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Robot food delivery in the neighborhood has been chatted up on the news as the cool new tech thing about to happen, being tested and now it’s here.
The flagship robot delivery fleet rolled out on Wednesday in Washington DC.
The robots are doing the deliveries, although human minders will accompany the machines for now.
The little robots scooting along the sidewalk look pleasantly futuristic, but the rapid entry of automation into non-manufacturing uses over the last while makes the long-term future of some low-skilled jobs appear rather grim. Pizza delivery driver has been the sort of part-time job that’s perfect for students, but that employment option looks to be on the way out.
The Gartner consulting firm forecast that one-third of US jobs will be done by robots or computers by 2025 is looking more likely as the automating process speeds up with increasingly capable technology. Forrester Research Inc. has a more optimistic view, that there will be a net job loss of 7 percent by 2025 from automation, but that’s still a serious deficit when more jobs are needed as population increases. Furthermore, Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to tech replacement within 20 years. The pessimistic view comes from Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi, who warns of a dystopian future in 30 years when humans become largely obsolete and world joblessness stands at 50 percent.
Right now, it’s great that President Trump has convinced some companies to bring their businesses back to the United States, but the resulting number of jobs may be disappointing because of automation. Reshoring has been happening already anyway, because US labor costs don’t matter that much when machines are doing most of the work. So we’ll see how Trump’s jobs plan goes.
For the long term though, the future is automated, and the political class needs to wake up and smell the software. At the least, Washington should reduce immigration radically, more than just the 50 percent cut proposed by Senator Cotton.
The first fleet of delivery robots officially rolls out in DC today after two weeks of testing. Starship Technologies teamed up with San Francisco-based delivery company Postmates for the launch, the first in the US.
Initially a group of around 20 bots will make short deliveries—mostly under a mile—in the Georgetown and 14th Street corridor, with more neighborhoods to come in the near future. The autonomous coolers-on-wheels essentially act like any Postmates delivery service. An app user orders, say, items from a nearby convenience store. The vendor is notified, and a robot is dispatched from one of several hubs. Goods are placed in a temperature-controlled bag in the bot’s sealed compartment, which can only be unlocked with a code that’s sent to the customer. The robot then makes its way to the destination, and voila, that $10 order of snacks and soda is that much more awesome.
Postmates makes over 2 million deliveries a month nationwide using a fleet of cars, bikes, scooters, and average humans on foot. The latter is what stands to be eventually replaced by robots—next in Redwood City, California, and eventually in every city Postmates operates. Continue reading this article
The automation job wrecker got a rare front-page spot on Monday’s New York Times, where the oil industry was the subject:
Blue-collar worker Eustasio Velazquez, 44, succinctly described the situation of many when he observed, “I don’t see a future. Pretty soon every rig will have one worker and a robot.”
And that one worker will be a tech-trained guy running the oil-extraction machines from a comfy office. The roughnecks have been replaced by robots.
In Midland Texas, Ryan Grant helps guide the operation of his company’s oil wells by computer at a distance since drilling and pumping no longer require human workers.
Bloomberg described the changes that automation has brought to the oil industry. The industry representative argued that lower oil prices made automation necessary. Or maybe it’s just more profitable long term.
The employment ecosystem is fundamentally changing because of smart machines, but the conversation has not yet filtered through to Washington. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban tweeted this week that “Automation is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it,” although he didn’t get into specifics.
There is not a lot that can be done to slow the technology, but the government can at least stop importing immigrant workers who are not needed now and will become even less employable in the automated future. In fact…
In December, the Houston Chronicle quoted energy analysts‘ estimation that software and robots could reduce the number of oil field workers by 40 percent in the next few years. The Times’ description falls along that line.
The industry is embracing technology, and finding new ways to pare the labor force. But as jobs go away, what of presidential promises to bring them back?
MIDLAND, Tex. — In the land where oil jobs were once a guaranteed road to security for blue-collar workers, Eustasio Velazquez’s career has been upended by technology.
