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CBS found plenty of amusements at Japan’s World Robot Summit, like an automated ping-pong partner and a mechanical sniffer dog that checks for foot odor.
But if you watch closely, the coming social and economic revolution can be seen. Japan is a leader in automation in part because of its slow-growing population (no immigration!), and the work still needs to get done.
Below, a robot and human work together in the “co-bot” mode as industry has called it.
There is not a lot that can be done about the approaching wave of job-destroying automation, but we should certainly end immigration as an obsolete institution.
Tokyo is hosting the World Robot Summit this week and it’s packed with the usual assortment of the practical, the weird, and the entertaining.
When it comes to factory robots, Japan is king. More than half of all industrial robots sold last year were made in the country.
The hazardous behemoths of old are getting kinder and gentler. Once corralled behind fences, factory bots are now working side by side and even collaborating with humans.
“Lifting 40-pound components is a real strain on human bodies. So robots do the heavy lifting and people do the light, complex work,” one developer told CBS News’ Lucy Craft.
Modern robots now have a light enough touch to grab — and delicately box — potato chips. The world’s first high-precision, tactile robot arm enables users to remotely sense what’s being touched, even from 3,000 miles away.
The technology could transform fields from agriculture to medicine and disaster response. (Continues)
Euronews has an interesting piece about the Summit where a robot is shown installing sheetrock, after which a Japanese man says, “We hope to use this sort of robot in place of humans in fields such as aircraft and sea vessel construction.”
It’s pretty big news when a totally robotic farm opens up, and that’s what happened recently in the San Francisco Bay Area — San Carlos to be precise, just a few miles north of San Jose.
The story got front-page notice on the San Francisco Chronicle last week:
In the video below, company co-founder Brandon Alexander states, “We’re able to do the equivalent of 30 acres outdoor farming in just a single acre of our robotic farm.”
Certainly automation promises to make food production more efficient, if not quite the 30 to one improvement claimed here.
Still, when a third of California farmers say they “turning to automation” because of a shrinking labor supply, perhaps it’s time to think different about needing immigrant workers to do the picking because. . .
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
The need for labor is booming now because of Trump’s economy, but that situation will change when smart machines become cheaper than human workers.
Angus doesn’t look like your normal farmer. He’s more of a giant, docile rectangle, built to lift 800-pound containers filled with water and seedlings and wheel them over to his partner robot, which looks like a giant arm with twin cameras set next to its gripping fingers.
It has taken a San Carlos company named Iron Ox three years to build these two core pieces of technology. As of Wednesday, they’re officially at work at the country’s first robotic farm.
Founders Brandon Alexander and Jon Binney met at the influential Silicon Valley robotics lab Willow Garage and quit their jobs in 2015 to dive into the farming world. “Let’s not build robots until we talk to a bunch of farmers,” Alexander said the pair decided. They road tripped all over California, asking farmers what their biggest point of concern was.
The answer was clear: labor scarcity.
According to a 2017 survey of 762 farmers conducted by the California Farm Bureau Federation, 55 percent of those polled reported labor shortages, and that figure was closer to 70 percent for those who relied on seasonal workers. Many had raised wages in an effort to attract laborers, but 33 percent of farmers said they were also turning to automation.
For California’s $54 billion agriculture industry, change is coming. “Labor-related tasks are kind of a big factor in what’s motivating farmers,” said David Slaughter, head of UC Davis’ Smart Farm Initiative. Many aspects of grain or cotton production have long been automated, but perishables — tree fruits, berries, lettuces — require the human touch.
Some robotics research is focused in the area of weeding and pruning, others on harvesting apples or strawberries. In the Salinas Valley, some field lettuce growers have adopted automation in the form of high-pressure “water knives” that move along the rows, cutting the bottoms of the heads and feeding them up to workers via conveyor belts, a process that eases the burden on workers’ backs.
Fully articulated robots like the ones operating at Iron Ox are rare.
