It’s encouraging to see a smart young candidate for president talking about automation as a threat to the US economy and American jobs. The 2016 election was lacking any such discussion: the tech community was aware, but Washington lagged behind, as usual.
The formula is simple: when a machine become less expensive than a worker, then the human will go. And unlike the Great Depression, the jobs won’t come back.
Among the first jobs to go are the low-skilled sort, the employment that illegal border crossers count on getting in America. It’s likely that automation-caused unemployment would be higher without President Trump’s economic leadership.
Andrew Yang was interviewed yesterday on CBS Sunday Morning (the show made famous by Charles Kuralt and his nostalgic patriotism seen on the nation’s backroads).
Candidate Yang mentioned in his CBS interview about how automation has already had an electoral effect: “We automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, all the swing states that Donald Trump needed to win, and did win.”
That job loss is an important point and a reminder that we are already on the big automation highway with no off-ramp.
In a park in Los Angeles last month, thousands gathered to hear the Democrat perhaps least likely to be running for president. “I am the ideal candidate for that job, because the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math,” said Andrew Yang.
In Yang’s world, MATH stands for “Make America Think Harder,” and Yang is mostly thinking about dire economic times ahead.
[. . .]
Andrew Yang, in fact, calls himself an entrepreneur. His parents immigrated from Taiwan: His father, a physicist, and his mother, with a master’s in math and statistics. Yang grew up in Schenectady, New York. His first big success was running a college test-prep company, and then he founded Venture for America, a non-profit that helps train entrepreneurs in struggling cities.
He thinks jobs – or rather, the loss of them – are why Donald Trump won the presidency.
“The numbers tell a very clear story,” he said. “We automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, all the swing states that Donald Trump needed to win, and did win.”
And Yang believes robots and artificial intelligence will accelerate the loss of all kinds of jobs. “Now, what we did to those jobs, we’re doing to the retail jobs, the call center jobs, the fast food jobs, the truck driving jobs, and on and on through the economy,” he said.
Thompson met Yang along the campaign trail, as he took a break for some tea (“Duke of Earl Gray”), and then discovered a foosball table, where he naturally talked about economic theory, and another of his big ideas: reforming how we calculate Gross Domestic Product, or GDP.
“If you want to see how out-of-whack GDP is, all you have to do is look at my family,” Yang said. “My wife is at home with our two boys, one of whom is autistic. And what is her work every day, included at in GDP? Zero. And we know that her work is among the most important work being done for our society.” (Continues)
Martin Ford, the technology expert whose 2016 book Rise of the Robots woke up a lot of people to the automation risk, is continuing to speak to audiences warning them about the threat of a jobless future.
He recently spoke in Armenia to discuss the topic as described below — but perhaps he should be rattling some cages in America’s capitol city where awareness of coming technological job loss is near zero. One obvious point: it makes no sense to continue admitting thousands of unskilled illegal aliens from the south when there will be no jobs for them at all when automation hits hard in a few years.
Human workers have largely disappeared from some manufacturing floors after being replaced by robots.
Ford remarked in a recent tweet that the Star’s headline “is a bit over the top” but he did not deny that a severe economic disruption is likely.
Artificial intelligence will soon be widespread in the workforce
Robots will make half of the world’s workforce redundant in the next 10 to 20 years in a global unemployment crisis, an AI expert has claimed.
Top US futurist Martin Ford said automaton will soon be widespread, with all low-skilled jobs replaced by robots.
Ford, who focuses on the impact of AI and robotics on the job market, warned we need to be ready for widespread global unemployment.
He acknowledges the “long record of false alarms,” but argues that this time is different.
The pace of automation, he says, is no longer linear, but exponential, like the growth in computing capacity predicted by Moore’s Law.
The economy, Ford says, will not have time to create new professions to absorb the tens of millions of workers displaced by automation.
“My primary concern is that as AI and machine learning and robotics advance, a huge fraction of the jobs and tasks currently performed in the economy are going to be susceptible to automation,” he told the World Congress on Information Technology in Armenia today.
“Primarily it’s going to be those types of roles that are fundamentally routine, repetitive and, to some extent, predictable.