For 10 years, he laid cables for service companies doing seismic testing in the search for the next big gusher. Then, powerful computer hardware and software replaced cables with wireless data collection, and he lost his job. He found new work connecting pipes on rigs, but lost that job, too, when plunging oil prices in 2015 forced the driller he worked for to replace rig hands with cheaper, more reliable automated tools.
“I don’t see a future,” Mr. Velazquez, 44, said on a recent afternoon as he stooped over his shopping cart at a local grocery store. “Pretty soon every rig will have one worker and a robot.”
Oil and gas workers have traditionally had some of the highest-paying blue-collar jobs — just the type that President Trump has vowed to preserve and bring back. But the West Texas oil fields, where activity is gearing back up as prices rebound, illustrate how difficult it will be to meet that goal. As in other industries, automation is creating a new demand for high-tech workers — sometimes hundreds of miles away in a control center — but their numbers don’t offset the ranks of field hands no longer required to sling chains and lift iron. Continue reading this article
Elections have consequences, so they say. The Associated Press reports that farmers in California fear that Trump’s promise of mass deportations means they won’t have enough cheapie Mexicans to pick the crops and are therefore investing in agricultural automation.
The state of Oaxaca lies in southern Mexico, far from the US border, nevertheless a number of its residents depend on connections with the United States to survive, and some put on a brave face about their concerns regarding the new president, voiced in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.
They make a familiar argument from yesteryear: “Who will pick the strawberries?” and seem to think Americans cannot manage without them.
Hardly! The United States won two world wars and became the planetary superpower before millions of Mexicans invaded to “help” us.
In fact, the best thing that could happen to Mexico would be an end to its dependency on American jobs and dollars by enforcing immigration north of the border. Mexico has great wealth at the top and a growing middle class, but the nation behaves like a poor relation, hoping for more crumbs from the rich uncle.
Donald Trump could help make Mexico average again by enforcing a divorce from the Times‘ “shared economy” and that would be a big improvement for both nations.
From her stall featuring regional delicacies — chile-infused dried grasshoppers, juicy white worms from the maguey plant and handmade chocolates, among other edible fare — 63-year-old Eufenia Hernandez issued a challenge to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
“If this individual came down here to Oaxaca, we would put him to work,” she said. “Let’s see if he can work as hard as the Mexicans in the north.”
Hernandez, a veteran border crosser, having made the journey 18 times, has a brother and son in California.
“What would the United States do without Mexicans?” she posed. “Who else would pick the crops? Who would build the homes?”
Mexico too depends on those crops, those homes.
Its citizens in the U.S. sent back nearly $25 billion last year, its second-largest source of foreign income, after manufactured goods and ahead of oil. Much of that ends up in impoverished rural communities like the ones here in the southern state of Oaxaca, which for decades have dispatched young and old to El Norte in a deep-rooted ritual of economic betterment.
The cash they send home builds homes, funds small businesses, refurbishes churches and schools, and provides sustenance for multitudes.
It’s evident in the expansive, half-finished homes dotting the countryside, the Mexican version of McMansions. “They are waiting for more dollars from the north to finish,” people explain.
In the state’s central valley region, lines form daily at banks and money-exchange outlets as people collect cash sent from loved ones.
The cycle of people heading north and money flowing south is so entrenched that no one here can envision it ending. And so while the election of Trump, who has vowed to halt it with a wall along the 2,000-mile border, has spread dismay and apprehension, a more common reaction has been bemusement.
Most everyone in the area appears to have heard of Trump and his threats — his bellicose pronouncements about Mexico have been major news south of the border. But there is a pervasive sense that Trump is bluffing — or will have little appetite to pursue his far-reaching immigration agenda once in office. Or that he will inevitably fail.
“It’s all campaign talk,” Rolando Silvaja Jarquina, a retired teacher, said on a Sunday at a busy market in the courtyard of Tlacolula’s 16th century Catholic church, the Assumption of Our Lady, known for a baroque chapel featuring likenesses of beheaded saints. Continue reading this article
In Idaho, a researcher at the state Department of Labor looked into automation and how it may play out locally. His overall estimate is based on that of the Oxford analysts, that nearly half of state jobs are susceptible within a couple decades.
