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Automation is coming on strong in the economy and will take millions of jobs in the next few years because as soon as a machine becomes cheaper for an individual task than a human, the worker will be gone. In addition, business owners like how robots work 24/7 and don’t require lunch, sleep or paychecks. Just an occasional squirt of oil will suffice to keep the machines performing.
More recently, the Wuhan pandemic has speeded up the process of businesses adopting smart machines, since robots also don’t get sick — so convenient rather than undependable humans with their annoying germs.
There’s not a lot that can be done to deal with the job-killing Age of Automation we face, but it would make sense to end immigration, because most of the jobs that immigrants do can be done more cheaply by smart machines. In short,
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
Here’s a transcript of the discussion I cleaned up for easy reference:
NARRATOR: Automation is coming for your job — at least that’s the fear among many workers — from burger-flipping bots to car-building robots, not to mention high-powered software taking on more and more administrative tasks. It seems like hundreds of skills are rapidly becoming obsolete in the US economy. A McKinsey study found that AI and deep learning could add as much as $3.5 trillion to $5.8 trillion in annual value to companies.
ANDREW YANG: Eighty percent or more of the jobs that make $20 an hour or less are at least potentially subject to automation.
NARRATOR: The economic shock of the pandemic hasn’t helped; human workers are vulnerable to diseases that robots aren’t, making it much easier and now cheaper to have a robot on staff that doesn’t require healthcare.
MARCUS CASEY: Businesses are kind of looking and seeing that humans can get sick from covid, but machines can’t.
MICHAEL HICKS: If you can eliminate the healthcare costs, the labor and wage tag that comes along with those folks and particularly in services — that’s a big competitive advantage.
NARRATOR: To put the increase in robotics in perspective: the U.S. had .49 robots per thousand workers in 1995 which rose to 1.79 robots per thousand workers in 2017, but automation isn’t just a robotics revolution. The rise in information technology and artificial intelligence or AI has also become an enabler of automation. AI can help navigate difficult challenges that previously only a human operator could handle. Of course, if you’ve encountered automated phone systems, it’s likely you personally experienced that automation still has a long way to go. Continue reading this article
To a large degree, automation’s job replacement has occurred out of the public eye, such as in factories, but we could soon find the appearance of smart machines in retail outlets — see Business Develops More Cashierless Stores.
Doubtless the number of human workers may seem excessive to business owners looking to save money by installing robots, which conveniently don’t require lunch breaks, healthcare or paychecks. Of course, disemployed workers are not dependable shoppers, a fact that automation implementers tend to ignore.
The writer of the article below seems to find the robot future to be a neato prospect judging by his writing style, although the associated job loss will be anything but cool — except for employers. For example, the World Economic Forum predicted a few years ago that 30 to 50 percent of retail jobs are at risk once known automation technologies are fully incorporated which will result in six million positions lost.
The robots are coming! The robots are coming! On our sidewalks, in our skies, in our every store… Over the next decade, robots will enter the mainstream of retail.
As countless robots work behind the scenes to stock shelves, serve customers, and deliver products to our doorstep, the speed of retail will accelerate.
These changes are already underway. In this blog, we’ll elaborate on how robots are entering the retail ecosystem.
Let’s dive in.
Robot Delivery
On August 3rd, 2016, Domino’s Pizza introduced the Domino’s Robotic Unit, or “DRU” for short. The first home delivery pizza robot, the DRU looks like a cross between R2-D2 and an oversized microwave.
LIDAR and GPS sensors help it navigate, while temperature sensors keep hot food hot and cold food cold. Already, it’s been rolled out in ten countries, including New Zealand, France, and Germany, but its August 2016 debut was critical—as it was the first time we’d seen robotic home delivery.
And it won’t be the last.
A dozen or so different delivery bots are fast entering the market. Starship Technologies, for instance, a startup created by Skype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, has a general-purpose home delivery robot. Right now, the system is an array of cameras and GPS sensors, but upcoming models will include microphones, speakers, and even the ability—via AI-driven natural language processing—to communicate with customers. Since 2016, Starship has already carried out 50,000 deliveries in over 100 cities across 20 countries.