“When it comes to automated, advanced mechanization, and specifically robotics, we’re very early in the game,” said Dennis Donohue, director of the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology, an agriculture-tech incubator program. (Continues)
While there are skeptics about the self-driving project who think it will require more time and testing to materialize, top corporations are taking concrete steps to move forward. Billion-dollar companies see autonomous vehicles as the future of transportation and they don’t want to be left behind.
Two major automakers have recently announced their intention to launch automated taxi services in California. That’s a smart move for a couple reasons, one being a smaller scale arena to work the kinks out.
Another topic that must concern the auto companies is the public’s apprehension about having a machine operating the car. A January Reuter/Ipsos poll found that two-thirds of Americans are uncomfortable about the idea of riding in a self-driving car. A Gallup survey released in February determined that 54 percent of Americans said they are unlikely to utilize self-driving cars.
So a gradual introduction of self-driving technology via taxis would make sense along with a marketing program of advertising and social media. For example, Intel ran an ad last fall showing basketball star Lebron James overcoming his aversion toward a driverless car. Online coupons for a cheaper ride would entice some. Local news stories about the new taxis will likely be promoted when they get going.
Of course, the proponents of the new automation technology rarely mention the associated job loss, as the less expensive machines replace pricey humans who also need lunch breaks and healthcare. A Bureau of Labor Statistics page for Taxi Drivers, Ride-Hailing Drivers, and Chauffeurs put the number of workers at 305,100 for 2016. In addition, there are millions of Americans who work as drivers: in 2015, the Department of Commerce reported that there were 3.8 million motor vehicle operators:
Interestingly, a 2013 paper from CIS.org noted that 42 percent of taxi drivers and chauffeurs are foreign born, so continuing to import low-skilled immigrants appears unwise, to say the least. For example, the Central Americans now mobbing the border and making fake asylum claims don’t bring any useful skills. Low-skilled jobs that Centrals could do — like restaurant work and agriculture — are the ones most likely to get robot replacements in the near future if they haven’t been transformed already.
Okay, back to robo-taxis coming to California; tech-friendly San Francisco is getting a General Motors installation:
General Motors Co. has created its own ride-hailing platform and quietly built one of the largest charging stations in the United States to get its Cruise self-driving car unit ready to enter the robo-taxi business next year.
Cruise has installed 18 fast chargers in a parking facility near San Francisco’s Embarcadero, the well-trafficked boulevard along the city’s eastern shoreline where Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. have busy drivers. And GM’s self-driving car unit has been testing its own Cruise Anywhere ride-hailing app and fleet-management system, said people familiar with the matter.
The largest U.S. automaker has long planned to start a ride-hailing business using self-driving cars by 2019, but it hasn’t said where the service would start or whether it would work with a partner. These latest moves show that San Francisco is where GM is assembling the pieces to launch its rival to Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo next year if GM decides against working with an established livery app such as Uber or Lyft. (Continues)
Meanwhile, Daimler is eyeballing wealthy Silicon Valley for a rollout of deluxe Mercedes shuttles.
LIKE IN A Tough Mudder, you’ve got a few strategies when it comes to the race to launch a taxi-like service with autonomous vehicles. You can start early and keep a slow but steady pace. You can show up a bit late, then try to sprint through it. Or you can hold back, see what trips up other contenders, and then slowly work your way through the obstacles.
The big automakers tend to fall into the third category. They may have taken a few years to recognize that shared autonomous vehicles could annihilate their business model—selling human-driven cars to individual humans—but they’re now making real progress toward the finish line. And today, Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler took a cautious step into the swamp stomp, announcing plans to launch a self-driving car pilot somewhere in Silicon Valley, next year.
Daimler is calling its service an “automated shuttle,” but it’s not referring to some blobby, slow-moving van. It’s going to start out using a fleet of S-Class luxury sedans and B-Class hatchbacks, with long-term plans for vehicles designed for autonomous driving, like the F 015 “Luxury in Motion” concept it showed off a few years back.