But there’s no mention that workers are shoppers and are the engine of America’s consumer-driven economy. Nobody is discussing how the financial system is supposed to function without a healthy population of shoppers.
Technology already is changing work force and how jobs are done throughout industries. The state may be a long way out from life as portrayed on “The Jetsons,” but one study projects that many jobs are at high risk of becoming mostly automated in the next 10 to 20 years.
Automation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. Clear Springs Foods in Buhl has found that machines can help employees.
“It’s really made people’s jobs easier,” spokeswoman Callie Grindstaff said. “We’re really trying to inform people that manufacturing is way different than it used to be.”
Machines that de-bone trout and perform weight-bearing tasks have helped combat workplace injuries and repetitive-motion conditions such as carpal tunnel, she said.
But, nearly half of all Idaho jobs — 46.5 percent — are highly susceptible to automation in the next 10 to 20 years, reports Craig Shaul, a research analyst supervisor for the Idaho Department of Labor.
So what jobs are more susceptible to automation?
“Those tasks where it takes a lot of man hours to do are the ones where people find machines to increase productivity, having increased quality and reducing error,” Shaul said.
Shaul applied data from a study to determine where automation will have the most effect in Idaho in the next 10 to 20 years. The figures are based on a 2013 Oxford report “The Future of Employment” by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne.
What jobs are safe? Basically “the occupations that require a higher degree of social intelligence, perception and manipulation and creativity,” Shaul said. Seventy-four percent of occupations in science, technology, engineering and math are at low risk.
And soft skills — things like interpersonal communication and problem-solving — are likely to become even more desirable for the future work force. Continue reading this article
Sunday’s Sixty Minutes episode had an interesting segment about the growth of manufacturing in the United States. The show focused on the economic developer Joe Max Higgins, who is both colorful in the southern style and business smart. Nevertheless, the piece provides a window on modern manufacturing, where robots do the repetitious tasks and human workers need technical knowledge for the new factory jobs.
Below, the PACCAR engine manufacturing plant in Mississippi has lots of robots and around 500 human workers.
(If the video below doesn’t work, try the CBS Sixty Minutes link below to watch.)
It’s a good news, bad news story: manufacturing is actually going strong in America, but far fewer jobs are being created because of automation and its increased efficiency. For example, one new steel mill in the story needs only 650 workers when it earlier would have required 4000 for the same productivity.
So America does not need any immigrant workers from Mexico or anywhere else.
Joe Max Higgins is credited with generating about 6,000 manufacturing jobs in Mississippi’s Golden Triangle, one of the poorest areas in the country. How’s he doing it? Bill Whitaker reports.
Bill Whitaker: This past week, Donald Trump cut his first deal as president-elect. He leaned on Carrier, the heating and air conditioning company, to keep 1,000 jobs in Indiana from going to Mexico. The company got a generous tax break in return. In the last few decades, America has lost millions of factory jobs offshore. But you might be surprised to learn U.S. manufacturing is showing signs of coming back due to cheap energy, proximity to customers, and a rising cost of labor in China. Nearly a million manufacturing jobs have been created since the Great Recession. About 350,000 are unfilled because factories can’t find properly trained American workers. The new plants demand more brainpower than brawn. It’s called advanced manufacturing and if you want to see what it looks like you need to go a place off the beaten track: The Golden Triangle. That’s a bit of a misnomer because it’s one of the poorest regions in the poorest state: Mississippi.
If you have heard of the Golden Triangle, it might be because of this: Mississippi State football. Around here, everybody loves the Bulldogs. And “bulldog” is an apt description of the man who runs economic development for the area: Joe Max Higgins. He considers job creation a full contact sport.
Joe Max Higgins: The only way we win any deal is to tear off everybody else’s face. We gotta kill everybody to win the deal.
Ferocity is a job requirement. During the recession, unemployment in some parts of the Triangle got as high as 20 percent.
Joe Max Higgins: We’re going to come up with a program.