Along similar lines, Nuro—co-founded by Jiajun Zhu, one of the engineers who helped develop Google’s self-driving car—has a miniature self-driving car of its own. Half the size of a sedan, the Nuro looks like a toaster on wheels, except with a mission. This toaster has been designed to carry cargo—about 12 bags of groceries (version 2.0 will carry 20)—which it’s been doing for select Kroger stores since 2018. Domino’s also partnered with Nuro in 2019.
As these delivery bots take to our streets, others are streaking across the sky.
Back in 2016, Amazon came first, announcing Prime Air—the e-commerce giant’s promise of drone delivery in 30 minutes or less. Almost immediately, companies ranging from 7-Eleven and Walmart to Google and Alibaba jumped on the bandwagon.
While critics remain doubtful, the head of the FAA’s drone integration department recently said that drone deliveries may be “a lot closer than […] the skeptics think. [Companies are] getting ready for full-blown operations. We’re processing their applications. I would like to move as quickly as I can.”
In-Store Robots
While delivery bots start to spare us trips to the store, those who prefer shopping the old-fashioned way—i.e., in person—also have plenty of human-robot interaction in store. In fact, these robotics solutions have been around for a while.
In 2010, SoftBank introduced Pepper, a humanoid robot capable of understanding human emotion. Pepper is cute: 4 feet tall, with a white plastic body, two black eyes, a dark slash of a mouth, and a base shaped like a mermaid’s tail. Across her chest is a touch screen to aid in communication. And there’s been a lot of communication. Pepper’s cuteness is intentional, as it matches its mission: help humans enjoy life as much as possible.
Over 12,000 Peppers have been sold. She serves ice cream in Japan, greets diners at a Pizza Hut in Singapore, and dances with customers at a Palo Alto electronics store. More importantly, Pepper’s got company.
Walmart uses shelf-stocking robots for inventory control. Best Buy uses a robo-cashier, allowing select locations to operate 24-7. And Lowe’s Home Improvement employs the LoweBot—a giant iPad on wheels—to help customers find the items they need while tracking inventory along the way. (Continues)
But it hasn’t happened, not even close. Maybe the brainiacs of Silicon Valley couldn’t anticipate the vagaries of normal street chaos and snow drifts in diverse climates.
The slow development is not a bad thing at all. Although self-driving cars would be a help to people with restricted movement, the job loss would be catastrophic. Millions of Americans work as drivers, as shown in the 2015 graph below:
As has been pointed out here numerous times, the automation of many industries means America needs vastly fewer immigrants to do low-skilled jobs. In numerous areas of work — those that are less fraught with issues of human safety — robots and automation are going gang-busters, and the country should recognize a near future of fewer jobs overall and adjust immigration accordingly — to zero. But in contrast to trends elsewhere, the self-driving issue being postponed indefinitely benefits foreign drivers along with Americans, so immigrant cabbies are safe for now.
In the current article from CNBC, there’s no assurance of self-driving progress. The failures in safety (like the 2018 crash of an Uber car that killed a woman in Arizona) have not been solved, so the basic promise of totally safe automotive travel has not been fulfilled. More surprising is that the technologists seem unsure of when the real deal will be here — the magic day keeps being postponed years into the future.
More companies are trying to bring self-driving cars to the masses than ever before. Yet a truly autonomous vehicle still doesn’t exist. And it’s not clear if, or when, our driverless future will arrive.
Proponents in the industry, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Waymo CEO John Krafcik and Cruise CEO Dan Ammann, touted an aggressive timeline but missed and reset their goals.
In a third-quarter earnings call, Musk said Tesla “appears to be on track for at least an early access release of a fully functional Full Self-Driving by the end of this year.” Other leaders in the field are taking a more sober view on driverless cars, what’s still needed to perfect them and how long before they are part of our daily lives.
Avideh Zakhor, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s electrical engineering and computer sciences department, explained what inspired the rational reckoning in the industry:
“There was a sense maybe a year or two ago, that ‘Oh, our algorithms are so good! We’re ready to launch. We’re gonna launch driverless cars any minute.’ And then obviously there’s been the setbacks of people getting killed or accidents happening, and now we’re a lot more cautious.”