The automaker is still negotiating the particulars of the deal, has not divulged which city will host this program, and being cagey on details like how many cars will make up the robo-fleet. It does plan to have human safety drivers on board to keep an eye on the system. Passengers, who will request rides via an app, will travel for free. The Germans are more open about the lessons they’ve learned watching the self-driving car industry start to take shape, including the myriad complexities of the challenge. “Hardly any company can meet this challenge alone,” says Uwe Keller, Daimler’s head of autonomous driving. (Continues)
Nexus Robotics beat out teams from U.S. universities at the agBOT Challenge in Indiana
A new robot created in Nova Scotia may mean farmers could get some help tackling troublesome weeds in their fields.
This month, Nexus Robotics, a technology startup based in Dartmouth, N.S., won the weed-and-feed competition at the agBOT Challenge, an international showdown between agricultural robots in Rockville, Ind.
Dubbed R2 Weed2 or Hal-Bot, the autonomous machine uses artificial intelligence to distinguish between weeds and crops and is designed to both pluck weeds and spray herbicide.
“We want to get rid of the weed and keep the crop and even fertilize it. So one of the advancements … we made is vision systems can be better than humans at distinguishing them,” said Thomas Trappenberg, part of the small team behind the battery-powered robot.
VIDEO: Halifax startup takes on big agriculture corporations, and wins international robotics competition. pic.twitter.com/1jybURkexg
The robot has a 1.5-metre square frame with a central nozzle for spraying fertilizer or herbicide and a cutting wheel to slice the weeds that have a less developed root system.
“We can treat different types of weeds differently because it’s more advantageous to cut certain weeds versus spray other weeds,” said Teric Greenan, who grows vegetables on a farm in Lunenburg County in addition to his work with Nexus.
It’s a rare thing to see Washington suits speak up about the coming automation revolution in the workplace, so the recent opinion piece in USA Today is welcome. The writers are not exactly household names in the heartland, but a statement by Penny Pritzker, former Secretary of Commerce, and John Engler, former Governor of Michigan, is a step in the right direction. They emphasize the importance of increasing technical education, a strategy that is certainly needed to cope with the coming changes in work. Many repetitive-movement jobs will go the way of the Model-T, but new employment opportunities will be created that require appropriate retraining.
In addition to instituting technical training for workers, we should also face up to substantial job loss caused by robots in sectors like manufacturing and agriculture. As a result of huge numbers of low-skilled jobs being taken by smart machines, it makes no sense to continue importing third-world immigrants at 20th century levels.
Trump’s tariffs miss the mark. Our central economic challenge is automation, not trade. It’s changing millions of jobs, and we need people who are trained to do them.
The Trump administration has threatened massive new tariffs against China, promising that protection against imports will bring greater fairness and prosperity to our economy. But these actions will harm more Americans than they help — driving up consumer prices, increasing costs for manufacturers, and threatening to trigger a still more damaging trade war.
On top of that, this approach misses the mark. The nation’s central economic challenge is not trade. It is the rapid pace of technological change — through automation, robotics and digitization — that is changing millions of jobs and has left too many Americans on the margins.
We believe there is a better way. In our new Council on Foreign Relations report on the future of the U.S. workforce, we argue that for more than 30 years our leading institutions — governments, companies, and educational and training systems — have failed to equip many Americans with the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century economy.
The crucial task facing the United States is to rebuild the links among work, opportunity and economic security in the face of accelerating technological change and global competition. Continued failure to address this challenge will amplify the pressures for retrenchment that are causing our country to back away from its historic global leadership.
The pace of workplace disruption is accelerating. Just with existing technologies, in about 60% of occupations, nearly one-third of employees may need to change jobs or develop new skills over the next decade, according to McKinsey Global Institute.
We are not facing a jobless future; indeed many companies complain of labor shortages. Smarter machines will replace some kinds of work, but they will also open up all sorts of new jobs. There was no such thing as a Web developer until the early 1990s, and in 2016, 163,000 Americans did that job at a median annual salary of $66,000.
But a better future is only possible if we prepare Americans for the jobs that are coming. Education and training need to be linked more closely to emerging careers, and with the growth of “gig” and part-time jobs, benefits must match the way we work.
Our bipartisan group offers a road map to address these challenges. We recommend measures to sustain U.S. technological leadership, boost job creation in struggling regions, streamline occupational licenses and other barriers to mobility, and offer more effective help — based on the best global models — for mid-career workers who lose their jobs.