“That could be jobs in factories, but it could also be white collar jobs, the kind of job where you’re sitting in front of the computer doing something relatively routine – perhaps producing the same report again and again.”
White-collar jobs are also at risk for the first time, Ford says. On Wall Street, the number of financial workers has already plunged by 50,000 since 2000, as computers can process 100,000 transactions in a tenth of a second. (Continues)
It turns out that not only are humans being replaced by smart machines, but workers are also getting reduced paychecks even in the booming jobs economy because of automation in the workplace.
The Fed report starts out:
The portion of national income that goes to workers, known as the labor share, has fallen substantially over the past 20 years. Even with strong employment growth in recent years, the labor share has remained at historically low levels. Automation has been an important driving factor. While it has increased labor productivity, the threat of automation has also weakened workers’ bargaining power in wage negotiations and led to stagnant wage growth. Analysis suggests that automation contributed substantially to the decline in the labor share.
Certainly America no longer needs to import immigrant workers to perform simple repetitious tasks because smart machines are increasingly taking the place of human employees.
The man interviewed in the Fox Business clip included below is cheerful about how the coming economy will work out, but keep in mind that William Santana Li is the CEO of Knightscope, a company that manufactures security robots among other automated items.
‘The world is going to change in the next 10 years than the last 100 years combined.,’ William Santana Li, Knightscope Inc. CEO, said.
Automation has “significantly contributed” to a decrease in the portion of national income that goes to American workers over the past two decades, according to a new report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
Although the bank found that a decline in union membership, increased outsourcing and offshoring and non-compete clauses that hurt workers’ ability to switch jobs are also contributing to a shrinking paycheck, automation is the primary cause.
Despite a strong labor market and consistently low unemployment, the labor share, or the portion of national income going to workers, declined to 56 percent in 2018, compared to about 63 percent in 2000. Although the decline steepened during the financial crisis, the labor share has remained at historically low levels, despite strong employment growth over the past few years.
In part, that’s more businesses are increasingly relying on automation for what are generally hard-to-fill jobs. Because of rapid advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, robots can perform jobs and tasks that only humans could do just a few years ago.
Coupled with a steady decline in the price of this equipment over the past few decades, it’s not only easier for businesses to automate, but cheaper. Plus, workers — worried about the possibility of being replaced by a machine — have a weaker amount of bargaining power.
“In this environment, workers may be reluctant to ask for significant pay raises out of fear that an employer will replace their jobs with robots,” the report found.
Since the early 2000s, the labor share has dropped about 7 percentage points, half of which occurred during the 2008 recession. But even in the midst of a record-long economic expansion, labor share remains stagnant at 56 percent, near the historical low.
“The significant decline in the labor share reflects that increases in real wages have not kept up with labor productivity improvements over the past two decades,” the authors wrote. (Continues)
Senator Sherrod Brown recently submitted legislation that requires employers to notify workers of new technology being implemented and provide retraining. The costs will be on the business owners which is proper since they will be saving big money by replacing humans with machines: taxpayers should not be hit with the huge costs of transitioning to an automation economy although of course we all will be taxed for unemployment welfare over the long term.
Below, some types of manufacturing have largely become automated.
It’s nice to see someone in the capitol paying attention to this world-changing subject. This bill won’t go anywhere, but increasing attention directed toward the coming jobs depression is absolutely welcome.
Next, some legislator can propose a bill to end low-skilled immigration entirely, because simple repetitive jobs will be taken by smart machines as soon as they are cheaper than humans.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who made “Dignity of Work” his slogan during a short-lived presidential exploration, on Wednesday introduced a bill that would require that workers get advance notice and training when their companies adopt new technologies.
The bill also would require that employers give six months of severance pay to workers whose jobs are lost to automation.
“No matter how technology changes, Ohio companies still need human beings to oversee that technology,” Brown told reporters. “Ohio workers will always be our greatest resource, but right now, too many workers get left behind when companies adopt new technology.”
Brown said his “Workers’ Right to Training Act” would require employers to provide and pay for on-the-job training for workers affected by the introduction of new technologies, including training those whose jobs are to be eliminated so they can get a similar job elsewhere.