States don’t have clear regulations governing the safety testing and deployment of driverless cars, and that’s one challenge to getting them out on the road.
As of October, 41 states have either enacted legislation or signed executive orders regulating the testing and use of autonomous vehicles. In September, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released new federal guidelines for automated driving systems — but they’re only voluntary at this point.
Miles driven by test vehicles on real roads had been a frequently touted metric. But to advance the safety of their driverless systems, big players including GM-owned Cruise and Amazon-backed Aurora have also developed their own means of testing in simulation, much like rocket and airplane makers would before a first test flight. (Continues)
Earlier this week, PBS broadcast a two-hour Frontline episode, In the Age of AI. It was one of the more comprehensive media presentations on the automated future we face, and the program was broken into five sections. One of those was titled “The Surveillance State” and it described the steps being taken by Red China in “a project called Sharp Eyes which is putting camera on every major street and corner of every village in China” — chilling, and a reminder that we in America should resist the many anti-freedom influences from Beijing, as the NBA has failed to do.
There was a segment about self-driving trucks that included an interview with Hope Cumbee, the wife of a human driver, who described how tough the life was and that they made only $22,000 a year.
Below, truck driver Shawn Cumbee said he loves his job because he is a third-generation truck driver.
Frontline found a diverse young entrepreneur named Alex Rodrigues who predicted, “We’re talking less than half a decade” for self-driving trucks to be on the highways.
The autonomous truck represents both as it maneuvers into the marketplace.
The engineers are confident that, in spite of questions about when this will happen, they can get it working safely sooner than most people realize.
ALEX RODRIGUES: I think that you will see the first vehicles operating with no one inside them moving freight in the next few years, and then you’re gonna see that expanding to more freight, more geographies, more weather over time as that capability builds up. We’re talking less than half a decade.
NARRATOR: He already has a Fortune 500 company as a client, shipping appliances across the Southwest. He says the sales pitch is straightforward.
ALEX RODRIGUES: They spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year shipping parts around the country. We can bring that cost in half.
And they’re really excited to be able to start working with us, both because of the potential savings from deploying self-driving, and also because of all the operational efficiencies that they see, the biggest one being able to operate 24 hours a day. So right now, human drivers are limited to 11 hours by federal law, and a driverless truck obviously wouldn’t have that limitation.
NARRATOR: The idea of a driverless truck comes up often in discussions about artificial intelligence.
Steve Viscelli is a sociologist who drove a truck while researching his book “The Big Rig” about the industry.
STEVE VISCELLI, University of Pennsylvania: This is one of the most remarkable stories in U.S. labor history, I think, is the decline of unionized trucking. The industry was deregulated in 1980, and at that time truck drivers were earning the equivalent of over $100,000 in today’s dollars. And today the typical truck driver will earn a little over $40,000 a year.
I think it’s an important part of the automation story, right? Why are they so afraid of automation? Because we’ve had four decades of rising inequality in wages, and if anybody is going to take it on the chin from automation, the trucking industry—the first in line is going to be the driver, without a doubt. Continue reading this article
I couldn’t face watching three hours of Democrats jabbering at each other on Tuesday’s debate, but it was interesting that automation came up as a question from news person Erin Burnet (Transcript):
BURNETT: I want to turn now to jobs. According to a recent study, about a quarter of American jobs could be lost to automation in just the next 10 years. Ohio is one of the states likely to be hardest hit.
Senator Sanders, you say your federal jobs guarantee is part of the answer to the threat from automation, but tens of millions of Americans could end up losing their jobs. Are you promising that you will have a job for every single one of those Americans?
SANDERS: Damn right we will. And I’ll tell you why. If you look at what goes on in America today, we have an infrastructure which is collapsing. We could put 15 million people to work rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our water systems, our wastewater plants, airports, et cetera.