Two pieces are especially important. The first is to make a clearer path from education to better work opportunities, and make lifelong learning a cultural imperative. U.S. success in the 20th century was built on education: We were the first country to make universal high school a reality, and then moved millions of students into the best colleges and universities in the world.
In the retail world, there’s an attempt being made to regain its market share by following the lead of Amazon with its use of technology. The major goal is saving the store as a place where people go and shop, rather than ordering everything online for delivery.
Below, the Amazon Go store offers a modern do-it-yourself checkout where shoppers just choose items they want and the cost is tallied up and deducted on their smart phones.
Here is Amazon’s explainer video about how the Go store works:
The article below, reprinted from the New York Times, explains how retailers and others “are motivated to shave labor costs” which points out the eventual catastrophic job loss that will come with automation across workplaces from agriculture to manufacturing and retail.
SEATTLE — To see what it is like inside stores where sensors and artificial intelligence have replaced cashiers, shoppers have to trek to Amazon Go, the Internet retailer’s experimental convenience shop in downtown Seattle.
Soon, though, more technology-driven businesses like Amazon Go may be coming to them.
A global race to automate stores is under way among several of the world’s top retailers and small tech startups, which are motivated to shave labor costs and minimize shoppers’ frustrations, like waiting for cashiers. They are also trying to prevent Amazon from dominating the physical retail world as it does online shopping.
Companies are testing robots that help keep shelves stocked, as well as apps that let shoppers ring up items with a smartphone. High-tech systems like the one used by Amazon Go completely automate the checkout process. China, which has its own ambitious e-commerce companies, is emerging as an especially fertile place for these retail experiments.
If they succeed, these new technologies could add further uncertainty to the retail workforce, which is already in flux because of the growth of online shopping. An analysis last year by the World Economic Forum said 30 to 50 percent of the world’s retail jobs could be at risk once technologies like automated checkout were fully embraced.
In addition, the efforts have raised concerns among privacy researchers because of the mounds of data that retailers will be able to gather about shopper behavior as they digitize their locations. Inside Amazon Go, for instance, the cameras never lose sight of a customer once he or she enters the shop.
Retailers had adopted technologies in their stores long before Amazon Go arrived on the scene. Self-checkout kiosks have been common in supermarkets and other stores for years. Kroger, the grocery chain, uses sensors and predictive analytics tools to better anticipate when more cashiers will be needed.
But the opening of Amazon Go in January was alarming for many retailers, who saw a sudden willingness by Amazon to wield its technology power in new ways. Hundreds of cameras near the ceiling and sensors in the shelves help automatically tally the cookies, chips and soda that shoppers remove and put into their bags. Shoppers’ accounts are charged as they walk out the doors.
Amazon is now looking to expand Go to new areas. An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment on its expansion plans, but the company has a job posting for a senior real estate manager who will be responsible for “site selection and acquisition” and field tours of “potential locations” for new Go stores.
“Unanimously, there was an element of embarrassment because here is an online retailer showing us how to do brick and mortar, and frankly doing it amazingly well,” said Martin Hitch, the chief business officer of Bossa Nova Robotics, a company that makes inventory management robots that Walmart and others are testing.
Tucker Carlson has been doing a series about men in his show and how economic forces in America have pushed them down for decades with destructive social effects. He does a good job of describing the causes, specifically noting immigration, automation and the competition of cheap foreign manufacturing. The best thing about his essay is describing the real human cost of these policies causing job loss or decreased wages which in turn lead to symptoms like drug abuse, less family formation and more divorce.
Washington sees many of these globalist changes as great successes because they bring less expensive consumer goods. But the suits in the capitol city overlook the costs to citizens which were entirely foreseeable.
Tucker observed that “truck driver . . . is the most common job in the majority of states” as illustrated in the map below. That’s over three million driving jobs that are on the chopping block of “progress.”
It’s certainly realistic to discuss the human cost of globalization and now automation since that debate rarely happens. It would be useful to mention that automation is just getting started and is predicted to displace millions of jobs over the next couple decades. We really need a national discussion about that coming employment disaster.
