed.com lists more than 6,000 warehouse jobs in Georgia, the bulk of them paying $25,000 a year or less.
“On the one hand, we can be concerned about the job loss, but on the other hand, many of the jobs are not great jobs,” said Green Leigh.
Georgia long has been a logistics and warehousing center.
Atlanta has the sixth-most warehousing space among metro areas, with 683 million square feet. It is home to companies such as UPS and Manhattan Associates and has major operations for big global logistics providers such as XPO.
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is a cargo hub and Savannah is the fourth-busiest U.S. container port in the U.S., connecting Georgia businesses to the world. The state boasts excellent rail and interstate access.
Verte, backed by $45 million in venture capital, is hoping to leapfrog larger and older competitors with the help of GreyOrange’s robots. GreyOrange, also a startup, has received more than $170 million in venture capital.
“Anybody who built five or 10 years ago was too early,” said Verte founder Julian Kahlon, in reference to fast-changing technology.
Kahlon added that he wanted to build a warehouse capable of doing Black Friday business volumes every day, to keep up with the explosion in demand as consumers increasingly opt to have goods shipped directly to their homes.
Low-skilled warehouse work is not well paid, the average job paying about $13 an hour, according to the Georgia Department of Labor. And the work can be arduous. Before mobile delivery robots, pickers could walk up to 12 miles a day finding and moving items, said Green Leigh, the Georgia Tech professor.
But the drive for efficiency means companies also are searching for additional ways to replace humans with robots. Both Amazon and GreyOrange say they have built and are perfecting picking robots — the same job that Usher is currently doing at Verte’s McDonough warehouse.
Amazon also has a test delivery program in Washington state, where a wheeled robot traveling on sidewalks is delivering packages to doorsteps, and has made investments in self-driving vehicles, including shipping trucks. (Continues)
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)
Here’s a new robot from the Ford company designed to work in its factories. It’s basically a filing cabinet on wheels that delivers replacement parts on the floor.
Below, Ford’s Survival robot consists of cubby holes for parts — each with its own identifying number on the door.
Users in the Valencia, Spain, plant report success with the machine, and the company may expand its implementation.
The Ford delivery robot is a simple thing, but it indicates a much larger trend in business. Remember that industry is not spending millions overall in its automation redesign to make work easier for employees; the change is to save money. And when smart machines become cheaper than workers, then the humans will be laid off.
As the work universe changes, First World nations like America won’t need many (any?) Third World migrants/aliens to work cheap and simple because machines will do it better.
Note how the article below includes a couple job loss studies associated with automation:
• The Ford Motor manufacturing plant in Valencia has a new delivery employee — an autonomous robot named “Survival.”
• The self-driving robot uses lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to visualize its surroundings and deliver spare parts.
• The robot made its debut at Ford as workers around the world become increasingly worried their jobs will one day be stolen by technology.
The Ford Motor manufacturing plant in Valencia, Spain, has a new delivery employee — an autonomous robot named “Survival.”
The self-driving robot uses lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to visualize its surroundings and deliver spare parts to where they’re needed in the facility. It was manufactured by Ford engineers and is the first of its kind to be used at one of the company’s European plants.
Ford said Survival gives employees more time to undertake more complex tasks.
“When it first started you could see employees thinking they were in some kind of sci-fi movie, stopping and staring at it as it went by,” Eduardo García Magraner, manufacturing manager at the Valencia factory, said in a statement. “Now they just get on with their jobs knowing the robot is smart enough to work around them.”
The robot made its debut as workers around the world become increasingly worried their jobs will one day be stolen by technology.
Nearly half of the world’s jobs face some risk of being automated, according to research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. A Brookings Institution report warns that a quarter of Americans are at high risk of losing their jobs to automation.
Workers in food services, manufacturing, administrative support, farming, transportation and construction have the greatest likelihood of being replaced by robots.
In 2018, a record number of robots were put to work in North America. According to the Robotic Industries Association, 35,880 robots were shipped to the U.S., Canada and Mexico last year, with 53% going to the automotive industry. (Continues)
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. . .
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.
The present low unemployment is likely to end in a few years when robots, automation and artificial intelligence become more widely used in the workplace. The article linked below observed that at the recent Davos meeting of elite globalists, in private, rather than promoting re-training, leaders admitted “the more automation, the better.”
So that’s the future economic elites plan for the rest of us.
Below, long unemployment lines will certainly reappear in the automated future.
We often think of automation as affecting physical occupations like farming and manufacturing, but the SynOps technology developed by Accenture is office oriented, performing tasks in finance, accounting, marketing and procurement. The company brags that it eliminated 40,000 human workers within its own ranks.
Over the last five years, the global management consulting company Accenture has developed proprietary automation software called the SynOps platform that it says has helped it cut 40,000 jobs within the company.
First, allow me to apologize for being forced to string together some of the dullest words in the English language, as few industries manage to deaden the soul and glaze over the eyes as potently as business consulting. Second, let me get to the news: Accenture is now putting this software up for sale, ostensibly allowing any mid-to-large-sized companies to automate their lower-level employees out of jobs.
According to Bloomberg, SynOps “suggests ways to streamline and automate processes in areas such as finance and accounting, marketing and procurement.” Synops is part of the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) boom, which is led by companies like UiPath, and which seek to automate jobs that occupy the so-called “repetitive cognitive” quadrant of jobs, like, say, data entry.
Accenture Operations, the company’s outsourcing unit, once used human workers in mostly low-wage countries such as India, to handle routine data entry and customer service tasks for clients. Now that unit is hoping this new software will help clients’ achieve further savings by — at least in some cases — eliminating the need for humans altogether.
For instance, if used in procurement, the SynOps system can take an order, generate an invoice, check that invoice against a contract, correct any errors and then email it to the customer.
