So it is a welcome change from the parade of bad behavior for Google to dip its corporate toe into the do-gooder field — or perhaps it is looking for some positive publicity for a change since America has fallen out of love with tech companies.
America certainly needs a tech-trained workforce. But there will be fewer jobs overall which indicates that Washington’s current policy of importing over a million legal immigrants annually needs to be retired as outdated. In fact,
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
For more info on the jobs program, check out Google’s thorough explanatory page Grow with Google.
Woz U and Grow with Google both hope to make tech education more accessible. Video provided by Newsy Newslook
SAN FRANCISCO — Google will invest $1 billion over the next five years in nonprofit organizations helping people adjust to the changing nature of work, the largest philanthropic pledge to date from the Internet giant.
The announcement of the national digital skills initiative, made by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in Pittsburgh, Pa. Thursday, is a tacit acknowledgment from one of the world’s most valuable companies that it bears some responsibility for rapid advances in technology that are radically reshaping industries and eliminating jobs in the U.S. and around the world.
Pichai’s pitstop in an old industrial hub that has reinvented itself as a technology and robotics center is the first on a “Grow with Google Tour.” The tour that will crisscross the country will work with libraries and community organizations to provide career advice and training. It heads next to Indianapolis in November.
“The nature of work is fundamentally changing. And that is shifting the link between education, training and opportunity,” Pichai said in prepared remarks at Google’s offices in Pittsburgh. “One-third of jobs in 2020 will require skills that aren’t common today. It’s a big problem.”
Google will make grants in its three core areas: education, economic opportunity and inclusion. Already in the last few months, it has handed out $100 million of the $1 billion to nonprofits, according to Pichai.
The largest single grant — $10 million, the largest Google’s ever made — is going to Goodwill, which is creating the Goodwill Digital Career Accelerator. Over the next three years Goodwill, a major player in workforce development, aims to provide 1 million people with access to digital skills and career opportunities. Pichai says 1,000 Google employees will be available for career coaching.
In all, Google employees will donate 1 million volunteer hours to assist organizations like Goodwill trying to close the gap between the education and skills of the American workforce and the new demands of the 21st century workplace, Pichai said.
The announcements, which drew praise from state and local politicians including Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf, come as Google scrambles to respond to revelations that accounts linked to the Russian government used its advertising system to interfere with the presidential election.
On Monday, Tucker Carlson examined the latest from the White House about enforcing law and sovereignty, noting, “The administration has now put forward a 70-point immigration plan which calls for easier deportations of people here illegally, a border wall or a partial border wall anyway and new limits on chain migration, which is the idea that once you get here all of your relatives can come. Those are all preconditions for any future amnesty of DACA beneficiaries. Could this be the beginning of real immigration reform?”
Tucker chatted up a liberal radio host from Los Angeles, Ethan Bearman, who was quite chipper about continuing the import of foreign workers. Interestingly, automation came up and Tucker connected the dots. He didn’t say “Automation makes immigration obsolete” but pretty close!
ETHAN BEARMAN: I want people out of the shadows, so they’re not abused and they’re not subjugated by unscrupulous people who take advantage of them while they’re here working. By the way, one of the advantages of a long term change here with increased minimum wages is you’re gonna see Silicon Valley fill that void. John Deere just bought a huge company — it was over three hundred million dollars, to buy a company that makes the lettuce bot to automate some of that so there are long term trends that are happening here as well, but why are why do we want to be as mean as possible?
TUCKER CARLSON: I like immigrants, I actually really do. I grew up in California. I like them. But I think our primary responsibility is to Americans, but I wonder as a macro question, if we’re automating a lot of these jobs — and you just said we’re going to — why do we need 1.1. million legal low-skilled workers every year and an unknown but high number of illegal ones? What’s the point, what are they gonna do exactly? If jobs are going away, why are we importing all these people? Has anyone ever stopped to ask that question?
In fact, smart farm machines have been coming on strong for a long time, and the advances in ag technology are making human farm laborers a thing of the past. When a farmer can rent a robot weeding machine for $300/month, why would he bother with a crew of Mexicans? The future of farming is automated — along with many other industries.