“Rebuilding” is not a clear career choice for young people, and anyway, construction is becoming at least as automated as other general fields. Most of the candidates who responded on the topic showed limited knowledge on the automation threat to employment.
Below, in certain types of manufacturing, human workers have largely disappeared from the floor as they are replaced by robots.
Senator Warren has been rising in the polls and may well be the Dems’ candidate, but she stuck to her anti-business position rather than recognizing the new and unique problem of smart machines:
BURNETT: Senator Warren, you wrote that blaming job loss on automation is, quote, “a good story, except it’s not really true.” So should workers here in Ohio not be worried about losing their jobs to automation?
WARREN: So the data show that we have had a lot of problems with losing jobs, but the principal reason has been bad trade policy. The principal reason has been a bunch of corporations, giant multinational corporations who’ve been calling the shots on trade, giant multinational corporations that have no loyalty to America.
Fortunately, automation-aware candidate Andrew Yang was able to make his point:
YANG: Senator Warren, I’ve been talking to Americans around the country about automation. And they’re smart. They see what’s happening around them. Their Main Street stores are closing. They see a self-serve kiosk in every McDonalds, every grocery store, every CVS. Driving a truck is the most common job in 29 states, including this one; 3.5 million truck drivers in this country. And my friends in California are piloting self-driving trucks.
What is that going to mean for the 3.5 million truckers or the 7 million Americans who work in truck stops, motels, and diners that rely upon the truckers getting out and having a meal? Saying this is a rules problem is ignoring the reality that Americans see around us every single day.
This topic appearing in a debate is real progress. No such discussions occurred in the 2016 campaign.
Now if the Democrats would admit that automation makes low-skilled immigration obsolete. . .
The Gold Rush toward domination of the future self-driving vehicle market continues with enthusiasm. The reticence that occurred after a deadly Arizona accident in 2018 appears to have faded, at least according to a recent CBS story. In fact, the article begins by saying, “The race to create the self-driving car continues at a feverish pace…”
The billions of dollars invested in the project probably have a lot to do with that renewed energy. Nobody in Detroit or Silicon Valley (or Japan or Germany or Red China) wants to lose out on a major industry of the future.
Furthermore, the CBS report was more interested in safety — which is important. Self-driving has been sold as being perfectly safe, unlike fallible humans who drink, blink and fall asleep. But the expert appearing on CBS This Morning, Kevin Delaney, said the current technology is only at Level Two out of five levels of autonomy.
Another point of interest is Delany’s mention of worsening “congestion” — which sounds a lot like population growth, now largely fueled by immigration of varying legalities.
The race to create the self-driving car continues at a feverish pace, with major players pumping billions into the effort. But Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief and co-CEO of Quartz, said that when it comes to autonomous vehicles, “we’re heading towards hell.”
“These cars are not safe yet,” Delaney said. “There are five levels of autonomous vehicle safety, according to the U.S. government’s certification, and right now, at best, we’re at level two. What this means is that people need to be keeping their hands on the wheel, they need to be keeping alert to avoid accidents.”
That’s not the only potential problem. “What researchers have found is that when people have access to cars driving that require less effort and money, they actually drive a lot more,” Delaney said. “So the traffic that we experience today is likely to get a lot worse.”
To avoid those problems and establish a “good path” for autonomous vehicles, Delaney said, there are a few solutions. One is to introduce autonomous vehicles in waves, starting with lower-risk innovations like low-speed buses. Platooning – having a human drive one truck, with an autonomous truck following close behind – is another option.
The other key is to encourage carpooling. “If you make it easier for people to drive, because they could sleep, or do whatever, while [their] car is driving, we need to make sure that it’s more like Uber Pool than Uber X,” he said. “Otherwise, the congestion is going to be atrocious.” (Continues)
Serious technical difficulties regarding the safety of autonomous vehicles have been noticed by the executives who run automotive development, according to the New York Times.
Apparently, the real world of city streets has proved to be more complicated than the simple suburbs of the Silicon Valley area, where initial self-driving tests were run.
Below, Google’s 2014 prototype model of self-driving car dinked around the neighborhood at a maximum speed of 25 mph.