At the minimum, America should end immigration as a remnant of a fading economic system no longer needed (if it ever was) because automation is coming on to do the low-skilled jobs performed by foreigners who work cheap. The smart machines are cheaper.
Plus, we have plenty of sober warnings from experts about the extent of automation’s future job displacement:
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re invisible in Washington, yet they’re everywhere: Americans who’ve dropped out of the workforce. About seven million American men between the ages 25 to 54 no longer have jobs. That’s more than 10 percent of the entire prime-age male labor force in the United States. It’s a huge number. Most of those men, studies predict, will never return to work.
What happened? Some of the causes are well known. Competition from foreign manufacturers crushed our country’s industrial sector. China’s entry into the WTO alone destroyed more than two million American jobs. Automation is killing many more. A disproportionate number of these jobs are in traditionally male industries. Manufacturing. Agriculture. Logging. A 2016 McKinsey report found that quote, “90 percent of what welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers do” could be replaced by robots.
Jobs in which women are the majority tend to be far less vulnerable to automation. Three of the five fastest-growing professions are dominated by women.
The jobs that remain for men tend to pay less than the ones that disappeared. This is especially true for working class men, who unlike their female counterparts have seen their real wages fall over time. Part of the reason for that is mass immigration. More than a million new immigrants enter the U.S. every year legally. A large but unknown number come illegally. Most of them are low-skilled. All of them are looking for work.
These new arrivals compete primarily with the very Americans most likely to have lost their jobs. The effect is lower wages. It’s a matter of supply and demand. An over-abundance of anything makes it cheaper, and that goes for labor.
One study, conducted after the Mariel boatlift in Florida, found that Americans with lower education levels in Miami, the most vulnerable, saw their wages fall by 37 percent after the immigrants arrived.
Policymakers didn’t seem to notice. and they still don’t, probably because it doesn’t really affect them. If waves of immigrants from the third world were becoming lawyers and non-profit executives and members of congress, how long would the borders stay open?
Meanwhile, millions of American men now make less than their fathers did. That’s a tragedy, a betrayal of the American dream. But it’s also a recipe for societal collapse. When men’s wages decline, families fall apart. This fact is well known to researchers. It’s been the subject of many studies over decades, with consistent results. Yet it’s rarely noted in public. Here’s some of what we know.
One well-regarded study released last year found that when men’s wages fell relative to women’s, families didn’t form. According to the authors, a falling male wage reduced, quote, “the attractiveness of men as potential spouses, thus reducing fertility and especially marriage rages.”
Researchers also noted a dramatic increase in out of wedlock births when men made less. In the words of one of the authors, an economics professor at MIT, quote: “We see a decline in fertility, a decline in marriage, but a rise in the fraction of births that are disadvantaged, as a consequence the kids are living in pretty tough circumstances.”
Numerous academic studies have reached identical conclusions. Research from 2015 found that quote, “when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline.” Those who do marry report being less satisfied and are more likely to divorce.
Low male wages are a driving force in family dissolution, and that’s why affluent neighborhoods in which men make more have a higher proportion of married couples, and fewer divorces. The opposite is also true, and that leads to a cascade of social problems, which over time become a disaster. Men who make lower wages marry less and father more children out of wedlock. These children, growing up without fathers, tend to make lower wages themselves in later life.
For decades this was a universally recognized pattern in inner cities: the cycle of poverty. Now the same destructive vortex is common in rural America. The problem isn’t culture — that’s what we thought. No. In both cases, the cause is the same: A lack of well-paying jobs for men.
What’s striking is how little notice these facts get from our policy makers have taken. Their overriding aim is to raise women’s wages to parity or above men’s. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But these are complex questions with numerous and profound unintended consequences, so they deserve vigorous public debate. It’s notable that most women, the very population on whose behalf these policies are supposedly devised, strongly prefer to marry men who make more than they do.