Now, back to the larger subject of Trump’s List. NumbersUSA has a simplified enumeration, excerpted immediately below. The voluminous entire list follows that.
BORDER SECURITY: Build a southern border wall and close legal loopholes that enable illegal immigration and swell the court backlog.
• Fund and complete construction of the southern border wall.
• Authorize the Department of Homeland Security to raise and collect fees from visa services and border-crossings
• Fund border security and enforcement activities.
• Ensure the safe and expeditious return of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) and family units.
• End abuse of our asylum system by tightening standards, imposing penalties for fraud, and ensuring detention while claims are verified.
• Remove illegal border crossers quickly by hiring an additional 370 Immigration Judges and 1,000 ICE attorneys.
• Discourage illegal re-entry by enhancing penalties and expanding categories of inadmissibility.
• Improve expedited removal.
• Increase northern border security.
INTERIOR ENFORCEMENT: Enforce our immigration laws and return visa overstays.
• Protect innocent people in sanctuary cities.
• Authorize and incentivize States and localities to help enforce Federal immigration laws.
• Strengthen law enforcement by hiring 10,000 more ICE officers and 300 Federal prosecutors.
• End visa overstays by establishing reforms to ensure their swift removal.
• Stop catch-and-release by correcting judicial actions that prevent ICE from keeping dangerous aliens in custody pending removal and expanding the criteria for expedited removal.
• Prevent gang members from receiving immigration benefits.
• Protect U.S. workers by requiring E-Verify and strengthening laws to stop employment discrimination against U.S. workers.
• Improve visa security by expanding State Department’s authority to combat visa fraud, ensuring funding of the Visa Security Program, and expanding it to high-risk posts.
MERIT-BASED IMMIGRATION SYSTEM: Establish reforms that protect American workers and promote financial success.
• End extended-family chain migration by limiting family-based green cards to include spouses and minor children.
• Establish a points-based system for green cards to protect U.S. workers and taxpayers.
Here in the Scribd format is the whole 70-item thing.
The race is on among tech and automative companies building self-driving vehicles to get their creations on the road. In Asia, a boxy little bus unit has been successfully transporting people around on the National Taiwan University campus since May.
The bus putters along at six miles per hour with a dozen passengers, which developers think is a good start, and Tapei hopes to have autonomous public transportation running in the city within a year.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Rolling with a barely audible hum beneath banyan trees, a brightly painted shuttle bus cruised through a university campus here.
The electric vehicle crawled along at a speed of no more than six miles per hour. And only 12 passengers could fit inside. But the bus also drove itself, raising hopes in Taipei that autonomous public transportation would be up and running here within a year.
“The idea of one day being able to ride around this city in driverless vehicles is quite exciting,” said Amber Chen, who was riding with her son Ruey-She, 8.
The bus tests are partly to prove that the autonomous-driving technology is safe to deploy on the city’s busy streets, and partly to gather the data needed to improve the artificial intelligence that steer such vehicles. The effort, one of the earliest in Asia, could help position Taiwan as both a pioneer in autonomous public transportation and, if things go according to plan, a producer of driverless buses.
So far, the bus being tested, the EZ10, has breezed through its trials on the campus of National Taiwan University, which have been in progress since May.
But successful testing on a closed course at low speeds can only reveal so much about how the buses would fare in traffic. Getting them on the road at busy times is the next step, and the program’s backers are eager to see that happen quickly.
Anyone who cares about automation’s threat to jobs should know that industry is moving ahead rapidly to develop and market self-driving vehicles which endanger the employment of 3.5 million Americans. As noted here, the House passed a self-driving car bill earlier this month despite its busy schedule.
I watched the hearing on C-SPAN and would rate it as watchable, only moderately wonky.
The issues around self-driving trucks are somewhat different from cars, particularly because of the size and use. A self-driving car will always have a human in it — unless “Come and get me” is planned as a future function. A platooning strategy will probably be the norm for a while, where a driver will be present in the lead vehicle.
