It’s nice to see somebody is paying attention to the devastating effect smart machines are having on American jobs, because our elected representatives in Washington certainly aren’t.
Jeff Greene, a wealthy investor, is concerned that white-collar jobs are about to go the way of blue-collar employment in five to 10 years — that’s soon!
Automation is threatening to replace swaths of white-collar workers, much as mechanical robots have displaced blue-collar workers on assembly lines. Among those in jeopardy: accounts-payable clerks; inventory-control analysts, who record and audit what is in stock and estimate inventory needs; and accounts-receivable clerks, who send invoices to customers, track payments, and forecast customer default rates.
These white-collar job losses are harder to notice. There’s no physical robot to see welding a car together, just a better software program to speed tasks through a computer. But the unemployment result is the same. Tech workers face the same pink slips as coding becomes automated.
Certainly the automation revolution now going on in the workplace needs a little attention from the bright lights in Washington. They continue to legislate immigration when none is needed in the job market. Meanwhile, a 2013 study from Oxford University researchers estimated that 45 percent of US jobs were at risk from automation. The Gartner consulting firm has forecast that one-third of jobs will be done by smart machines by 2025.
So one thing that needs to be done is to find the OFF switch for immigration, because we will need all the remaining jobs for citizens.
Here’s an interview with the concerned billionaire, Jeff Greene:
Billionaire investor Jeff Greene is digging into his own pockets to address what he believes is a big issue: robots.
Greene, founder of the Greene Institute, sponsored the Closing the Gap conference last week, hoping that attendees would develop solutions on creating a more inclusive global economy. According to him, a looming threat comes from technology, where he contends automation is becoming increasingly disruptive to both white-collar and blue-collar jobs.
He warned that “what globalization did to the blue-collar worker in manufacturing over 30 or 40 years, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, robotics I believe will do to the white-collar workforce in the next five to 10 years,” Greene said. His comments echoed the widening opinions of experts who believe robots and AI pose a serious challenge to middle-class vitality.
“This is a national emergency and I’m going to address it myself if no one else will,” Greene said. Continue reading this article
A Pew study (The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground) released on Wednesday found that the number of Americans living in a middle-class household had fallen to below half.
That’s a major event, because America is supposed to be a middle-class nation, not like backward countries such as Brazil where the great majority of people are poor and are ruled by a powerful rich oligarchy. Now America is looking more and more like a banana republic.
There was a burble of interest around the Pew report, from CBS (video below) to Rush Limbaugh, who opined that Americans “look to Washington and they see the country being undermined” — even including immigration as part of the problem in his remarks.
Perhaps the study will be discussed in next week’s GOP Presidential debate.
As I pointed out in my 2014 Social Contract article about economic globalization, Three Stakes in the Heart of the American Dream, decades of mass immigration and outsourcing have battered US workers, and now automation is coming on strong to wipe out even more jobs. This nation once had a sizable blue-collar middle class, fueled by jobs in manufacturing and meatpacking, until outsourcing and immigration largely destroyed it.
On Sunday, the Fox News business reporter Maria Bartiromo pointed out the automation angle to the lost middle class story:
TUCKER CARLSON: It turns out the American middle class is melting away; it was not your imagination: now no longer in the majority. A brand new study finds middle-class Americans make up just half of our population. That’s down from 61 percent in 1971.
CLAYTON MORRIS: So while many want to blame the rich for the growing disparity, wasn’t the Obama administration’s policy supposed to help the middle class? Joining us now with her reaction is the host of Sunday Morning Futures, Maria Bartiromo. So break it down for us. What’s happening and why are they being so squeezed?
BARTIROMO: A couple of things are happening right now. First of all you have a complete breakdown in the manufacturing side of the economy. I mean, that has to do with a number of things not necessarily policy only, but commodities, oil is down fifty percent, iron ore, steel, copper — these are all the things that are industrial metals that are used to build houses and build cars. That area of the economy is in recession right now, partly because of China, partly because the economy is completely changed in terms of jobs. I mean, if a company can do something through automation, robotics — they will do it.And unfortunately the manufacturing jobs in particular have been taken out by technology. So technology is part of this.