What’s beyond debate is that Washington and corporate America aren’t thinking a lot about how to solve the male wage crisis. If anything, they’re exacerbating it. Lawmakers in both parties, for example, have heartily embraced self-driving vehicles and drone delivery of packages. It’s all impressive technology, but what would be the effect on employment? Has anyone asked that?
There are more than three million professional truck drivers in this country. It’s the most common job in the majority of states. More than 90 percent of drivers are men. Thanks to technology, many of them are about to lose their jobs. That’s a lot of unemployed Americans. That’s a lot of broken families.
Washington isn’t worried at all about this. Lawmakers and business leaders assure us those truck drivers will be just fine. They’ll find something else to do, something better in fact, with higher pay. Maybe they will. But keep in mind that they said the same thing about manufacturing jobs thirty years ago.
A century ago, one of the most miserable jobs was picking cotton in the hot sun. Now cotton farming has become highly automated like much of present-day agriculture. One cutting-edge machine is a John Deere cotton stripper which moves through the fields, picking and processing eight rows of cotton at a time and finally plopping out a 5000-pound packaged tube of the fiber ready to be sent to a modern cotton gin where cleaning and baling is completed.
The importance of the machine’s efficiency, particularly cutting the expense of workers, stands out in the company video below. The voice-over says, “Perhaps best of all is the decrease in your labor costs.” Cotton farmer Mike Henson of Ropesville, Texas, remarked positively, “The biggest thing about it was a one-man operation doing what nine or ten other people usually do.”
So why does Washington continue importing immigrant workers like it’s 1910?
Adding millions of low-skilled foreigners to America will look like a really bad idea when automation becomes obvious as a disruptive social force. From farm to factory, the workplace is changing fundamentally because of smart machines, and the revolution only getting started: in fact tech experts predict the next five years will see a growing threat to jobs and a need for workers to have technical skills to stay employed.
Cotton harvesting is now dominated by machines. But it took decades to happen.
From the cab of Rodney Terry’s state-of-the-art John Deere cotton stripper, harvesting cotton seems like the easiest job in the world. We chug along at four or five miles an hour, watching the giant machine’s bright yellow fingers gobble up eight rows of bolls at a time. White rows magically turn brown as we pass over them. Then comes the reveal, as every few minutes a plastic-wrapped cylinder eight feet across plops out the back, holding as much as 5,000 pounds of cotton ready for the gin.
“This thing is just constantly moving,” says Terry, who farms 6,000 acres in Ropesville, Texas, a half hour’s drive southwest of Lubbock. The stripper cost a whopping $700,000, but it’s amazingly efficient. Terry can harvest 100 to 120 acres a day, compared to 80 with the previous generation of equipment, which had to stop periodically to empty its basket of harvested cotton into a trailer. He can also keep working in windy weather that would blow away loose bolls waiting to be wrapped in the field.
Most important, he no longer needs to hire a half dozen harvest workers to supplement his three full-time employees. Finding reliable seasonal laborers for farms and gins is increasingly difficult in West Texas. Locals blame government benefits that offer a better deal than temporary work. (“Don’t get me started,” says Terry.) Bringing in the harvest with his new setup takes only two people at a time: one to steer the stripper and one to drive a tractor that lines up the modules for the gin to pick up. Full-timers handle everything, and the machine can run all night if needed.
“I figured out this new machine, it’s displacing at least 1,000 people,” says Dan Taylor, a retired cotton farmer and gin owner in Ropesville. “It can harvest on a good day as much as a thousand people would harvest” in the days of hand-pulling cotton. Of course, most of those people left the cotton fields decades ago. The robots are taking the jobs — and they’ve been doing it for at least 60 years. The story of how cotton harvesting has changed over the decades doubles as a reminder that even robots take their time. At least until a certain point.
1) Full automation was impossible without years of tinkering. Although mechanized cotton harvesters were available in the 1920s, they didn’t catch on until after World War II. As long as farms needed workers to hoe weeds and thin cotton plants, replacing them at harvest time made little economic sense. Chemicals, not machines, solved that part of the problem; the ground between rows in Terry’s field is perfectly bare.