Of course, nobody in the hearing was so unPC as to mention that:
WASHINGTON —- A U.S. Senate committee is considering whether legislation dealing with the future of self-driving cars should also pave the way to self-driving trucks, considering the impact such technology could have on millions of workers.
The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee held a hearing Wednesday on automated vehicles focusing on the future of self-driving commercial trucks and 3.5 million commercial truck drivers nationwide.
“Self-driving vehicles have the potential to change the transportation industry as we know it. That can be for the better or for the worse depending on the actions that this committee, workers and others take,” said Ken Hall, general secretary treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. “It is incumbent upon the members of this committee that workers are not left behind in this process.”
Even as Hall and others — including U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich. — suggested that it may be too early to allow for widespread testing of autonomous commercial trucks across the nation, others said that the future of autonomous trucks could greatly help reduce traffic fatalities and improve safety.
Legislation passed by the U.S. House last week paved the way toward more testing of autonomous cars across the nation — allowing for as many as 100,000 cars to be exempted from safety standards while they are being tested — but did not address the future of autonomous trucks.
We tend to think of automation-caused job loss to be a first world problem, but as the smart machines get cheaper, they are appearing in poor countries as well. Places like Africa, with its host of difficulties, do not have the resources to cope with worsening unemployment and angry residents. Results may range from social disruption and political revolutions to even more illegal immigration to submissive Europe.
Europe needs to understand that the surge of illegal immigration is not a temporary thing and will continue as long as Europeans allow it — to their great detriment.
CNN did a good job in recognizing the social downside to automation in the Third world and presenting it factually.
“The increased use of robots in developed countries risks eroding the traditional labor cost advantage of developing countries,” it states.
A 2016 study which stems from World Bank research, states that more than half of jobs in parts of Africa are at risk of automation with Ethiopia leading the highest proportion globally at 85%.
It’s interesting how Democrats on average seem more aware of how automation threatens the economic system of most of the world, and the resulting mass unemployment must be faced with planning. Perhaps it’s because the Ds are more comfortable with handing out cash (one suggested solution, namely Universal Basic Income), while Republicans see smart machines are just another way to make money.
Why haven’t the big brains in Washington noticed how whole industries — like automotive manufacturing — are now largely operated by robots, and that’s only the beginning?
“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level,” he says.
City Supervisor Kim, who is also running for the State Senate, is a proponent of the “robot tax” and is working on an upcoming ballot measure.
Wednesday she launched the Jobs of the Future Fund, an initiative to drive conversation among state business leaders, politicians and local civic organizations about how to prepare for an increasingly automated workforce. Continue reading this article
Former McDonald’s USA CEO Ed Rensi said regulation will force restaurants to turn to technology to make a profit.
“Not only is the minimum wage an issue but health care, rights to work, overtime hours, government regulation—if you look at the mounds and mounds and mounds of regulation that comes from the local, federal level it’s almost impossible to do business and make a profit,” Rensi told Stuart Varney on Varney & Co. Friday.
Rensi pointed out how Amazon has begun to use robots in its fulfilment centers.
“Look at what’s happening in retail with Amazon. Automation and robotics are going to start replacing people and they’ve got to become more efficient to make a profit,” he said. “There’s too much invested in quick service restaurants around the world across the United States. Too many dollars invested in fixed properties—[they have to] do something and that something they are going to do is automate and try to reduce the amount of labor and labor content.”
A one-time CEO of McDonald’s, Ed Rensi, recently appeared on a Fox Business show and explained the financial facts about automation in the fast-food industry: “If the $15 minimum wage goes across the country, you’re going to see job loss like you can’t believe. I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry — it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries . . . it’s going to cause a job loss across this country like you’re not going to believe.”
Robot bellhops were introduced to the public as a coming thing in 2014 when trials began. Now they and other automated technology are becoming normalized, as reported in a CBS Los Angeles TV segment.