By helping those workers receive the training they need, Brown said the bill will also help ensure the U.S. workforce remains high-skilled and capable of competing in a global economy, and ensure that workplace technology introductions are fair to workers. He said workers would have the right to sue if their employers don’t comply. (Continues)
On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to discuss his presidential campaign along with the issue of automation, specifically how it threatens the jobs of millions of Americans in the near future.
An article written by de Blasio appeared in Wired the same day, titled Why American Workers Need to Be Protected From Automation which is a topic more leaders should be addressing. The article is decent, but if anything, it underestimates the effect that the permanent removal of perhaps the majority of workers from the economy will mean. The adjustments to society will take decades.
The good news about the de Blasio interview was Tucker’s question to the mayor: “If you really believe that automation is a threat to low-skilled jobs, why are you for mass immigration?”
Which de Blasio dodged.
The bad news is how Tucker became distracted from the important discussion about America’s future under smart machines to badger de Blasio about his terrible management of New York City: one topic is of a transitory nature; the other is world changing.
At least there were several good minutes before the important topic of automation was mostly lost:
TUCKER CARLSON: So in the three or so years the show has been on the air, we’ve taken a bunch of different positions on a bunch of different topics, but one thing we’ve always been consistent about from the first day until today is making fun of Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York — on every topic. If you watch this show, you’ll know.
Then the other day, it came to our attention that de Blasio has raised an issue that too few in either party are talking about. It’s the question of automation. He has got a piece in “WIRED” magazine on it.
De Blasio, as you as you know is also running for President. Something else we’ve made fun of. But his position on automation really struck us is pretty interesting, so yesterday, we arranged a phone call and we talked about a very friendly conversation, invited Mayor de Blasio to come on the show to talk about that and other things and he was gracious enough to respond.
And so we’re happy to have Mayor Bill de Blasio join us tonight live. Mr. Mayor, thanks a lot for coming on.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D-NY): Thank you, Tucker and I appreciate that you care deeply about this issue of automation because it’s bearing down on all of us.
CARLSON: It is, it is and my praise of you on this question is totally sincere. Very few people are taking this seriously. Andrew Yang is one of them, you’re another. I can’t think of many others who are, and so God bless you.
So you’re basically saying that companies ought to have to — and I’m not sure how much of this I agree with, but I think I’m phrasing this correctly. You say companies ought to have to bear some of the cost of helping workers transition to something else when they lay them off in favor of robots.
DE BLASIO: That’s right. Tucker, right now, let’s just get the magnitude clear for all your viewers.
Middle-class Americans, working-class Americans whose jobs are not going to be there if we don’t do something different. Because right now, the recent estimate I saw, 36 million jobs that could be made obsolete. We’re talking as early as 2030 — 12 years ahead. Eleven to twelve years from now.
So here’s the reality. Right now, in fact the Federal Tax Code rewards companies that invest in the kind of technology that actually sheds jobs, destroys jobs.
Our tax dollars are helping companies — incentivizing companies to get rid of more and more American workers. So my plan is simple, it says, end that. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that we could use to actually address our bigger issues in this country and employ a lot of people.
CARLSON: I am completely with you on that one right there. I’m sure there’s a lot of details we disagree on, but I agree with you on that, for sure.
DE BLASIO: And by the way, South Korea is doing that right now. They recognize that if they don’t stop incentivizing companies, a lot of times these companies are making the decision simply because it’s better for their tax reality rather than what’s better for working people or even productivity.
The second point of my plan is, let’s institute something — Bill Gates actually was the first one I think to call for — which is a quote unquote “robot tax.” It says simply, you know a worker pays income tax. You take away millions and millions of workers, that’s a lot less revenue to take care of all the things we need in our society and it means of course, millions and millions of people who don’t have a livelihood.
I believe in work. I think you do, too. I believe we need a future that’s based on work. So if a company is going to put thousands of people out of work, they should bear responsibility for making sure that those folks get a new job, either in the same company or elsewhere.
But that tax is both an incentive to keep people on the job in a good way, in a productive way, it also provides money to help foster from the Federal level the kinds of things we need a lot more of. We need a lot more investment in renewable energy and recycling and environmental restitution. There’s all sorts of this.