At 6.0 percent, unemployment is now just above the national average and a lot of people here credit Joe Max Higgins. He has attracted $6 billion of advanced industry including this mill run by Steel Dynamics. It’s one of the most hi-tech steel mills in the country. He got this helicopter factory up and running. Truck maker PACCAR used to build engines only in Europe. It opened its first U.S. plant in the Triangle.
Bill Whitaker: Companies were moving around, this offshoring. They were going to countries where everything’s cheaper?
Joe Max Higgins: For some companies, offshore wasn’t as great as they thought it was or as it was portrayed to be. Many of the companies said “Hey, if it’s gonna be consumed in the U.S., we can produce it in the U.S. cheaper and more efficiently than we can elsewhere and bring it in.”
Bill Whitaker: They save money by being here in Mississippi?
Joe Max Higgins: Uh-huh.
Higgins has brought in 6,000 jobs to the tri-county area since 2003. That might not sound like a lot to people in big cities. But to the people here in the small towns of the Golden Triangle, it amounts to about half the manufacturing jobs lost during the last 25 years. Through the 1990s, factories here produced textiles, toys, and tubing. One by one, they shut down and thousands of low skilled jobs vanished. Continue reading this article
Robot design and engineering is a growing business because companies want to reduce their labor costs and smart technology increasingly accomplishes that goal. And now, with robots becoming less expensive, machines will replace human workers in even the cheapest low-wage havens of Asia.
The PBS Newshour has done good reporting on the automation revolution, and the latest is a thorough overview of the tech developments and the rapidly shifting labor situation, starting in Korea with a visit to the Hyundai robot research institute where its machines are becoming more precise, faster and cheaper.
Below, Hyundai welding robots are showcased at a trade show.
Like American workers, Koreans are concerned about job loss to smart machines, and with good reason. Technological unemployment threatens millions in the coming years, but governments — or the American government, at least — has not begun to discuss how to deal with an economy where a substantial minority or eventually even the majority of adult citizens do not have jobs because of automation.
Automation expert Erik Brynjolfsson remarked [Automation] is “the most important single thing that our country can focus on.” But Washington remains in the pre-investigation stage of coping with the challenge of replacing the present economic system of markets with something fundamentally different.
Of course, given such profound and systemic job loss, immigration is no longer an appropriate government policy.
In fact,
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
It’s time for Washington to wake up about this issue.
South Korea is among the countries working to increase automation in the manufacturing sector, with some large companies seeing robots as a cost-effective way to replace expensive human labor. But how will the expansion of this technology affect American workers? NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Karla Murthy reports.
By Mori Rothman and Karla Murthy
KARLA MURTHY: Hyundai means “modernity,” and it’s is a big name in the South Korean economic landscape – and not only for cars.
Headquartered in the industrialized port city of Ulsan, Hyundai Heavy Industries, or HHI, is the world’s largest shipbuilder. It produces engines and construction equipment.
HHI is also a leader in making industrial robots.
Hyun-kyu Lim is a head researcher at HHI’s robot research institute. This is where they test robots used to assemble cars. He showed me an example of what robot technology looked like ten years ago:
HYUN-KYU LIM: It shakes a lot.
KARLA MURTHY: That shake when the robot stops slowed down productivity and accuracy.
HYUN-KYU LIM: Now I’ll switch to the robot controller that is used these days. There’s no vibration.
KARLA MURTHY: Lim says today’s robots are much more precise and 40 percent faster. He says spot welding, which is a common process in car factories, takes just under one second with a robot.
Refugee Resettlement Watch noted another batch of targets a couple days ago including one unlucky city: New refugee seeding site: Youngstown, Ohio. That community is particularly unsuitable to be burdened by needy and/or hostile foreigners: it was plunged into a local depression by the closing of the major steel mill in 1977 and never recovered.
The steel industry in Youngstown provided blue collar workers with middle class jobs until it was shut down by the forces of globalization.