The nation’s middle class, long a pillar of the U.S. economy and foundation of the American dream, has shrunk to the point where it no longer constitutes the majority of the adult population, according to a new major study.
The Pew Research Center report released Wednesday put in sharp relief the nation’s increasing income divide, which is certain to be a central issue in the 2016 presidential race. It also highlights how various economic and demographic forces have eroded long-held ideals about maintaining a strong, majority middle class.
Many analysts and policymakers regard the shift as worrisome for economic and social stability. Middle-income households have been the bedrock of consumer spending, and many liberals in particular view the declining middle as part of a troubling trend of skewed income gains among the nation’s richest families. Continue reading this article
Along with the many business stories about the Amazon retailer on Cyber Monday, the company used the occasion to release a video about Jeff Bezos’ favorite hobby, a drone delivery robot, a project he announced on Sixty Minutes in 2013.
Jeremy Clarkson, formerly of the British car show Top Gear, told a story about a girl whose soccer shoe is eaten by the dog — but Amazon Prime save the day by same-day delivery of a new pair!
Interestingly, the new model of Amazon drone looks like a flying shelf that poops out its cargo. It doesn’t appear to have unshielded whirling blades to bonk unhelmeted pedestrians, as has already happened with other drones.
A sky full whirring drones is not my idea of a pleasant future. Plus, if the drones really become a major delivery vehicle, that would mean fewer jobs for human truck drivers. Automation has killed millions of jobs, to the point where it is crazy for Washington to continue importing immigrant workers, as if nothing had changed in the workplace universe.
Here’s more background on the Jeremy Clarkson connection:
Retailer seems determined to get its money’s worth out of the former Top Gear host as he fronts YouTube campaign showing how it may deliver in the future
Amazon is seeking to get as much mileage as possible out of new star-signing Jeremy Clarkson, with the former Top Gear presenter fronting an ad unveiling anew hybrid drone that could see deliveries made to customers’ backyards. Continue reading this article
Cyber Monday is a major business story because it is the biggest online shopping day of the year. As a result, many news outlets sent reporters to one of the 13 Amazon “fulfillment centers” around the country where consumer orders are processed, filled and shipped. The sight of items zooming by on speedy conveyor belts makes for good visuals.
The backbone of Amazon’s increasingly automated processing is the Kiva robot system, the foot-high wheeled gizmos that bring shelves of products to human packers, who are still needed to place the ordered merchandise into boxes. The company recently doubled the number of Kiva-bots from 15,000 to 30,000 in preparation for the Christmas shopping season.
The super-fast conveyor belts of stuff may create zippy television, but the robots make that speed possible:
Jo-Ling Kent of Fox Business reported from the Amazon processing center in Robbinsville NJ which occupies one million square feet (28 football fields!), has 14 miles of conveyor belts, employs 4000 full-time workers and processed 500 orders per second last year and expects to do better today.
The remarkable success of the world’s top automated store — where shoppers buy online and their purchases are hardly touched by human hands — shows how rapidly the retail world is moving away from brick and mortar. The pattern is recurring through many industries, where fewer human workers are needed to perform the workplace tasks.
One of the toughest skills for automation engineers to crack is the amazing human hand with its unique dexterity — but it’s not for lack of trying.
Amazon’s highly automated warehouses have thousands of Kiva robots moving racks of merchandise around to human box packers — for now. The company is working to develop a machine that can discern, grasp and pack objects through its yearly Amazon Picking Challenge, a contest for robot designers to create the the next major step in human worker replacement.
Meanwhile, sewing presents a similar problem because clothing construction is almost completely based on manual dexterity, where the process requires handling fabrics that can vary tremendously in terms of stability, stretch, slipperiness, thickness and other qualities.
But now the brainiac engineers say they are getting close to a workable SewBot.