CARLSON: Well, let me ask you this question though, okay, so I’m not sure I think of the second, but I don’t think it’s totally crazy. You know, I am happy to read and think about it more. So we’re together up until this point, but if you really believe that automation is a threat to low-skilled jobs, why are you for mass immigration?
What are all of these people going to do, we’re importing with your help?
DE BLASIO: Look, Tucker, I’m not finished on the point about what we’re trying to achieve here and I certainly want to answer that question, it’s an important one. Let’s just be clear about the central point here.
Right now, there is no American strategy, no Federal government strategy to address automation and it could be the single most disruptive force in our society that we’ve ever experienced.
If you talk about tens of millions of working-class and middle-class Americans who no longer have work or the prospect of work, that’s unacceptable.
So the Federal government has to step up. There is no strategy now. There’s no candidate in my opinion who is offering a coherent strategy. I respect Andrew Yang for raising the issue.
CARLSON: So I agree. I would say that immigration — immigration is a close second as a force to transforming the country and the two are at cross-purposes. So immigrants come here overwhelmingly to work in low-skilled jobs, a lot of those jobs no matter how hard we try are going away. This is crazy, why are we doing this?
DE BLASIO: Well let’s face it, there’s a huge number of jobs right now and let’s take agriculture as an obvious example. We’re in the worst of all worlds. We don’t have enough workers to do the work among the people already in this country and we don’t have a coherent immigration system including something as obvious as a guest worker program, a legal guest worker program.
CARLSON: Okay, but Ag is a small sector.
DE BLASIO: That could actually take this some place.
CARLSON: Okay, Ag is — and that’s a separate debate. I disagree but that’s not — I mean, the much bigger picture is jobs in the service sector are going away that immigrants fill. We continue to import immigrants at over a million a year, why are we doing that? Continue reading this article
Automation is creating a big change that is going to reorder the employment universe fundamentally. People engaged in repetitive type jobs that can be easily automated should consider a Plan B for making money, because when smart machines can perform a job more cheaply than a human, then the worker will be replaced. This is how capitalism works.
Below, a 2017 report from PwC titled How will automation impact jobs? shows the company’s predicted timeline for how automation will roll out in various industries.
The report also notes, “In the short term, the impact of automation may be low for workers of all education levels, but in the long run our estimates show that those with lower education levels could be much more vulnerable to being displaced by machines.”
So it makes no sense for Washington to continue with open borders, since the low-skilled illegal aliens from Central America and beyond will be among the first to get cut because switching to a robot will simply be cheaper and with no downside. Meanwhile, English-speaking Americans with more training who can flexibly transition into a semi-automated work environment will be valued.
Fortune magazine recently took up the necessity and challenges of retraining for the coming automation age:
As technology, including robots, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other forces change the nature of work, employees will need new skills to adapt to shifting roles. Research firm Gartner predicts that employees who regularly update their skill sets and invest in new training will be more valued than those with experience or tenure. But it’s not going to be easy.
The World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs 2018” report estimates that, by 2022, more than half (54%) of employees will require significant skills updating or retraining. More than one-third (35%) will need about six months to get up to speed, while nearly one in five will require a year or more of additional training.
And employers might not be much help. A 2019 global survey of employers by consulting firm Deloitte found that 86% of respondents rated the need to improve learning and development (L&D) as “important” or “very important.” But just 10% felt ready to “very ready” to address that need. As digital transformation affects so many businesses, a 2018 Gartner report found that just 20% of employees have the skills they need for their jobs now and in the future.
For workers who are concerned about remaining marketable, this raises a number of questions about where they should invest their efforts.
“In almost every job, you need a different set of skills than you did five years ago, and there’s no reason to believe that number’s going to get smaller,” says Brian Kropp, the Arlington, Virginia-based chief of human resources research at Gartner. Employees who are serious about remaining marketable must take it upon themselves to remain in demand in the marketplace.
Finding the focus
Identifying skills with emerging demand can begin with simply keeping abreast of job ads, says career expert Susan P. Joyce, publisher of Job-Hunt.org, a Marlborough, Mass.-based website for job seekers. As certain tools and technologies become more widely adopted in a given field, the skills required to use them are going to be listed as requirements for certain positions, she says. “If something’s required now that wasn’t a year ago, that’s a sign,” she says. (Continues)
Andrew Yang discussed his presidential campaign on Fox News Sunday.