A whole industry was created and put on the fast track to get autonomous cars on the road.
But now, the brakes are on, and it’s just as well the self-driving juggernaut gets dialed down. More that three million Americans drive for a living, and replacing them with robots was going to be a big hit on the jobs economy. It’s better that widespread use of self-driving vehicles is postponed for a long time.
A year ago, Detroit and Silicon Valley had visions of putting thousands of self-driving taxis on the road in 2019, ushering in an age of driverless cars.
Most of those cars have yet to arrive — and it is likely to be years before they do. Several carmakers and technology companies have concluded that making autonomous vehicles is going to be harder, slower and costlier than they thought.
“We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” Ford’s chief executive, Jim Hackett, said at the Detroit Economic Club in April.
In the most recent sign of the scramble to regroup, Ford and Volkswagen said last week that they were teaming up to tackle the self-driving challenge.
The two automakers plan to use autonomous-vehicle technology from a Pittsburgh startup, Argo AI, in ride-sharing services in a few urban zones as early as 2021. But Argo’s chief executive, Bryan Salesky, said the industry’s bigger promise of creating driverless cars that could go anywhere was “way in the future.”
[. . .]
A year ago, many industry executives exuded much greater certainty. They thought that their engineers had solved the most vexing technical problems and promised that self-driving cars would be shuttling people around town in at least several cities by sometime this year.
“There was this incredible optimism,” said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Navigant Research. “Companies thought this was a very straightforward problem. You just throw in some sensors and artificial intelligence and it would be easy to do.”
The industry’s unbridled confidence was quickly dented when a self-driving car being tested by Uber hit and killed a woman walking a bicycle across a street last year in Tempe, Arizona. A safety driver was at the wheel of the vehicle, but was watching a TV show on her phone just before the crash, according to the Tempe Police Department.
Since that fatality, “almost everybody has reset their expectations,” Abuelsamid said. It was believed to be the first pedestrian death involving a self-driving vehicle. Elsewhere in the United States, three Tesla drivers have died in crashes that occurred while the company’s Autopilot driver-assistance system was engaged and both it and the drivers failed to detect and react to hazards.
But on Saturday, the Tribe of the Day was Sikh who, according to the Times, are “transforming” the US trucking industry. Say, did American truckers ask to be replaced by foreigners and have their business transformed?
Below, immigrants now drive on the “Punjabi American highway” according to the LA Times.
The paper even included a video online with a kid for extra emotional effect.
For a little history, American truckers have been celebrated in music and film for decades. In 1978, Sam Peckinpah directed the popular film Convoy, starring Kris Kristopherson, back when long-haul truckers were in the news for using CB radios.
In 1974, Johnny Cash wrote and recorded “All I Do Is Drive,” a song dedicated to hard-working truckers:
Plus, America certainly doesn’t need to import diverse truck drivers when self-driving vehicles are high on industry’s to-do list of automation. Driverless big rigs have been tested on highways for the last couple years, and recently the state of Florida approved a plan where more advanced vehicles could be on the road next year. The Starsky company intends to have remote drivers logging on to computers in an office environment to handle its trucks during the first and last miles of their trips by the end of 2020.
But the Times prefers its diversity fairy tale rather than facing America’s automated future.
It’s 7:20 p.m. when he rolls into Spicy Bite, one of the newest restaurants here in rural northwest New Mexico.
Locals in Milan, a town of 3,321, have barely heard of it.
The building is small, single-story, built of corrugated metal sheets. There are seats for 20. The only advertising is spray-painted on concrete roadblocks in English and Punjabi. Next door is a diner and gas station; the county jail is across the road.
Palwinder Singh orders creamy black lentils, chicken curry and roti, finishing it off with chai and cardamom rice pudding. After 13 hours on and off the road in his semi truck, he leans back in a booth as a Bollywood music video plays on TV.
“This is like home,” says Pal, the name he uses on the road (said like “Paul”).
There are 3.5 million truckers in the United States. California has 138,000, the second-most after Texas. Nearly half of those in California are immigrants, most from Mexico or Central America. But as drivers age toward retirement — the average American trucker is 55 — and a shortage grows, Sikh immigrants and their kids are increasingly taking up the job.
