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Tech experts all say that simple jobs are the easiest to automate. Therefore we can expect to see a lot more self-checkout when shopping. How hard is it to scan bar codes and calculate the total cost? My local Safeway added several DIY checkout stations a couple years ago in a major remodel.
Self-checkout — get used to it, shoppers.
As a result of advancing technology, cashier jobs are starting to disappear now, and a recent study forecasts that six million or more could go in the next decade.
Seriously, does America really need to continue importing immigrant workers when automation is forecast to shrink the number of US jobs dramatically? There is a bill in Congress to reduce immigration by half, but that’s hardly enough given the automated future.
A recent Rasmussen poll found that “63% of American Adults believe it’s at least somewhat likely that most jobs in America will be done by robots or computers 25 years from now.”
So if nearly two-thirds the American people are aware of the automation threat to employment, why is Washington entirely asleep on the subject?
Robots have already cost millions of factory jobs across the nation.
Next up could be jobs at your local stores.
Between 6 million to 7.5 million existing jobs are at risk of being replaced over the course of the next 10 years by some form of automation, according to a new study this week from by financial services firm Cornerstone Capital Group.
That represents at least 38% of the current retail work force, which consists of 16 million workers. Retail could actually lose a greater proportion of jobs to automation than manufacturing has, according to the study.
That doesn’t mean that robots will be roving the aisles of your local department store chatting with customers. Instead, expect to see more automated checkout lines instead of cashiers. This shift alone will likely eliminate millions of jobs.
“Cashiers are considered one of the most easily automatable jobs in the economy,” said the report. And these job losses will hit women particularly hard, since about 73% of cashiers are women. Continue reading this article
The CBS Sunday Morning show began a special edition focusing on money with a report on automation and its threat to employment now and going forward. The eight-minute video report included tough facts about job loss across the skills spectrum with expert comments by Rise of the Robots author Martin Ford and other involved in the technology.
The piece has more facts than most TV reports, but typically the pro-robot cadre is included, and they insist that automation will actually create jobs. Right, all the manufacturing workers, store stockers and pizza cooks will be retrained to be computer coders. As if. But that’s the only way to end the segment on a positive note. And of course, there’s no mention that immigration becomes a counterproductive policy in the automated future — that’s to be expected in network TV.
By every measure, our country is on the road to becoming an AUTOMATION NATION. Our Money Issue Cover Story comes from David Pogue of Yahoo Finance:
Tony Hughes has been a long-haul truck driver for more than 20 years. But today, all he has to do is sit back and relax.
“’Rosebud’ is on,” he said, flipping a switch.
Today, he’s hauling 20,000 pounds of freight down the Florida turnpike in a self-driving, robotic truck. It’s been retrofitted with a self-driving kit made by Starsky Robotics.
Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, who founded the company in 2016 with Kartik Tiwari, said, “We think that sometime towards the end of the year, we could be doing this run without a person behind the wheel.”
And if it’s not his company, it might be Otto, whose truck made headlines last October by driving itself across Colorado to deliver a shipment of beer. Otto is owned by Uber, which also has been testing self-driving taxis in Pennsylvania and Arizona.
But here’s the thing! Once our trucks and taxis drive themselves, what will happen to the people who used to do those jobs? In the U.S., that’s 180,000 taxi drivers, 600,000 Uber drivers, and 3.5 million truck drivers.
An Otto self-driving truck on the road.
CBS News
“We really need to start to think very seriously about this,” said Martin Ford, author of the book “Rise of the Robots” (Basic Books).
Basic Books
Ford says driverless cars and trucks are just the beginning of a wave of automation that will threaten millions of jobs, in every industry at once, like America’s nearly five million store workers.
Later this year, shoppers in Seattle will be able to walk into the first Amazon Go grocery, take what they want, and walk out again, without ever encountering an employee.
Sensors will detect what you take and bill you automatically.
“The cashiers are totally gone,” Ford said. “You’re going to end up with the equivalent of a Walmart with a handful of employees. You scale that out, and that’s just extraordinarily disruptive.”
Name an occupation, and there’s somebody considering a robot to take it over.
At Zume Pizza in Silicon Valley, four specialized robots help make the pizza. Eventually, the company plans to replace the remaining humans on the line, too.
Pogue said, “You would think there would be some Roman pizza chefs who’d say, ‘No, this is not the way it’s been done since our ancestors!’”
A robot making pizza.
“Well, the world changes,” said Zume’s chief technology officer Josh Goldberg. “There’s a lot of other things we don’t do just the way our ancestors did, either.”