But rather than explain what tech authorities forecast will happen, Yang went for the attention-getter of free money, aka Universal Basic Income. The details are important because it’s difficult for average people to envision a level of permanent job loss worse than the Great Depression. In fact, polling has shown a strange sort of denial among the public:
AI is a problem for jobs, say the majority of Americans, but it’s someone else’s problem.
Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of US adults believe artificial intelligence will “eliminate more jobs than it creates,” according to a Gallup survey. But, the same survey found that less than a quarter (23 percent) of people were “worried” or “very worried” automation would affect them personally. (Continues).
The jobs economy is booming now, but that could change quickly: when smart machines become cheaper than humans in performing jobs, then the replacement will begin, as it already has in industries like automotive manufacturing:
Furthermore, it’s crazy to continue admitting huge numbers of low-skilled foreigners as immigrants when their jobs will be among the first to be automated.
Candidate Andrew Yang appeared on Fox News Sunday to discuss how automation will affect American workers and the economy:
CHRIS WALLACE: His supporters call themselves the Yang Gang. They chant PowerPoint at his rallies and wear ball caps with “M-A-T-H” on the front for “Make America Think Harder.”
Joining us now for an exclusive “Fox News Sunday” sit down, Democratic presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who will be on the debate stage this week.
Mr. Yang, welcome to “Fox News Sunday.”
YANG: Thanks for having me, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here.
WALLACE: Let’s start with the latest Fox News poll that came out this week. It shows you tied for sixth place with Amy Klobuchar at 3 percent, 30 points behind Joe Biden, but running ahead of Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke and Julian Castro.
So I have kind of a good news/bad news question, which is, why do you think you’re doing better than a lot of better-known politicians? And then the other hand, how do you ever make the big jump that you still have to make to get into the top tier of candidates?
YANG: Well, on the positive side, America, unfortunately, has lost a lot of confidence in its politicians. It’s one reason why I’m doing so well, I’m beating many sitting senators and governors.
The American people realize that our government is way behind the curve in solving the real problems. And we need to catch up and speed up. And they see someone like me as someone who can help make that possible.
In terms of making the big jump to catch up to Joe Biden and the other leaders, most Americans are just tuning in to who’s running in 2020. I’m still introducing myself to the American people. It’s going to be a very, very fluid race over the weeks and months to come. I’m very confident I’m just going to keep on climbing the polls and start catching up to the leaders very soon.
WALLACE: You say people are just tuning in, but if they tuned in to the first Democratic debate, they didn’t see much of Andrew Yang. You ended up getting — I had to get check this out — two minutes and 50 seconds total in a two hour debate, by far the least amount of time of any of the Democrats in the two debates.
What’s your plan to get more airtime this week?
YANG: Well, I got asked two questions in two hours, which certainly was not enough, but we’re very confident that this Wednesday I’m going to have much, much more of an opportunity to make my case to the American people that the real central issue is that we’re automating away millions of first manufacturing jobs and now retail jobs, call center jobs, and on and on through the economy.
And because of the polling support we have, I’m not going to have just next week in Detroit. I’m going to have also September in Houston and on and on. My campaign is going to be here the entire way.
WALLACE: I want to talk about your policy proposal and automation in a moment, but just to get back to the debate, one way that is tried and true to get more attention and airtime is to go after the front runners. You’re going to be on the stage on Wednesday night with two of the front runners, Vice President Biden and Senator Harris.
Any thoughts about going after them, one, because you have differences on issues, and, two, because it will get you more attention?
YANG: Well, my focus is on solving the problems of the American people. And to the extent that I can drive the conversation towards those issues, I’m very, very excited about it.
I don’t think that we benefit if I’m throwing rocks at other candidates when, frankly, I agree with them on many, many issues. And I think right now my focus really is on still introducing myself to the American people.