Estimates of the number of Sikh truckers vary. In California alone, tens of thousands of truckers trace their heritage to India. The state is home to half of the Sikhs in the U.S. — members of a monotheistic faith with origins in 15th century India whose followers are best recognized by the uncut hair and turbans many men wear. At Sikh temples in Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield and Riverside, the majority of worshipers are truck drivers and their families.
Over the last decade, Indian Americans have launched trucking schools, truck companies, truck washes, trucker temples and no-frills Indian restaurants modeled after truck stops back home, where Sikhs from the state of Punjab dominate the industry.
“You used to see a guy with a turban and you would get excited,” says Pal, who is in his 15th year of trucking. “Today, you go to some stops and can convince yourself you are in India.”
Three interstates — the I-5, I-80 and I-10 — are dotted with Indian-American-owned businesses catering to truckers. They start to appear as you drive east from Los Angeles, Reno and Phoenix, and often have the words “Bombay,” “Indian” or “Punjabi” on their storefront signs. But many, with names like Jay Bros (in Overton, Neb.) and Antelope Truck Stop Pronghorn (in Burns, Wyo.) are anonymous dots on a map unless you’re one of the many Sikhs who have memorized them as a road map to America.
The best-known are along Interstate 40, which stretches from Barstow to North Carolina. The road, much of it alongside Historic Route 66, forms the backbone of the Sikh trucking world. (Continues)
Self-driving trucks have been in basic test mode for several years now — meaning a human is present behind the wheel — but now Florida moving toward full auto.
The founder of Starsky Robotics, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, appeared on Fox Business recently and remarked, “We’ve been testing on Florida roads with people in the cab for couple of years. We’re now gearing up to take the person completely out of the cab on public roads in the state of Florida.”
Still, the Starsky boss says is is not ignorant of the job threat posed by self-driving vehicles, as he described in a June 11 interview:
Seltz-Axmacher explained to Freightwaves, “While others are trying to build fully autonomous trucks, we are building a truck that drives with no person in it and is remote-controlled for the first and last mile and that’s a completely different mindset. We are not eliminating drivers’ jobs. Instead, we are moving them from a truck to a safe and comfortable office where they utilize years of their long-haul trucking experience, but remain close to their families and go home between shifts.”
Perhaps. We’ll see how long that strategy lasts when other companies compete with cheaper hauling rates by deleting drivers entirely.
Driverless semi-trucks could be sharing Florida highways as early as next year, and there will be no requirement that surrounding motorists know it.
Nor will autonomous driving systems need to be tested, inspected, or certified before being deployed under a new state law that takes effect July 1.
10-4?
Starsky Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup company that’s been testing its driverless trucking technology in Florida and Texas, has put out a call for job applicants who one day want to pilot big rigs remotely.
Starsky envisions its remote drivers logging onto computers in an office environment to take the reins of its trucks during the first and last miles of their long hauls.
That means the trucks will be on autopilot for the vast majority of their highway journeys.
Driverless deployments should begin in Florida by the end of 2020, Starsky says.
That’s much sooner than 2027, the year consulting firm McKinsey & Company projects fully driverless trucks will be ready to hit the highway.
This brave new world is brought to you by a new state law authorizing driverless transportation networks to operate on public roads without the presence of human drivers in the vehicles.
On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill enacting the law in a ceremony at SunTrax, the state’s new autonomous vehicle testing track in Auburndale.
While the law will also open the door for ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft to deploy fleets for commuter use, DeSantis’ signing ceremony was staged in front of a Starsky-branded semi-truck. Starsky demonstrated its technology during the event, the company said.
Co-sponsored by Rep. Jason Fischer, a Duval County Republican, and Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, the new law replaces an existing one that required a human driver be present and able to take over driving chores in autonomous vehicles operating on public property for any other reason than testing.
Brandes, Fischer and other proponents of driverless vehicle technology say automated systems will make transportation safer by removing the potential for human error. Driverless technology proponents envision a day in the not-too-distant future in which most driving becomes automated, freeing commuters to stare into their smartphones or their dashboard video screens.