The common wisdom is that robots primarily threaten repetitive, blue-collar jobs. Not so, says Martin Ford: “We’re seeing dramatic advances in the area of computers analyzing tumors, recognizing medical scans, mammograms, and being able to find disease. We’re seeing algorithms move into areas like journalism, for example.”
Wait, wait, wait. Certainly not journalism? “Oh, yeah. Absolutely,” Ford said. “By one account, every 30 seconds there’s a news story published on the web, or maybe in a newspaper, that’s machine-generated.”
Algorithms are even threatening the Masters of the Universe. Two weeks ago, Black Rock, the world’s largest money manager, announced that it’s laying off dozens of human stock pickers and replacing them with robots. By 2025, across the financial industry, artificial intelligence is expected to replace 230,000 human workers. Continue reading this article
But driving is a major jobs category, as shown by the map below, taken from an interactive NPR graphic in the 2015 article Map: The Most Common Job In Every State.
Of course, it goes without saying that America no longer needs to import immigrants to drive our trucks given the coming technology. There is supposedly a shortage of drivers now, leading to a push for immigrants, but that won’t last long. The future is automated, including on the highways.
It was news last October when a self-driving truck from the Otto company traveled 120 highway miles to deliver a load of beer:
The following article was written by Martin Ford, author of the book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. His knowledge on the subject adds to the big picture of how our society is on the edge of a foundational transformation to work and the economy.
America is producing more than ever before, but it is doing so with fewer and fewer workers. Once trucks become automated, where will these jobs go?
In April 2016, Uber announced the acquisition of Otto, a San Francisco-based startup that has developed a kit that can turn any big rig into a self-driving truck.
The Otto technology enables complete autonomy on highways: trucks can navigate, stay in their lane, and slow or stop in response to traffic conditions completely without human intervention. Otto’s equipment currently costs about $30,000, but that is certain to fall significantly in the coming years.
Otto is by no means alone. Massive automated vehicles are already commonly used to move materials for the Australian mining industry. Daimler, the German multinational company, has likewise demonstrated its own model, a giant 18-wheeler with a “highway pilot” mode available (meaning a driver has to remain present, prompting the head of the US branch to say that “tomorrow’s driver will be a logistics manager”). Another approach is to use automated convoys, in which self-driving trucks follow a lead vehicle.
It seems highly likely that competition between the various companies developing these technologies will produce practical, self-driving trucks within the next five to 10 years. And once the technology is proven, the incentive to adopt it will be powerful: in the US alone, large trucks are involved in about 350,000 crashes a year, resulting in nearly 4,000 fatalities. Virtually all of these incidents can be traced to human error. The potential savings in lives, property damage and exposure to liability will eventually become irresistible.
There’s only one problem: truck driving is one of the most common occupations in the US.
Once replaced by automation, where will these jobs go?
As of 2015, a typical production worker in the US earned about 9% less than a comparable worker in 1973. Over the same 42 years, the American economy grew by more than 200%, or a staggering $11tn.
For millions of average Americans, the reasonable expectations of their youth – a steady job, home ownership, college education for their children – have degraded into decades of stagnation, even as they have been continuously bombarded by news of the overall growth and prosperity of the US economy.
The driving force behind this transition has been technology. It is widely recognized among economists that while the impact of globalization has been significant, especially in specific regions of the country, robots and factory automation have been a far more powerful force. Indeed, even those jobs that did migrate to China are now evaporating as factories there aggressively automate. Continue reading this article
You don’t see many news reports like this one where a relative few human jobs are lost when smart machines are brought in.
I suspect there are many more instances of a few dozen job cuts here and there that never make it to the newspapers or internet. It’s just the company upgrading equipment to become more efficient, so it’s not really news. But the effect of technological unemployment is cumulative and is at least partly responsible for the jobless recovery.
The production of eyeglasses is becoming more automated.
There probably aren’t many optical production specialists flooding across the Rio Grande to steal American jobs. Still, the jobs universe is shrinking enormously because of automation, so it is foolish for the United States to continue with immigration of any legality as a normal government policy. We should end immigration because it has become obsolete — like homesteading, which was stopped after the west was settled.
Wal-Mart has cut 91 jobs at its optical lab in Dallas after installing new manufacturing equipment.
The lab, which is one of three where Wal-Mart makes prescription eyeglasses, will now employ 430 people.
While trade policies were a big issue in the presidential election, manufacturing jobs are still being lost in the U.S. to automation. Last year, Wal-Mart said it would spend $10 million to upgrade manufacturing equipment at its Fayetteville, Ark.; Crawfordsville, Ind.; and Dallas optical labs.