Accenture insists that all of the workers whose jobs were cut were retrained, and the group chief executive officer of Accenture Operations gives the oft-repeated bromide that, “This is not trying to get rid of the human… but to make them as productive as possible and get them to focus on the work that a human really needs to do.”
To which I say—right. And the aim of automating factories was definitely not eliminating human labor, but giving workers more fun and efficient things to do on the assembly line As Kevin Roose pointed out in his recent column about the public and private sides of the Davos set’s true motivations on automation, executives and management are beyond eager to start cutting headcount. Though they may bandy about terms like “retrain workers” and “make humans more productive” in public, privately, the aim is clear: the more automation, the better. (Continues)
It’s not news that when an economic downturn hits, business looks to cut numbers of expensive employees, but these days, the entrance of smart machines into the workplace makes the layoffs even easier for executives. It has happened before and it will happen again.
In fact, a 2013 investigation by the Associated Press found that good jobs lost in the economic downturn aren’t coming back: AP IMPACT: Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs. Companies chose to become more efficient by laying human workers off and substituting automation and software for a range of employment from farm pickers to educated office workers.
We can therefore expect similar behavior in the next recession, as is forecast in a Washington Post article, reprinted in the Houston Chronicle, linked below.
The piece utilizes the recent Brookings report, Automation and Artificial Intelligence. It presents a reassuring tone, suggesting that robots “will bring neither an apocalypse nor utopia.”
So forget about those scary predictions like the shocker on a recent Sixty Minutes show that “in 15 years, [automation is] going to displace about 40 percent of the jobs in the world.”
All in all, the best course is probably to bet on the profit urge among business executives — and when machines become cheaper than workers to perform a task, the humans will go.
The Post article observes, “Hispanic workers are more exposed than any other race or ethnic group” to the automation threat, though without connecting the educational component or ability to speak English.
Immigrants are not mentioned at all in the Brookings report, although the recent batch of illegal aliens from Honduras won’t be suitable for any useful work before too long. Foreigners whose skills consist of Third-World farming techniques will not be employable even at menial labor when the cheap robots come galloping into the workplace.
The coming automation spurt will likely bring enormous welfare costs because of crazy liberal immigration of unskilled persons.
In this May 3, 2018, file photo a worker lifts a lunch bowl off the production line at Spyce, a restaurant which uses a robotic cooking process, in Boston. Robots aren’t replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of today’s work, according to a new Brookings Institution report published Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019.
Robots’ infiltration of the workforce doesn’t happen gradually, at the pace of technology. It happens in surges, when companies are given strong incentives to tackle the difficult task of automation.
Typically, those incentives occur during recessions. Employers slash payrolls going into a downturn and, out of necessity, turn to software or machinery to take over the tasks once performed by their laid-off workers as business begins to recover.
As uncertainty soars, a shutdown drags on, and consumer confidence sputters, economists increasingly predict a recession this year or next. Whenever this long economic expansion ends, the robots will be ready. The human labor market is tight, with the unemployment rate at 3.9 percent, but there’s plenty of slack in the robot labor force.
This next wave of automation won’t just be sleek robotic arms on factory floors. It will be ordering kiosks, self-service apps and software smart enough to perfect schedules and cut down on the workers needed to cover a shift. Employers are already testing these systems. A recession will force them into the mainstream.
A new analysis from Mark Muro, Robert Maxim and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, finds much of the nation will be susceptible to the upheaval caused by automation in coming decades, particularly young people, minorities and Rust Belt workers.
The total number of jobs will rise in the long run, but many workers will be forced to adapt. Robots will continue to roil the long-suffering manufacturing sector, Brookings finds. They will also move into low-skill service jobs such as food services workers once considered too cheap or too difficult to automate.
Economists generally focus on workers performing repetitive tasks, including rote mental or clerical work in an office cubicle and rote manual labor on a factory floor, to measure the influence of technology.
Middle-income work has evaporated in recent decades. Americans are now divided between the high-paid employees who design machines, the low-paid workers who sweeps up after it, or the even lower-paid service workers who serves fast-casual sandwiches to the other two.
In an upcoming paper from Review of Economics and Statistics, economists Nir Jaimovich of the University of Zurich and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia found that 88 percent of job loss in routine occupations occurs within 12 months of a recession. In the 1990-1991, 2001 and 2008-2009 recessions, routine jobs accounted for “essentially all” of the jobs lost. They regained almost no ground during the subsequent recoveries.
Firms in cities hit hardest by the Great Recession raised their skill requirements for new employees and invested more in technology, according to economists Brad Hershbein of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Lisa Kahn of the University of Rochester.
Their 2018 American Economic Review analysis of almost 100 million online postings collected by Burning Glass Technologies in 2007 and 2010-2015 found strong signs companies were replacing workers who performed routine tasks with a combination of technology and more skilled workers. The effect was especially pronounced for “cognitive” workers such as office clerks, office administrators and salespeople.
The economy is near full employment – the point at which everyone who wants a job has one. The unemployment rate has been at or below 4.0 percent for 10 straight months.
But the labor market for robots has room to grow. As wages rise and human help gets pricey, companies have experimented with alternatives.
The Washington Post’s Peter Holley has tapped into a deep vein of corporate automation efforts in recent months. Cooler-sized robots deliver food for $1.99 at George Mason University in suburan Washington. Tall, slim robot assistants patrol Giant supermarkets in search of spills and hazards. Walmart planned to install 360 floor-cleaning robot zambonis by the end of January. A start-up called Robomart hopes to start running mobile supermarkets in robotic minivans in the Boston area in partnership with Stop & Shop.
But while many businesses dabble, few have gone all-in — yet. (Continues)
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