WALLACE: One of your main messages, which you referred to a moment ago, is that you say that this country is going through a dramatic, economic transformation, in large part because of automation. And you say that you will keep the promises to working-class Americans that President Trump has failed to keep to them. Here you are in the first debate:
YANG: I can build a much broader coalition to beat Donald Trump. It is not left, it is not right, it is forward. And that is where I’ll take the country in 2020.
WALLACE: You propose what you call the American Mall Act, like shopping mall act, with a $6 billion fund.
How would that work?
YANG: We’re in the process of automating away the most common jobs in the U.S. economy, which includes retail worker, call-center worker, truck driver, food service. These are the jobs that are disappearing around the country. And, unfortunately, they’re also the most common jobs.
So Amazon is closing 30 percent of our malls and stores and paying zero in taxes while doing it. And these malls become sinkholes. They cause blight, become havens for crime and bad actions. So we need to help communities transition these malls to become community centers or schools or even residential. But in the absence of that kind of move, these ghost malls become the last place anyone wants to be and they destroy property value for miles around. Continue reading this article
Forbes provides a review of expert opinions about how the new automation/AI is going to roll out regarding the jobs economy over the next years. It notes the dire early predictions of mass unemployment, but tries to provide a balance with more upbeat forecasts of new jobs being created in the tech economy.
Forbes also mentioned that the future tech jobs require new skills which entail appropriate training and won’t be available to low-skilled workers.
In fact, the many thousands of non-English-speaking unskilled Third-Worlders who have flooded across America’s open border won’t be employable in a few years when automation and artificial intelligence hit big.
Thanks to President Trump in the White House, America’s employment economy is booming. However, when a smart machine becomes less expensive performing a job than a worker, then the human will be replaced: that’s market reality.
The upshot is: Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete.
Amazon announced last week that it will spend $700 million to train about 100,000 workers in the US by 2025, helping them move into more highly skilled jobs. The New York Timesobserved that with this program Amazon is acknowledging that ”advances in automation technology will handle many tasks now done by people.”
The number of jobs which AI and machines will displace in the future has been the subject of numerous studies and surveys and op-eds and policy papers since 2013, when a pair of Oxford academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, estimated that 47% of American jobs are at high risk of automation by the mid-2030s. Here are a few more recent examples of what has become a popular number-crunching (automated, computerized, AI-driven) exercise:
McKinsey Global Institute: between 40 million and 160 million women worldwide may need to transition between occupations by 2030, often into higher-skilled roles. Clerical work, done by secretaries, schedulers and bookkeepers, is an area especially susceptible to automation, and 72% of those jobs in advanced economies are held by women.
Oxford Economics: up to 20 million manufacturing jobs worldwide will be lost to robots by 2030.
McKinsey Global Institute: at the high end of the displacement by automation spectrum are 512 US counties, home to 20.3 million people, where more than 25% of workers could be displaced. The vast majority (429 counties) are rural areas in the Americana and distressed Americana segments. In contrast, urban areas with more diversified economies and workers with higher educational attainment, such as Washington, DC, and Durham, NC, might feel somewhat less severe effects from automation; just over 20% of their workforces are likely to be displaced.
But other reports provide a more positive take:
World Economic Forum: automation will displace 75 million jobs but generate 133 million new ones worldwide by 2022.
Gartner: AI-related job creation will reach two million net-new jobs in 2025.
McKinsey Global Institute: worldwide, with sufficient economic growth, innovation, and investment, there can be enough new job creation to offset the impact of automation, although in some advanced economies additional investments will be needed to reduce the risk of job shortages. In the US, there will be net positive job growth through 2030.
By way of explaining the more positive take on the future of work, a recent Forrester report (Future of Work) argues that “automation is not a singular trend,” and that future scenarios are influenced by the varying fortunes of a number of trends such as the gig economy, the destruction of industry boundaries, and the increasing desire for privacy and transparency. “You can argue that automation will open the aperture to new, previously unthinkable business opportunities as well as be the necessary engine to execute on business strategy,” says Forrester.
