replacing workers with smart machines

Tucker Carlson Examines a Future with Self-Driving Cars

Last week Fox TV host Tucker Carlson interviewed robotics expert and Columbia professor Hod Lipson, author of Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead to discuss the future of transportation and jobs. The professor is obviously a well educated guy and an expert in his field, but he apparently doesn’t get how the entire basis […]

Automation Makes Youth Employment More Difficult

Young people are particularly hard hit by the increased automation of business, since they need a first job to learn the basic skills of showing up on time, taking directions and pleasing the boss. Increasingly those basic first jobs — like waiter or pizza delivery driver — are being done by machines.

One indicator is a […]

Robots Shrink Workforce in California Distribution Center

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for an excellent report of how automation displaces human workers in a warehouse environment, which unfortunately is a pattern followed by many industries: bring in the smart machines and employ fewer human workers.

Amazon has been the leader of warehouse robotics, with its proprietary Kiva machines, and has received enormous […]

Mississippi Factories Illustrate the New Manufacturing

Sunday’s Sixty Minutes episode had an interesting segment about the growth of manufacturing in the United States. The show focused on the economic developer Joe Max Higgins, who is both colorful in the southern style and business smart. Nevertheless, the piece provides a window on modern manufacturing, where robots do the repetitious tasks and human […]

Wal-Mart’s Dallas Optical Lab Replaces 91 Jobs with Machines

You don’t see many news reports like this one where a relative few human jobs are lost when smart machines are brought in.

I suspect there are many more instances of a few dozen job cuts here and there that never make it to the newspapers or internet. It’s just the company upgrading equipment to […]

Trump’s Employment Agenda May Bring Automation into a National Spotlight

It will be interesting to see how effective President Trump can be in bringing jobs back to America through reducing regulation, renegotiating bad trade deals, lowering corporate taxes and creating a more business-friendly environment. The process will be a good measure of how much automation has undermined employment for American workers.

Some reshoring has already occurred […]

Automation May Undermine President Trump’s Jobs Reshoring Plan

One of Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to bring back manufacturing jobs by renegotiating trade deals which have been disadvantageous to American workers and also by improving the business environment generally.

On Thursday, the Trump jobs strategy was discussed on the Fox Business channel, including renegotiating NAFTA and rejecting the Trans Pacific Partnership.

As I wrote in […]

Automation Is a Worse Cause of Factory Job Loss Than Bad Trade Deals

The Presidential race has, thanks to Donald Trump, focused on American unemployment because of excessive immigration and factories offshored to countries with low wages. But that’s not the whole picture by any means because automation is now changing the work universe fundamentally.

Robots are getting smarter, faster and cheaper, so naturally business is using more of them to […]

Michael Bloomberg Names Technological Unemployment as the Next Administration’s “Greatest Conundrum”

It’s rare to see a politician who understands the threat to jobs from technology and who will also name the problem. There is a fair amount reporting in the mainstream media about how automation and advanced software are increasingly replacing human workers, but this subject has been largely missing from the political sphere. Remarkably, the volumes […]

Robots from Korea to America Are Replacing Workers

Robot design and engineering is a growing business because companies want to reduce their labor costs and smart technology increasingly accomplishes that goal. And now, with robots becoming less expensive, machines will replace human workers in even the cheapest low-wage havens of Asia.

The PBS Newshour has done good reporting on the automation revolution, and the […]

Obama Warns of Automation and Artificial Intelligence Threat

You can’t make this stuff up: the open borders Immigrationist-in-Chief is concerned that AI and other technology may eliminate jobs and suppress wages.

In the face of such technology, a pro-American President would prudently reduce the influx of immigrant workers who add to job elimination and wage suppression for citizens, but Obama is more concerned with […]

Tech Sector Booms, but Job Creation Is Falling

A few decades back, when the globalization honchos decided to pack up whole American industries and move them to cheap labor havens in Asia and Mexico, the oligarchs promised that US workers would be retrained for jobs in the new tech industry. Few at that time saw the rise of robots able to replace human […]

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Limits to Growth