jobs « Limits to Growth

Ten Human Jobs Soon to Be Automated Are Mainstream Employment

There are numerous lists of jobs being made obsolete by automation sorted by expertise level (e.g. blue collar, financial, medical) and also by skill type, such as in the chart below:

Today’s item purports to list the top ten jobs moving to the automation column soon. A brief look reveals they account for millions of American jobs.

Surely […]

“Labor-Saving” Robots Mean Job Elimination for Humans

I generally don’t care much for the PBS Newshour’s liberal slant on nearly everything, but must admit they have done good work in examining the automation revolution in the workplace. They have reported important tech news, like one research firm’s forecast that smart machines will perform one-third of jobs by 2025 and have kept an […]

McDonald’s Introduces Kiosks So Customers Can Have (Money-Saving) Non-Human Food Ordering

The automation revolution keeps picking up speed as the machines get better. Today’s news included a report from Fox Business about McDonald’s introduction of kiosks to replace human order takers in its restaurants. The company saw the writing on the wall last year with the noisy campaign to demand big pay raises for fast food […]

Pew Poll: Republican Voters Notice Washington GOP’s Obama-Friendly Governance

Did the GOP leadership of the House and Senate think that party voters wouldn’t detect their consistent failure to oppose Obama policies of crazed overspending, globalized trade and immigration amnesty, among others?

A recent Pew survey shows the support of Republicans for GOP behavior has dropped like a stone — down 18 percent (from 86% to […]

Boeing Aircraft Increases Robots in Factories

In the Seattle area, the Boeing aircraft manufacturing company has long been a big player in the local economy. Now the firm is expanding the use of robots in building airplanes, and though it promises that nobody will lose their jobs any time soon, we can see the long-term trend: more robots, fewer human workers.

And […]

Robot Hotel Opens in Japan

The “Weird Hotel” in Sansebo still has some bugs to be solved, and the rollout was inclined to gimmicks designed to attract the sensation-seeking media, but the business does show the future.

How gimmicky is it? Well, the English-speaking desk clerk is a bizarro dinosaur robot. Really.

The Japanese-speaking clerk is a cutesy humanoid robot. The Japanese people […]

Germany Volkswagen Factory: Robot Crushes a Human to Death

On Monday a young man was killed by a robot he was installing in a Volkswagen factory in Baunatal Germany. Reports say the machine grabbed and smashed him as he was assembling the robot for a new electric motor production line.

Below, robots construct Volkswagens in a German factory.

This tragic accident violates the narrative that the […]

Self-driving 18-Wheeler Trucks Forecast for Highways in Ten Years

It’s interesting to see that many tech prognosticators see self-driving vehicles to be a reality in a decade (or less). A little Google search experiment got 1.4 million hits for self-driving cars OR trucks decade. The search gets a bunch of junk but also turns up titles like Self-driving cars could be on Britain’s road […]

Robots Move into Construction and Take Human Jobs

We see lots of photos of robots on factory floors, where the machines weld and assemble 24/7 with no coffee breaks. But construction workers shouldn’t think that their jobs are safe because they are outdoors and not as repetitious as some. New robots and techniques are being developed that are revolutionizing the construction process. One […]

“Rise of the Robots” Author: Job-Replacing Technology Is Unstoppable

C-SPAN’s BookTV showed an author talk this weekend with Martin Ford who wrote the important Rise of the Robots. You can watch the hour-long discussion in Seattle on the C-SPAN site or listen to the audio here.

Ford opened his talk by disagreeing with the title given by the Seattle Town Hall: How to Stop Robots […]

Mexican Brewery Is Fully Automated

It’s not just the first world where smart machines are taking over jobs that humans recently performed: Mexico’s Constellation brewery is “fully automated” and employs only six human workers per shift.

One variety of the machines is a laser-guided vehicle that moves pallets of beer and materials around the factory, replacing forklifts driven by people. They […]

Disaster Robot Competition Demonstrates Machine Advances

A month ago, I wrote about the then-upcoming DARPA competition for robots, that had quite a demanding test for the machines (Humanoid Robot Competition Suggests Rapid Advance in Technology). DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the US Defense Department.

The diagram below shows the obstacle course of very challenging movements in […]

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