Safeguards in the new state law are limited.
Companies will be allowed to deploy their systems with no state inspection or certification.
“Companies [that] wish to operate in the state can do so as long as they are in compliance with any applicable federal regulations and the insurance requirements outlined in state law,” said Beth Frady, communications director for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.
Owners of autonomous commercial vehicles will be required to carry at least as much liability insurance as the state requires for commercial vehicles driven by humans. Currently, that means a minimum level of $300,000 in combined bodily liability and property damage coverage for trucks with a gross vehicle weight of 44,000 pounds or more, and lesser amounts for lighter vehicles.
Autonomous vehicles used for “on-demand” networks must be covered for at least $1 million for death, bodily injury and property damage, the law states.
Autonomous vehicles also will be required to achieve what’s called “minimal risk condition” — such as coming to a complete stop and activating their hazard lights — if their operating systems fail.
Existing traffic laws requiring drivers to promptly notify law enforcement agencies of crashes and then remain on scene to provide information or render aid will be exempted if law enforcement is notified by a vehicle’s owner or by the vehicle’s automated system.
After a Senate committee hearing in March to consider the new law, Sen. Janet Cruz, D-Tampa, prevailed in her push to require owners of autonomous vehicles to carry insurance and be held responsible when vehicles fail to operate as intended.
But she was unsuccessful in her call for a requirement for some sort of signal to passengers and surrounding motorists that the vehicle is operating in the autonomous mode. (Continues)
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)
Automation designers have a two-fer human job killer on the drawing boards — a combo self-driving van equipped with a separate robot that can deliver customers’ order mail-order boxes right to the door. The robot hops out of the van, grabs the package and carries it to the delivery point, even managing several stairs.
Navigating complicated steps is a problem little mentioned in these cheerful tech reports, as if America were a flat suburb designed for shopping carts. The latest creation manages a few steps well enough but nothing like what millions of homes have before reaching the front door. Most people want their packages left as close to the door as possible, not left on a lower landing.
So delivery jobs for humans are safe for a few more years, but the plans are clear to eliminate expensive workers as soon as possible.
Below, the creepy headless robot called “Digit” can carry 40 pounds.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has a posting for the category Delivery Truck Drivers and Driver/Sales Workers that shows an average wage of $14.66/hour and the number of jobs counted in 2016 was 1,421,400. The median annual wage for light truck or delivery services drivers was $32,810 in May 2018, which seems decent for an occupation that requires only a high school education, a driver’s license and a few weeks of on-the-job training.
The tech industry aims to reduce that employer cost considerably. Of course, America won’t need any low-skilled immigrants to deliver packages in a few years when this and similar automation is deployed.
● The robot known as Digit, designed and built by Agility Robotics, walks upright and can carry packages weighing up to 40 pounds.
● Ford and Agility Robotics are still researching exactly how Digit would work with the autonomous vehicles.
It’s not fast and may be years from visiting your neighborhood, but a walking robot is part of Ford’s vision for how its autonomous vehicles will someday deliver packages and goods.
The robot known as Digit and designed and built by Agility Robotics, walks upright on two legs, goes up and down stairs and can carry packages weighing 40 pounds.
So why is Ford interested in a walking robot?
Digit may be how Ford solves one of the biggest issues confronting the self-driving vehicles it’s developing for companies like Domino’s Pizza and the food delivery firm Postmates: how to get deliveries from cars to the front door?
“As we’ve learned in our pilot programs, it’s not always convenient for people to leave their homes for packages or for businesses to run their own delivery services,” Ken Washington, Ford’s chief technology officer, said in a post on Medium.
“If we can free people up to focus less on the logistics of making deliveries, they can turn their time and efforts to things that really need their attention.”
Ford envisions a future where Digit is part of an autonomous vehicle that could be delivering pizzas, packages or other items.
Designed to fold up when not deployed, Digit could be programmed to carry deliveries from the autonomous vehicle to the front door or exact location of the final destination. (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)
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