Because of its persistent economic misery, Youngstown was a major subject of the Atlantic magazine cover story of July/August 2015 about automation: A World without Work. The beginning of the lengthy, far-ranging piece was memorable for its description of how the once prosperous city was plunged into poverty:
1. Youngstown, U.S.A.
The end of work is still just a futuristic concept for most of the United States, but it is something like a moment in history for Youngstown, Ohio, one its residents can cite with precision: September 19, 1977.
For much of the 20th century, Youngstown’s steel mills delivered such great prosperity that the city was a model of the American dream, boasting a median income and a homeownership rate that were among the nation’s highest. But as manufacturing shifted abroad after World War II, Youngstown steel suffered, and on that gray September afternoon in 1977, Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced the shuttering of its Campbell Works mill. Within five years, the city lost 50,000 jobs and $1.3 billion in manufacturing wages. The effect was so severe that a term was coined to describe the fallout: regional depression.
Youngstown was transformed not only by an economic disruption but also by a psychological and cultural breakdown. Depression, spousal abuse, and suicide all became much more prevalent; the caseload of the area’s mental-health center tripled within a decade. The city built four prisons in the mid-1990s—a rare growth industry. One of the few downtown construction projects of that period was a museum dedicated to the defunct steel industry.
This winter, I traveled to Ohio to consider what would happen if technology permanently replaced a great deal of human work. I wasn’t seeking a tour of our automated future. I went because Youngstown has become a national metaphor for the decline of labor, a place where the middle class of the 20th century has become a museum exhibit.
“Youngstown’s story is America’s story, because it shows that when jobs go away, the cultural cohesion of a place is destroyed,” says John Russo, a professor of labor studies at Youngstown State University. “The cultural breakdown matters even more than the economic breakdown.”
But despite so much suffering and economic damage, the diversifier bunch has decided that Youngstown should take some refugees to do its part. The Catholic diocese is advocating the idea as a fine do-gooder project despite the added stress on the local community.
For diversity-promoting elites, Americans always come last.
Yes, truck driving is now diverse! Americans cannot be allowed to remain the majority of workers in any job that still pays somewhat decently: that wouldn’t be fair to the swarms of immigrants and illegals, eager to work for less than citizens.
Below, Harsharan Singh, a trucker based in Los Angeles, is originally from India.
La Times noted the purposeful destruction of millions of middle-class blue-collar jobs: once again, the brilliant captains of industry grasp the short-term cost savings of automation while ignoring business’ concurrent elimination of the consumer via unemployment.
Trucking paid for Scott Spindola to take a road trip down the coast of Spain, climb halfway up Machu Picchu, and sample a Costa Rican beach for two weeks. The 44-year-old from Covina now makes up to $70,000 per year, with overtime, hauling goods from the port of Long Beach. He has full medical coverage and plans to drive until he retires.
But in a decade, his big rig may not have any need for him.
Carmaking giants and ride-sharing upstarts racing to put autonomous vehicles on the road are dead set on replacing drivers, and that includes truckers. Trucks without human hands at the wheel could be on American roads within a decade, say analysts and industry executives.
At risk is one of the most common jobs in many states, and one of the last remaining careers that offer middle-class pay to those without a college degree. There are 1.7 million truckers in America, and another 1.7 million drivers of taxis, buses and delivery vehicles. That compares with 4.1 million construction workers.
While factory jobs have gushed out of the country over the last decade, trucking has grown and pay has risen. Truckers make $42,500 per year on average, putting them firmly in the middle class.
On Sept. 20, the Obama administration put its weight behind automated driving, for the first time releasing federal guidelines for the systems. About a dozen states already created laws that allow for the testing of self-driving vehicles. But the federal government, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will ultimately have to set rules to safely accommodate 80,000-pound autonomous trucks on U.S. highways.
In doing so, the feds have placed a bet that driverless cars and trucks will save lives. But autonomous big rigs, taxis and Ubers also promise to lower the cost of travel and transporting goods.