Dismissing “apocalyptic scenarios that endanger fear,” Forrester outlines its recommendations in terms of government policy (understand faster technology’s impact), economic planning (maximize opportunity while minimizing impact on local jobs), business planning (good-by graceful planning cycles, hello disruptive forces), and leadership planning (learn to manage humans and machines). Most important, for individuals: “As much as companies must become learning institutions, so must employees become learners — learning core skills, adapting to new working models, and understanding what it means to be ready and fit for the future, maximizing their Robotics Quotient.” (Continues)
Sunday’s Los Angeles Times has an upbeat front-page article about a Guatemalan town that has been transformed for the better by illegal immigration. The residents love America for its jobs and free stuff, shown by a “proliferation of U.S. flags” and new houses built in a style called “remittance architecture.”
Indeed, the money sent back as remittances is a lifeline to the poor country: Guatemalans abroad, mostly in the US, sent $9.5 billion home last year — 12 percent of the country’s GDP.
The local priest is quoted as supporting illegal immigration because “it serves a fundamental human need to survive.”
Of course, the article has no mention of the harm caused by the influx of millions of Third-Worlders into the United States. The economy is booming, but wages are not rising because of the millions of foreign workers who compete against citizens by working cheap.
Plus, the Guatemalans now work as “menial laborers” but when automation becomes more widespread in a few years, they will not be cheap enough as the smart machines become even less expensive. At that point, their advantage as cheap illegal labor will evaporate and they will become jobless.
The foreigner invasion is also harmful to American students because schools are forced to reallocate their budgets to serve often illiterate, non-English-speaking foreigners.
Last year, the Palm Beach County school district enrolled 4,555 Guatemalan students in kindergarten through 12th grade, nearly 50% more than two years earlier. Many of the students come from the country’s remote highlands and speak neither Spanish nor English. The number of elementary school students in kindergarten through fifth grade more than doubled to 2,119 in that same period.
But the Los Angeles Times thinks that we Americans should celebrate the Third World invasion because it is a big benefit to Guatemala. The United States as the World Welfare Office is not questioned, nor is homemade reform abroad even considered.
This mist-shrouded mountain town in northwest Guatemala exudes a bustling air of good fortune, even prosperity, that may seem at odds with the landscape of subsistence cornfields and vegetable plots.
Concrete and stucco houses of three and even four stories tower over traditional dwellings crafted from adobe bricks and wooden planks.
The source of the housing boom isn’t income from crop sales or occasional tourism. Rather, Todos Santos runs on savings sent home from the United States.
“The United States helped me more than the Guatemala government ever did,” said Efrain Carrillo, 40, outside the three-story house he built with three years of savings from working in the north as a laborer a decade ago. “I was deported, but I am grateful to the United States.”
The house features a ground-floor grocery store to provide income, while Carrillo and his wife live upstairs and their two teenage children live with relatives in the United States.
Fluttering from a balcony is the Guatemalan flag, and next to it another common sight here: the Stars and Stripes.
The proliferation of U.S. flags is a testament to the importance of illegal migration here — and the difficulty of curtailing it.
For the moment, Mexican authorities, under pressure from the Trump administration, are cracking down on U.S.-bound migration from Central America, deploying Mexican National Guard troops along roads leading from the country’s southern frontier and stepping up deportations.
The effort appears to be yielding results, with apprehensions in June along the U.S. Southwest border down 28% compared with May.
But in the long term, such campaigns may do little to stop the exodus from places like Todos Santos.
Gang violence and political persecution — two of the most common reasons that Central Americans give when they claim asylum at the U.S. border — are not major problems here. The migration is driven by economics. Continue reading this article
There’s a new automation report out, forecasting major job loss around the world from robots. The Oxford Economics study focuses on the manufacturing sector, which is what makes some economies run in Third World nations lacking economic diversity, and political instability may result.
Oxford Economics wants you to register your business on its website to get the report, but you can go directly to the file to read for yourself: How Robots Change the World.
In a few years, inexpensive machines will replace more expensive humans, even cheapie foreigners. At that point, we will wonder at the stupidity of having an open border to admit the unskilled Third World, because
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
Some tech experts estimate that serious automation is only a few years off, as indicated by the chart below from a 2017 PwC report, How will automation impact jobs?
Shutting down unskilled immigration should be the highest priority for the government, but it is not.