As is often the case, the media doesn’t know how to handle the automation issue and the CBS pirce wanders all over the place. It begins thoughtfully by asking whether smart machines threaten human jobs in the future but then veers into a Jetsons clip and from there to existing businesses with robots in use. Questions of whether humans are being displaced are laughed off as managers emphasize the appealing novelty aspect of the bots. Finally, serious person Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, appears with a warning, “The way these technologies always begin is they begin as tools helping people do their jobs, but they eventually do evolve.”
A purpose-built hotel robot acts as a bellhop when it delivers desired items to the rooms of customers.
Service jobs in hotels and restaurants are popular among immigrants, particular in diverse locales, so the government should get serious about passing the RAISE Act to decrease immigration substantially, because many unskilled jobs will be disappearing under the automation onslaught.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts bellhops and baggage porters together, and the May 2016 number of persons employed in the category was put at 44,750. It’s not a huge number as jobs cohorts go, but alternative choices are shrinking for unskilled people because of immigration and automation.
Does it make sense for Washington to continue importing immigrant workers when the workplace is changing fundamentally from automation? It makes no sense at all, but the government is pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
He’s a robot butler at the Residence Inn LAX on Century Boulevard, and his name is Wally.
“In this particular brand of Residence Inn, if you called down and you wanted something, you’d really have to come down and get it yourself,” Residence Inn LAX General Manager Tom Beedon told CBS2.
But employees can program the butler to deliver anything to a room that fits in Wally’s compartment, even fresh towels from housekeeping.
“You’re going to hear somebody check in that says, ‘Oh, this is the hotel with Wally the Robot, right?’ ” says Beedon.
And if you think a robot delivering hand towels to your hotel room seems cool, you should check out the Gen Korean BBQ restaurant in Montclair.
It’s here where a human server takes your order with a tablet, another human loads your food in the kitchen, and a robotic system of trays and tunnels delivers it all to your table.
“I don’t think anybody 10 or 15 years ago would have thought, ‘Hey I’ll be at a Korean barbecue house with a robot bringing food out to me,’ ” says Gen Korean BBQ VP David Ghim. . .
Here’s a snapshot of the automated, globalized future: a Chinese company has acquired a factory in Arkansas to produce t-shirts for the German company Adidas using robot sewing machines from Atlanta business SoftWear Automation.
Clothing manufacture is big business and is important to small, poor countries like Honduras where the income from sewing jobs helps keep many people afloat. So the automation of the industry over the next decade or two could be hard on that and other countries’ economies and may potentially inspire another large surge of illegal immigration.
Interestingly, a recent poll in Guatemala (another apparel producer) found that 90 percent of illegal aliens came for economic reasons rather than to escape violence, the reason frequently given by the liberal media as an excuse. So if the clothing manufacturing jobs were to disappear, low-paid though they are, it makes sense that even more Central Americans would head for the US. In general, the automation discussion has concerned what will happen in our own country, but it will have worldwide effects.
I reported earlier about a sewing robot that developed a technique for stiffening the material to deal with the difficulty of various fabrics from dense denim to stretchy knits. It looks like SoftWear Automation system uses overall pressure on the fabric to keep it from wiggling around, although the company’s solution is not completely clear.
Below, a Sewbot demonstrates a couple of sewing tasks.
Technology developed in the USA will be used by a Chinese company to supply European sports brand Adidas with T-shirts made in the US by robots. This is a major breakthrough in the automation of garment assembly by the global partnership.
Leading sportswear brand Adidas is planning to produce 800,000 T-shirts per day using fully automated Sewbot Workline’s supplied by SoftWear Automation, of Atlanta, GA. Tianyuan Garments Company, of Suzhou, China, the largest producer of apparel for Adidas worldwide, has partnered with SoftWear Automation to produce the T-shirts at Tianyuan’s newly acquired plant in Little Rock, AR, China Daily reports.
Using cameras to map the fabric and robots to steer it through the sewing needles, the system will handle soft fabrics and make the T-shirts for Adidas on the system which is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of next year.