It would also be the first time that machines take direct aim at an entire class of blue-collar work in America. Other workers who do things you may think cannot be done by robots — like gardeners, home builders and trash collectors — may be next. Continue reading this article
Below is a rare local report about automation and its effects at ground level. It’s a 3-minute TV-news segment, but the piece does get the sense of general anxiety about the future of employment. One man sought retraining for a new computer-related career because automation was cutting into construction jobs. A recurring theme was that many job categories weren’t disappearing entirely, but automation was making them more efficient and therefore the workplaces need fewer workers overall.
Food service jobs are threatened in North Carolina because of the increasing use of smart machines, such as ordering kiosks, like the one shown.
North Carolina State University has created a website with a disruption index showing the effects of automation and demographic change by county. The research from the university has indicated that smart machines may threaten 60 percent of jobs, which is considerably higher than the estimate of Oxford scholars who put the number at around 50 percent within 20 years.
Whatever the number ends up being, the estimates are high enough to warrant ending immigration to save the few remaining jobs for citizens. America won’t need millions of immigrant workers when there are no jobs for them in a decade or two.
STATESVILLE, N.C. — New research suggests North Carolina is at risk of losing thousands of jobs over the next decade.
Eyewitness News investigated what’s being done to prepare local workers and workplaces after the study from N.C. State University shows that the rise of automation could impact more than 60 percent of current jobs.
Ray Goodwin traded in his career in construction to pursue his passion: computers. As he was transitioning he noticed new technology was hurting his colleagues in the concrete business.
“You didn’t need the number of laborers that you need to actually pour the concrete if you were willing to pay the money for the technological leaps and bounds,” said Goodwin.
Advances in automation, combined with the economy, put construction among the top industries in North Carolina to lost jobs between 2002 and 2015. The findings are part of Dr. Mike Walden’s research on the rise of automation. He teaches economics at N.C. State.
I’ve posted earlier discussions with the author of Rise of the Robots before (Australia ABC radio, Sept 2015 and NPR, May 2015) but the latest has a timely dialogue about jobs and the incursion of smart machines.
The automated workplace is a huge and basic threat to the economy when the social contract of payment to workers for tasks performed becomes more broadly undermined. We seem to be seeing the beginning stages now in the jobless recovery, which is partially caused by businesses turning to machines to survive the hard times of the recession:
Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What’s more, these jobs aren’t just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren’t just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers.
These forecasts are rather alarming and seem worthy of attention in Washington. But the people’s representatives are asleep as the future economy is headed off a cliff.
Government needs to wake up and smell the technological unemployment — something that has not happened in Washington, where the same old prescriptions are dragged out with no understanding of the new age of automation.
There are no easy fixes, but certainly the first thing to do is slash immigration severely, because America won’t require foreign workers for the mythical “jobs Americans won’t do” — citizens will need those jobs.
Today, robots are increasingly handling many jobs in manufacturing that were done by human hands not more than 20 years ago. This sea change has affected a variety of industries, and it’s one reason why the jobs recovery of the past few years hasn’t included as many manufacturing jobs. Those jobs weren’t just destroyed — they were lost to smart machines.
But while we’re living in a time when computer programs already dominate Wall Street, and when driverless cars and delivery drones are moving from science fiction to mundane fact, those developments may be just the tip of the iceberg. Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, recently appeared on the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM channel 111 to talk about how the robot revolution has affected businesses in a host of industries, what it means for jobs in the years ahead, and what other surprises might be on the horizon.
An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.
Knowledge@Wharton: We’ve seen these changes going on. Where does your concern lie for the future?
Martin Ford: It’s really across the board. Traditionally, robots have been in factories, but I think that over the next 10 to 20 years, automation in the form of robots, smart software and machine learning is really going to invade pretty much across the board. It’s going to start impacting jobs at all skill levels. It’s not just going to be about low-wage people who don’t have lots of education. It’s really starting to impact also professional jobs.
Knowledge@Wharton: For years, when you did have robots involved, they were viewed as a supplement to the workers, but that clearly isn’t the case now in some areas. From what you’re saying, we’re going to see this even more going forward.
Ford: That’s right. I really think we’re in the midst of a transition where in the past, machines have always been tools that have been used by people and made those people more productive, but increasingly, the technology is really becoming a replacement or a substitute for more and more workers. That’s going to be a huge issue over the coming decade.