A new report by Oxford Economics claims that robots are forecasted to replace almost a tenth of the world’s manufacturing jobs with the majority borne by lower-income areas in developed nations.
Robots Replacing 20 million Manufacturing Jobs
Oxford Economics, global forecasting, and quantitative analysis firm have released a new report that predicts robotic machines will displace about 20 million manufacturing jobs across the world over the next decade.
Robots are increasingly capable of performing tasks that were previously relied on human hands.
This robotic revolution is propelled by technological advances in automation, engineering, energy storage, AI and machine learning.
Already, the number of robots in use worldwide multiplied three-fold over the past two decades, to 2.25 million.
Trends suggest the global stock of robots will multiply even faster in the next 20 years, reaching as many as 20 million by 2030, with 14 million in China alone.
This increase will be challenging for governments and policy-makers as it will impact the economy, the workplace, and society.
As a result of robotization, tens of millions of jobs will be lost, especially in poorer local economies that rely on lower-skilled workers.
This will, therefore, translate to an increase in income inequality. However, the rise of robots will also be beneficial in terms of productivity and economic growth, leading to the creation of new jobs. (Continues)
Dishwasher seems like a perfect job for newbie unskilled immigrants: English is not required and training is probably an hour, max. It’s one of the more basic jobs. In fact, an open-borders booster website says, Immigrant Dishwashers Do the Jobs Americans Don’t Want, so we spoiled citizens apparently need foreigners to keep our plates clean.
But now a start-up company called Dishcraft is developing an automated machine that could make human dishwashers obsolete before long.
Below, the Dishcraft robot cleans noodles off a plate.
CNBC reports that the company has amassed $25 million in funding, which is another sign that investors believe the future will be automated. Too bad Washington isn’t paying attention to what’s happening in automation technology and how it will radically change the economy.
One aspect is that in a few years, there won’t be jobs for the thousands of illegal aliens now streaming across our open border because smart machines will be doing the unskilled, repetitive jobs more cheaply.
More than half a million people work as dishwashers in the United States today, according to the most recent data from the Department of Labor. But that’s not nearly enough hands to keep cookware clean in the 660,755 establishments counted by the 2018 NPD Group Restaurant Consensus.
Enter Dishcraft, a start-up building a robotic dishwasher for commercial kitchens.
CEO and founder Linda Pouliot said that to figure out what tech could really do to help, she and CTO Paul Birkmeyer went to restaurants of every kind, volunteering to wash their dishes. Restaurateurs and managers were more than welcoming.
The co-founders discovered that work in the dish room is the same as it has been for decades — repetitive, frantic and physically punishing.
In a typical setup, it’s easy for a dishwasher to break a dish, get burned or slip and fall on the wet floor, Birkmeyer noticed. And at work it’s tempting for dishwashers to just put a rubber band on the overhead sprayers to keep hot water running all day, so they won’t have to keep reaching and grasping. Those conditions drive attrition.
“We found the problem is universal. It didn’t matter if you were the French Laundry, a hospital cafeteria or Chili’s; everyone is having a hard time hiring dishwashers,” Pouliot said.
Some restaurants turn to disposables or just deal with the expense of constant recruiting. But Dishcraft wants to give them a more sustainable, less costly option.
Dishcraft’s system uses four main elements: a dish drop, robotic dishwasher, rolling racks and the restaurant’s already-installed sanitizing machine.
At the dish drop, diners or bussers place dirty bowls and plates into a container that stacks and keeps track of them. When a rack is full, a light calls for a dish-room worker to roll it over to the robotic dishwasher, which loads them up automatically.
The washer picks up the plates and bowls with a magnet, cleans them with a rubber scraping wheel and rinses them with gray water (recycled water safe for cleaning purposes). Dishcraft’s robotic washer uses cameras, sensors and “dirt identification algorithms” to find and clean every last spot of food, even those that would be invisible to the naked eye.
Once they are washed, the machine stacks the plates and bowls into racks. A worker then places those racks in a sanitizer, standard equipment already used in commercial kitchens today. The sanitizer heats up the dishes, killing any remaining germs.
Restaurants love the system because “Robots do not call off, robots don’t take breaks, and robots do not take vacation,” Pouliot said. (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)
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