“From fabric cutting and sewing to finished product, it takes roughly four minutes,” said Tang Xinhong, chairman of Tianyuan Garments. “We will install 21 production lines. When fully operational, the system will make one T-shirt every 22 seconds. We will produce 800,000 T-shirts a day for Adidas.”
This is a big achievement for Atlanta based brand SoftWear Automation, which launched in 2012. The company’s Sewbots use a combination of patented high-speed computer vision and lightweight robotics to steer fabric to and through the needle with greater speed and accuracy than a human. The technology was developed by and is patented by Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center.
Tang said that with complete automation, the personnel cost for each T-shirt is roughly 33 cents. “Around the world, even the cheapest labour market can’t compete with us. I am really excited about this,” he said.
Tianyuan announced last October that it would invest $20 million in the 100,000-square-foot defunct Little Rock plant it had acquired. In time, it will bring 400 new jobs to Arkansas. The signing ceremony was witnessed by a Chinese textile delegation led by Xu Yingxin, vice-president of the China National Textile and Apparel Council.
The Washington Post included a front-page story about automation on Sunday, and it admitted “the surrender of the industrial age to the age of automation continues at a record pace.”
But the cause was mostly laid at the feet of the workers themselves rather than complex forces of globalization that have been accumulating for decades. The workers are blamed for being late, drunk, stoned and having bad work attitudes which may certainly be true in some cases. But the pay is poor and there is no opportunity for advancement. No mention is made of retraining for more technical jobs that could provide a step up. Wages start at $10.50/hour for day work and $13 for night shifts.
But the article further admits that “even the lowest-paid worker was more expensive than the robots,” yet blaming the victims is a theme that runs throughout.
Rather than blame the dispirited workforce, there are many more issues about automation that the Post could have examined for the benefit of readers. One is how is society supposed to function when a third to a half of the workforce is unemployed in less than 20 years or more in decades beyond, as forecast by tech experts? That topic would fill lots of column inches and could be composed by a software robot.
Another subject: why should America continue to import immigrant workers at all when most will be redundant in the near future? Automation makes immigration obsolete, just like homesteading.
How a couple of robots came to be the newest hires at a Wisconsin factory in search of reliable workers
By Chico Harlan in Dresser, Wisconsin
The workers of the first shift had just finished their morning cigarettes and settled into place when one last car pulled into the factory parking lot, driving past an American flag and a “now hiring” sign. Out came two men, who opened up the trunk, and then out came four cardboard boxes labeled “fragile.”
“We’ve got the robots,” one of the men said.
They watched as a forklift hoisted the boxes into the air and followed the forklift into a building where a row of old mechanical presses shook the concrete floor. The forklift honked and carried the boxes past workers in steel-toed boots and earplugs. It rounded a bend and arrived at the other corner of the building, at the end of an assembly line.
The line was intended for 12 workers, but two were no-shows. One had just been jailed for drug possession and violating probation. Three other spots were empty because the company hadn’t found anybody to do the work. That left six people on the line jumping from spot to spot, snapping parts into place and building metal containers by hand, too busy to look up as the forklift now came to a stop beside them.
In factory after American factory, the surrender of the industrial age to the age of automation continues at a record pace. The transformation is decades along, its primary reasons well-established: a search for cost-cutting and efficiency.
But as one factory in Wisconsin is showing, the forces driving automation can evolve — for reasons having to do with the condition of the American workforce. The robots were coming in not to replace humans, and not just as a way to modernize, but also because reliable humans had become so hard to find. It was part of a labor shortage spreading across America, one that economists said is stemming from so many things at once. A low unemployment rate. The retirement of baby boomers. A younger generation that doesn’t want factory jobs. And, more and more, a workforce in declining health: because of alcohol, because of despair and depression, because of a spike in the use of opioids and other drugs.
But there are caveats. The industry is very interested in automation technology that will end the struggles of labor acquisition. As a result, many of the unskilled refugees are likely to be unemployed in a few years, requiring even more taxpayer assistance.