Even that wasn’t the end of it. “The ancillary requirements seemed to go on and on,” wrote the late historian Donald Holley in The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the South. Gins had to install dryers, for instance, because machine-harvested cotton retained more moisture. Farmers needed chemical defoliants to apply before harvesting so that their bales wouldn’t be contaminated with leaf trash. Breeders had to develop shorter plants with bolls that emerged at the same time, allowing a single pass through the fields. Until all these things had happened, harvesters had limited appeal.
Below, the little orange Kiva robots scoot under racks of merchandise and deliver them to humans who fulfill the orders.
Today, many people find it easier to shop online than to spend hours to drive through traffic to a store that may not have what they want. Amazon’s recent record-breaking Cyber Monday following Thanksgiving illustrates its increasing success, along with Jeff Bezos’ ascent to becoming the richest man in the world.
The universe of work is undergoing a fundamental transformation because of automation and computers, and we’re just beginning to see how the future may function. Massive job destruction is a given, according to numerous tech experts. Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years. Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi believes that in 30 years humans will become largely obsolete, and world joblessness will reach 50 percent. The Gartner tech advising company believes that one-third of jobs will be done by machines by 2025. The consultancy firm PwC published a report earlier this year that forecast robots could take 38 percent of US jobs by 2030.
Amazon may be adding employees now, but the company’s long term plans are to replace workers in their function of filling and packing customer orders as shown by the company’s annual Picking Challenge competition for robots.
And plenty of other industries from agriculture to accounting are incorporating more smart machines to save money.
So it makes no sense for America to continue importing millions of immigrants who expect to work here, right?
Amazon employs over half a million workers. In the past year alone, the online retailer has added roughly a quarter of a million employees to its headcount, and 238 cities across the country are competing to become the location of Amazon’s second headquarters, which is estimated to create 50,000 more Amazon jobs.
But according to Dave Edwards and Helen Edwards at Quartz, Amazon may be killing more jobs than it creates. Quartz found that there are 170,000 fewer retail jobs in Amazon-related industries — like bookstores, grocery stores and clothing stores — in 2017 than the year before.
According to their calculations, even if Amazon maintains an impressive 43 percent personnel growth for another year, the total number of workers employed in Amazon-related industries would still decrease by 24,000.
So where are the jobs going? Quartz suggests that an increase in robotic workers could be to blame. They estimate that Amazon added 75,000 new robots to their workforce in 2017 for a total of roughly 100,000. By these approximations, machines constitute 20 percent of all Amazon “employees.”
More robots don’t always mean fewer jobs, but it may in the case of Amazon. Edwards and Edwards write, “While it may be difficult to prove causality, it’s not difficult to see the correlation between a decline of 24,000 human employees and an increase of 75,000 robot employees.”
Amazon attests that the investment in technological workers has improved efficiency. CNBC reports it takes 90 minutes on average for a human Amazon employee to find a product and package it, but with the help of robots, a product can be found and packaged in as little as 13 minutes.
Farm automation has been progressing along, just like uses of smart machines in other industries, but agbots may now be getting an extra boost. Apparently President Trump’s crackdown on illegal border crossings has decreased the supply of foreign pickers, so farmers are looking more favorably at tech solutions. The transition would have happened anyway, but immigration enforcement is speeding it up a bit.
Not only are there are robot weeders, pickers and cultivators, but cows can now walk into an automated milker when they feel the need.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Convincing big U.S. dairy owners to buy robots to milk their cows – and reduce the farmhands they employ – used to be a tough sell for Steve Fried. Recently, his job has gotten easier, he says, in part because of President Donald Trump.
“I get calls on a daily basis and it typically starts with, ‘I don’t want to deal with this labor headache any more’,” said Fried, sales manager for Lely North America, which makes robotic dairy milking and feeding systems.
Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration through stepped-up arrests and border enforcement has shaken the U.S. agricultural sector, where as many as 7 in 10 farm workers are undocumented, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
In addition, Republican lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation that would require all employers to check social security numbers against federal databases to ensure their workers are in the country legally, something that is now voluntary in all but a handful of states.