The other facilities aren’t affected by the decision, said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Anne Hatfield.
Prescription eyeglasses are the only product that Wal-Mart manufactures, start-to-finish, in-house. The three labs serve 3,500 Wal-Mart stores with optical centers. The Dallas lab opened in 1995, and Wal-Mart started making eyeglasses in 1991. Continue reading this article
Of course, news outlets rarely report when an inexpensive robot is introduced in a small business and workers are quietly let go. The good news of outsourced jobs being returned the US is diminished by fewer workers being needed in the automated workplaces. The jobs economy faces the death of a thousand cuts.
Generac Power Systems, which shifted some of its work from abroad, can now make an alternator with one worker in the time it took four workers in China. Above, an employee at its Whitewater, Wis., plant.
Given the changing nature of the workplace, it makes no sense to continue immigrating foreigners who are unemployable now and less so in the future. In fact,
Imagine it’s 2030, and it’s nearing time to eat dinner.
You text a grocery store where your order is taken for a pound of ground beef, a box of Hamburger Helper and maybe some lettuce and tomatoes for a salad. Possibly you want to fancy it up with a bottle of cabernet. The beef was butchered and packaged by a machine. Robots picked and processed the grapes, which where then bottled and shipped to a market by automation.
A driverless car, or possibly a drone aircraft, delivers the goods to your front door. You never see a person from the text-to-your-doorstep process.
There are maybe four or five jobs currently associated with that scene: From the grocery store clerk, to the produce person to the butcher who packaged the beef and the winery were the grapes were picked.
All those jobs could vanish in the years ahead as technology moves at lightening speed to make our lives easier. It’s hard to imagine one area, maybe motherhood excepted, where humans couldn’t be replaced by automation or at least significantly affected by technologies.
According to the latest employment stats from Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity, Brevard had 202,400 (not seasonably adjusted) jobs in July. Most of those jobs were concentrated in areas like “good producing,” which includes manufacturing and assembly; services, such as retail, and also leisure and hospitality.
“I’d say almost all jobs are in some jeopardy, including many white-collar positions that were previously sheltered from automation,” said Scott Tilley, a professor in the Department of Engineering Systems at the Florida Institute of Technology and president of the Big Data Florida user group.
“On the hardware side, robots are becoming increasingly adept at mimicking human movement,” Tilley said. “This means they can interact with people much easier than before. On the software side, artificial intelligence – coupled with big data analytics and cloud computing – are making programs and the robots that use the AI software much ‘smarter’ in the sense that they can act autonomously. These programs will only get better — and it won’t take eons for them to evolve like we did.” Continue reading this article
Tuesday was the Amazon Prime day, where super deals were offered to shoppers of the online store who pay a fee for extra services. Last year’s Prime Day broke records with its total of 34.4 million items ordered in eligible countries worldwide. That task requires mega processing capability that depends on computers and automation, particularly the company’s Kiva robots that move the orders from storage to packaging to shipping in enormous warehouses.
Amazon’s video of the 2015 contest was explanatory without being too wonky:
The rapid progress of technology as highlighted by this competition should remind us all how the very basics of the economy — namely workers earning money to buy the products they and others produce — are being undermined. Yet none of our political leaders are discussing how the revolutionary changes to society will be addressed.
Robotics competition prize for best warehouse-working ‘picker’ machine awarded to robot designed by Dutch team
Amazon’s progress toward an army of helpful robots is one step closer: a prize for the best warehouse-working “picker” machine has gone to a robot designed by a team from TU Delft Robotics Institute and Delft Robotics, both based in the Netherlands.
The competition was held in conjunction with Germany’s Robocup in Leipzig. Announced on Monday, the winners took home $25,000, while the university of Bonn’s NimbRo won $10,000 for second place and Japanese firm PFN was awarded $5,000 for third.
The contest, in Amazon’s words, “aimed to strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities,” and ended with slightly fewer than half of the entrants scoring more than 20 out of 40 possible points, according to a report in TechRepublic. The technology is advancing quickly: all of those contestants would have surpassed the highest scorer in the previous Picking Challenge, held just three years ago. Continue reading this article
Amazon’s automated warehouses continue to show how rapidly smart machines are taking over tasks that were performed by humans. A few years ago, workers pushed carts for miles around the warehouse picking out items for customer orders. Huffpo reported in 2011, “Some workers at Amazon.com’s Allentown, Pennsylvania warehouse are reportedly willing to contend with working at a brutal pace in dizzying heat so long as it means having a job.”
Was that only five years ago? It shows how quickly an industry can change when modern automation is applied.