Knowledge@Wharton: Based on the level of adoption by businesses so far, what has been the effect on the economy? It’s probably somewhat marginal at this point, but it’s certainly going to be growing.
Ford: That’s right. Clearly, we have not seen actual massive unemployment as a result of this. That’s obvious. But what we have seen is, for decades now, wages have been stagnant, and even now, as the economy has been recovering and we’ve seen the unemployment rate falling, we haven’t seen anything in terms of wage increases. I do think that technology is probably one of the main forces that’s driving that stagnation of wages. It’s important to note the way that stagnation is happening — even as, over the long run, productivity has continued to increase. We see this decoupling of productivity and wages that really points to this transition that’s unfolding.
Knowledge@Wharton: You work in software development, so this is an area that you have focused on professionally for quite some time. How quickly are we going to see this continue to grow? I was watching a segment on a TV show earlier today where they were showing off a driverless pick-up truck. That technology is getting closer and closer to being a part of our everyday life.
Ford: That’s right. All of this is subject to a continuing acceleration, and for that reason, it’s going to unfold at a rate that may surprise us. To take the example of driverless cars: It’s just a few years ago — really, back in 2009 — that I wrote my first book on this topic, and I never imagined at that time that driverless cars would be feasible any time soon. It seemed like an almost impossible task, even to me. Yet now, virtually every auto manufacturer, as well as a whole bunch of companies that haven’t traditionally been in the car industry, are working on this, and it’s looking like it’s going to be feasible within 10, 15 years, at least. So it’s pretty amazing how fast things are moving. Continue reading this article
This New York Times report is unusual in that it looks at a small number of jobs lost, an event that usually doesn’t register in the big media. The public reads about it when Microsoft lays off thousands, but many of the jobs lost to automation go in smaller increments, one workplace at a time. We don’t notice it happening, until one day the employment universe is far smaller and more limited than it once was. Phone operator and related work like receptionist were once jobs available for non-college graduates (around 70 percent of Americans). Now they are becoming obsolete.
These days, we have all experienced obnoxious automated phone systems (“Press 3 for English”) and wished for a human with whom we could reason. But smart machines are much cheaper so they will only increase.
With basic jobs being gobbled up like cookies at a Christmas party, the prudent policy course for Washington would be to sharply reduce the number of immigrant workers. But no! Donors want even cheaper labor.
The decision of the Republican Congress to quadruple (!) the H-2b visa is all the more infuriating given the automated future we face. The H-2B visa designed to bring in non-farm foreign workers to take jobs in hotels, construction, truck driving, and countless other blue collar jobs sought by millions of Americans.
On “Mad Men,” the telephone operator for the Sterling Cooper advertising firm, Marge, is a vital part of the office. But that was decades ago. Today, the notion of women with headsets perched behind wire-laden switchboards feels as antiquated as the clattering of typewriters.
Though operators are an endangered lot, they still exist and can be found in some of New York City’s larger hotels. There are 497 hotel telephone operators working in 161 of these establishments, according to the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, the union that represents them. Their numbers have dwindled, but not as sharply as might be expected. Fifteen years ago, the union counted 571 operators among its members. Union leaders say the ranks of operators have thinned less in New York than in other parts of the country because of union efforts to save their jobs.
Nevertheless, their ranks will be thinning a bit more. The Crowne Plaza Times Square Manhattan, a 795-room hotel on Broadway, plans to shut its telephone department, which has seven operators. The Park Central Hotel on Seventh Avenue is also planning to close its five-person phone department.
In January, the operators at the Crowne Plaza, who had already seen their numbers reduced from 13 people a few years ago, were told they were being replaced with an automated phone service; other hotels are already using similar phone systems. Technical kinks have delayed the changeover. Continue reading this article
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In Idaho, a researcher at the state Department of Labor looked into automation and how it may play out locally. His overall estimate is based on that of the 
I’ve posted earlier discussions with the author of Rise of the Robots before (