The get-tough approach “has created a great deal of anxiety,” said Tom Vilsack, chief executive of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, who was U.S. Agriculture Secretary for eight years under President Barack Obama.
The shift comes as the industry was already struggling to cope with a shrinking, aging workforce. That is ratcheting up pressure on the sector to embrace new technology.
Farmers and food companies increasingly are moving to automate dairy operations, chicken processing, crop production and harvesting. Even delicate crops such as strawberries and peaches are being considered for mechanization.
“You’d be a fool to not have a plan that moves you that way,” said Duff Bevill, who owns a vineyard management company in Sonoma County, California.
On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson had a rapid-fire interview with billionaire Mark Cuban who thinks he might challenge President Trump in the 2020 Republican primary. Cuban bragged on how he can use his technological expertise to solve government problems, but he shrunk into nonsense at an automation question with an obvious answer:
MARK CUBAN: We need to find ways to reduce the cost of those entitlements while maintaining the same level of care. I’m a tech guy, and the reality is I would focus on creating technology solutions. I have investments that I see myself where it can have an impact. I think there’s a way that we can reduce the size of government, the size of bureaucracy that deals with healthcare but it’s going to take somebody who understands technology that can introduce technology to find those solutions, and I think it can happen relatively quickly.
TUCKER CARLSON: You definitely understand technology and you’ve been one of the people, to your great credit, who’s been sounding the alarm about automation’s effect on employment: you said robots are basically going to kill a lot of jobs; I think you’re right. Given that, is allowing about a million low-wage low-skilled workers into the country every year legally is that a good idea? Is that the right level of immigration?
CUBAN: You know what, you can argue both sides of that, Tucker, I’m not, I don’t have all the data to make the final decision, but on one hand you can say that it takes jobs away from people who need them the most. On the other hand, because of the demographic trends you can say we need people to fill certain jobs, you know if you look at agriculture, there’s jobs that are going unfilled, so you know there’s arguments for both sides. I’m not ready to come to a conclusion.
It’s good to see traditional media connect the dots between automation and immigration, as the Los Angeles Times inadvertently did somewhat on Tuesday’s front page:
The online version of the article appeared last week, on Friday, July 21. An above-the-fold story with photo gets a lot more attention, certainly, as long as those newspaper boxes are sitting on the sidewalk.
The missing part of the message is that the machines make importing foreign farmworkers increasingly unnecessary. If fewer illegals are crossing the border because of Trump, that may hasten smart machines in the fields, but ag robots are coming sooner or later: when the machines become cheaper than human pickers, then field workers will be gone, period.
Plus, it’s long past time that Mexico etc. became more responsive to its own people’s needs, rather than pushing them north to mooch from America.
Remember,
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
Can we get Washington to notice that the world of work is changing fundamentally?
Driscoll’s is so secretive about its robotic strawberry picker it won’t let photographers within telephoto range of it.
But if you do get a peek, you won’t see anything humanoid or space-aged. AgroBot is still more John Deere than C-3PO — a boxy contraption moving in fits and starts, with its computer-driven sensors, graspers and cutters missing 1 in 3 berries.
Such has been the progress of ag-tech in California, where despite the adoption of drones, iPhone apps and satellite-driven sensors, the hand and knife still harvest the bulk of more than 200 crops.
Now, the $47-billion agriculture industry is trying to bring technological innovation up to warp speed before it runs out of low-wage immigrant workers.
California will have to remake its fields like it did its factories, with more machines and better-educated workers to labor beside them, or risk losing entire crops, economists say.
“California agriculture just isn’t going to look the same,” said Ed Taylor, a UC Davis rural economist. “You’re going to be hard-pressed to find crops grown as labor-intensively as they are now.”
Driscoll’s, which grows berries in nearly two dozen countries and is the world’s top berry grower, already is moving its berries to table- top troughs, where they are easier for both humans and machines to pick, as it has done over the last decade in Australia and Europe.
“We don’t see — no matter what happens — that the labor problem will be solved,” said Soren Bjorn, president of Driscoll’s of the Americas.
That’s because immigrant farmworkers in California’s agricultural heartlands are getting older and not being replaced.
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