Now the Amazon warehouse is immersed in tech, and other companies are turning to automation as the capability of the machines improves. For example, Walmart announced early this month that it was six to nine months from using drones within its warehouses to do inventory, cutting the time of that chore from one month to one day.
San Jose California is a part of Silicon Valley, and naturally awareness of tech issues is high there. The home town Mercury News had a front-page spread on Sunday that focused on the employment threat presented by robots, as represented by the automation powerhouse that Amazon has become. The paper tried to draw a fine line, cheering the advances of robots and the jobs added to the nearby Amazon warehouse in Tracy while also observing the long-term inevitable job loss.
Certainly within such a dire employment prospects, it makes no sense for Washington to continue importing millions of unnecessary immigrant workers. In fact…
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
Amazon’s success has led to employment growth for the time being, but improving technology means fewer jobs later on. How do these brilliant captains of industry like Jeff Bezos expect the economy to run when half or more of the jobs (and paychecks!) have disappeared?
TRACY — In Amazon’s million-square-foot order-filling warehouse, two low-slung orange robots carrying stacks of consumer products are zipping across the floor, headed right at each other. One stops — not on a dime, it turns out, but rather over a QR code stuck to the floor — and allows the other to proceed, carrying inventory to a human worker who will pluck out an item, scan it and send it off for packing and shipping.
In this building the size of 28 football fields, containing four miles of conveyor belts and 15 million items awaiting customer orders from Northern California and beyond, the two limbless goods-moving machines are part of Amazon’s 30,000-strong robot army. Gliding in straight lines on a grid, separated from workers by chain-link fencing with signs warning people to keep out, the machines can lift and carry up to 750 pounds of retail products.
Seattle-based Amazon has pushed itself to the forefront of the robotics revolution, deploying robots in 15 U.S. fulfillment centers over the past four years. It has leased a fleet of 20 jumbo jets to further speed deliveries as an estimated 54 million Americans have flocked to its two-day-delivery Prime service.
The company says its superhuman robots have created far more jobs than they’ve taken, but experts say that employment trend will reverse as machines grow increasingly sophisticated and climb ever higher on the job-skills ladder, bumping Homo sapiens to the side.
“There was very little appreciable progress (in robotics) for a long time. Now we’re in an era where that progress is occurring,” said MIT economist David Autor.
But Amazon says the advancement won’t come at its workers’ expense. Two years ago, the e-commerce titan opened the Tracy facility with 1,500 full-time, permanent employees. Now, there are more than 3,000, company spokeswoman Ashley Robinson said. The job gains here that result from automation of certain tasks are seen across Amazon’s robot-equipped warehouses, Robinson said.
“It’s all about efficiency. It’s all about getting the boxes out to customers as quickly as we can. In a building without robotics it can take hours to fulfill an order. In this building it can take minutes,” Robinson said. “We’ve been able to build our workforce in this building because the robots have allowed us to fulfill more customer demand. It allows us to keep growing and growing.” Continue reading this article
Starship Technologies has been testing its little delivery bots in a few cities and they are already being employed in London. The machine looks like an ice chest on wheels and can scoot along sidewalks without terrifying the children. And unlike Amazon’s proposed drone delivery machines, the earth-bound vehicles are unlikely to endanger safety.
The company thinks the bots are being accepted by the public and can work in many locales. Rough neighborhoods might be unsuitable, even though if a bot is stolen or otherwise messed with, it can send a message to police with photos. The machines may prove to be attractive to unengaged youth in inner cities despite precautions. Or little kids might hop a ride for fun.
Below, a Starship delivery robot.
This technology is another example of how rapidly machines are being developed to perform human jobs more cheaply than workers. Delivery jobs aren’t great, but they are at least good entry jobs for young people to learn basic work skills.
It must be obvious that with technological unemployment dogging the American workforce, the government shouldn’t be importing immigrant workers who are not needed now, and will certainly won’t be needed in the automated near-future. If indeed nearly half of US jobs are susceptible to being taken by smart machines in less than 20 years, as forecast by Oxford University researchers, then the number of immigrants should be ZERO.
In the near future, if you need a few things from Amazon, or perhaps you forgot to pick up the dry cleaning, there’s a chance a small robot will deliver your goods right to your front door.
No, this won’t be a drone dropping something from the skies. A six-wheeled robot from Starship Technologies, run by the founders of Skype, will soon be making deliveries without those complicated autonomous drone systems touted by Amazon and Google. Starship’s little robots are already making deliveries in London, and they will likely be rolling around US streets soon.