Also, the story notes that the refugees are from Muslim nations, and while Taiseer and the others profiled sound like upstanding fellows, the second generation is where the trouble often starts among Muslim immigrants. Second gens may have identity problems, feeling they are neither entirely American nor the parents’ tribe either. As a consequence, the strong message of jihad and sharia can sound like the answer to a young person’s confusion.
The most prudent policy would be to admit NO Muslims as immigrants at all. Public safety should come first.
Taiseer Al Souki spends most days on his feet at a Foster Farms poultry plant, hefting table-sized plastic brown boxes and feeding them into a machine that cleans them.
He plugs his ears to soften the deafening clang of heavy machinery as he cycles through the same motion for hours on end.
At night, after slumping to sleep in exhaustion, the 44-year-old Syrian refugee dreams that he’s at the plant, still hoisting box after box filled with chicken destined for dinner tables across America.
Al Souki does not complain. He fled war-torn Syria and worked backbreaking 12-hour shifts in his home country and Jordan before making his way to the United States. He is grateful for the $10.50 an hour he collects at the poultry plant.
“I like work. I need work,” he said in the smattering of English he has picked up. “Without work, not a man.” [. . .]
The meatpacking industry has become so reliant on refugees that the North American Meat Institute, an industry lobby group, released a statement stating their concerns after President Trump issued an executive action restricting citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries and all refugees from entry into the United States.
In St. Louis, a midwestern grocery chain is making news with its test run of an inventory-taking robot, called Tally by its manufacturer. The machine is not unrelated to the LoweBot-type machine that guides customers to desired items in the store which the robot has filed in its database of what and where. The Tally just rolls around and counts, creating a list of what needs restocking.
The Tally robot scoots around stores to check inventory and verify prices.
The robot won’t actually be restocking the shelves because that task requires the dexterity of the human hand — for now at least. But developers are engaged in a race to build a machine that can move objects around as well as a person. Ground zero for that technology is the Amazon Robotics Challenge, an annual contest for a robot that can physically pack an order into a box for shipment (which is taking place this week, as it happens). A machine that can pick and pack like a human hand will have a lot of job-killing applications beyond the Amazon warehouse.
The Tally robot is a creation of Simbe Robotics in San Francisco. The company has a pleasantly reassuring video with a Strauss waltz playing — though there’s no mention of the jobs lost since a human with a clipboard is no longer needed.
“Amazon didn’t go put a robot into the bookstores and help you check out books faster. It completely reinvented bookstores. The idea of a cashier won’t be so much automated as just made irrelevant — you’ll just tell your Echo what you need, or perhaps it will anticipate what you need, and stuff will get delivered to you.”
The shopping experience that tech wizards are designing sounds pretty sterile, but it would be an improvement over sales helpers who don’t speak English well (as I reflected yesterday while shopping for manila folders at Staples).
The future will automated. To prepare for it, the least Washington could do is severely limit immigration, say by about 99 percent, because AUTOMATION MAKES IMMIGRATION OBSOLETE.
A family-owned grocery chain in the Midwest is set to test an aisle-roving robot, joining technology-savvy retail behemoths like Amazon and Walmart.
The robot, named Tally, will begin scanning store aisles at three St. Louis-area Schnucks grocery stores in a six-week pilot program starting on Monday. The robot will check aisles three times a day to look for out-of-stock items and make sure items and price tags properly correspond, company officials say.
“We’re excited to see what this partnership brings,” Dave Steck, the chain’s vice president of IT and infrastructure, said in a statement on its collaboration with San Francisco-based Simbe Robotics. “This is just one of many ways that Schnucks is staying at the forefront of technology to enhance our customers’ shopping experiences.”
Schnucks — which operates more than 100 stores in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa — will initially use the adjustable 38-inch, 30-pound robot to monitor items on store shelves but is hopeful that the robot “may open up a world of other possibilities” with the data it collects, Steck said. Continue reading this article
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Being a former CEO does give Ed Rensi greater freedom to speak about automation-fueled job loss. I reported a year ago about his similar remarks: 