Lauri Väin, Starship’s engineering lead, said during last week’s RoboUniverse conference in New York City, that the company has 10 prototype robots, and plans to have 100 by the end of the year, and over 1,000 next year. The Washington Post reported last month that Starship plans to bring its test program to Washington, DC soon. Väin said the little robots, which look like a rolling ice chests, can handle most curbs and cobbles that they might encounter on the streets of metropolitan areas. His robot followed him along quite nicely on the walk from his Midtown hotel to the convention center, multiple blocks away. Continue reading this article
The topic of systemic job loss caused by automation has been examined in some corners, like the tech community, but not in the political universe where it should be heard because of the effect on society. Experts on robotics concur that many jobs were lost in the recession to smart machines, and those jobs aren’t coming back. Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of the Gallup polling company, stated a few months ago that 13 million jobs were lost during the recession, only three million of which have returned. Certainly a substantial number of those have gone to smart machines, but the administration has been strangling employment with undue regulation also, so the precise effect of automation is hard to determine.
Given the expanded used of computers, robots and automation, America’s need for immigrant workers going forward is ZERO.
Below, the post-human hamburger, being developed by the Momentum Machine company that will unemploy fast-food workers.
Following is an excerpt from Ford’s new book that explains the production of hamburgers by machine along with other job killers, like the Kiva warehouse system that Amazon is using.
In the United States and other advanced economies, the major disruption will be in the service sector—which is, after all, where the vast majority of workers are now employed. This trend is already evident in areas like ATMs and self-service checkout lanes, but the next decade is likely to see an explosion of new forms of service sector automation, potentially putting millions of relatively low-wage jobs at risk.
San Francisco start-up company Momentum Machines, Inc., has set out to fully automate the production of gourmet-quality hamburgers. Whereas a fast food worker might toss a frozen patty onto the grill, Momentum Machines’ device shapes burgers from freshly ground meat and then grills them to order—including even the ability to add just the right amount of char while retaining all the juices. The machine, which is capable of producing about 360 hamburgers per hour, also toasts the bun and then slices and adds fresh ingredients like tomatoes, onions, and pickles only after the order is placed. Burgers arrive assembled and ready to serve on a conveyer belt. While most robotics companies take great care to spin a positive tale when it comes to the potential impact on employment, Momentum Machines co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas is very forthright about the company’s objective: “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” he said. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.” The company estimates that the average fast food restaurant spends about $135,000 per year on wages for employees who produce hamburgers and that the total labor cost for burger production for the US economy is about $9 billion annually. Momentum Machines believes its device will pay for itself in less than a year, and it plans to target not just restaurants but also convenience stores, food trucks, and perhaps even vending machines. The company argues that eliminating labor costs and reducing the amount of space required in kitchens will allow restaurants to spend more on high-quality ingredients, enabling them to offer gourmet hamburgers at fast food prices. Continue reading this article
Don’t be surprised if you are welcomed to an Orchard Supply Hardware Store by a robot ready to direct your shopping to the right aisle. Just show the replacement part needed to the machine’s screen and the OSHbot will escort you to the correct spot.
An addition, the robot celebrates diversity by speaking Spanish, so immigrants will find another disincentive to assimilate linguistically (which Americans expect of newbies).
Of course, robot greeters mean fewer jobs for humans. Store welcomer is a position sometimes taken by older workers, who are often seen as useless in today’s whippersnapper employment culture. Many Americans need to work well into their post-retirement years.
So Zero is now the correct number of immigrants for the roboticized future economy to keep producing goods and services. But Washington doesn’t seem to notice.
If you happen to find yourself in a Orchard Supply Warehouse in Northern California this November, don’t be alarmed if you are approached by a large LCD screen on wheels, especially when it talks to you. Lowe’s will introduce new robot shopping assistants at a trial location later next month and claims this is the first robot to inhabit such a role in a retail environment. Lowe’s, which acquired Orchard Supply Hardware last year, has dubbed the new assistants the ‘OHSbot,’ as they will be making their debut in an OSH location.
If all goes according to plan, the OSHbots will welcome customers as they enter stores and ask if they can help them find anything in particular. The robots will be able to provide details on items in the store and will also walk–er, wheel customers to the exact location of the item(s) they’re looking for.
The OSHbots stand five feet tall and are made of white plastic. They feature two screens, one on the front and back of the robot, and can even allow customers to video conference with store associates. OSHbots will also be able to scan an item a customer has in their hands utilizing a 3-D scanner built-in to the robots’ bodies. Oh yeah, and they can also speak Spanish. Pretty neat. Continue reading this article
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Amazon’s automated warehouses continue to show how rapidly smart machines are taking over tasks that were performed by humans. A few years ago, 