Add sewing to the growing list of jobs that won’t need imported immigrant workers to perform because smart machines will fill them in the future. As the following article points out, “in coming decades the gains [in automation] could add up to a significant reduction in the need for human workers in many fields.”
Another quote that should be getting attention: “By 2030, 90% of jobs as we know them today will be replaced by smart machines,” according to a 2013 report from a Gartner tech analyst.
Why isn’t automation being discussed by any of the gaggle of Presidential candidates? The workplace is being fundamentally transformed, while Washington acts as if nothing has changed and the jobless recovery is an unexplainable curiosity.
Automation gains could reduce need for human workers in many fields
ATLANTA—In a former kitchen-cabinet workshop here, a dozen engineers are creating robots to sew garments and rugs—tasks usually relegated to low-wage workers in distant countries.
SoftWear Automation Inc., the startup that employs the engineers, promises to transform the apparel industry, automating production so goods can be made in factories anywhere by robots and small teams of people tending them.
So far, the robots can do only basic tasks, like sewing around button holes or the edges of fluffy bath rugs. They can’t do other things people are good at, such as holding together two floppy pieces of material while sewing them into a shirt. SoftWear’s SewBots can’t produce a finished garment, though the firm hopes to reach that stage next year.
The garment industry is interested in the technology, but “people are going to start small with us,” says K.P. Reddy, SoftWear’s CEO. “It’s going to be incremental.”
The same can be said for many potential applications of robots, 3-D printers and other forms of automation, ranging from the assembly of myriad consumer goods to caring for the elderly. Though progress has been incremental so far, in coming decades the gains could add up to a significant reduction in the need for human workers in many fields.
“By 2030, 90% of jobs as we know them today will be replaced by smart machines,” three analysts from the research firm Gartner Inc. wrote in a 2013 report. They defined smart machines as ones doing things previously thought doable only by people, such as learning from experience. Machines, they said, “are evolving from automating basic tasks to becoming advanced self-learning systems mimicking the human brain.”
By 2050, such machines are likely to “do every job that we presently do,” says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford University and frequent writer on technological trends. “The more I look forward, the more convinced I am that jobs won’t be about sustenance any more. Since everything will be so cheap, our jobs will be about knowledge and the arts. This is what will keep us busy.”
The most common tasks for industrial robots today include heavy lifting, welding and applying glue, paint and other coatings. Robots can lift heavier weights than people and are far more precise. Unlike people, they can be relied on to do exactly what they are told. They also can work around the clock. Continue reading this article
The fundamental transformation of the American workplace by smart machines has gone undiscussed in the Presidential campaign until now: one tiny mention occurred in Tuesday’s Republican debate by a man who characterizes himself as the fresh voice for the 21st century.
RUBIO: The problem is that today people are not successful working as hard as ever because the economy is not providing jobs that pay enough. If I thought that raising the minimum wage was the best way to help people increase their pay, I would be all for it, but it isn’t. In the 20th century, it’s a disaster.
If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that’s replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.
The ambitious new senator from Florida thought he would make a name for himself by creating landmark legislation that would coincidentally injure Americans who work for a living by flooding the labor market with millions of foreign workers. Now he thinks he should be president.
Actually, there was also a question about robots that went to Senator Rubio but he didn’t answer it:
BAKER: Senator Rubio, Senator Rubio, let me — let me take you to a question that I think gets to the root of a lot of the anxiety that people have in this country. The economy is undergoing a transformation through information technology. Americans are anxious that the new economy isn’t producing higher-paying jobs. Many are concerned that the new wealth seems to be going mainly to innovators and investors.
Meanwhile, with factories run by robots and shopping done increasingly on smartphones, many traditional jobs are just going away. How do you reassure American workers that their jobs are not being steadily replaced by machines?
RUBIO: Well, you know, that’s an excellent question, because what we are going through in this country is not simply an economic downturn. We are living through a massive economic transformation. I mean, this economy is nothing like what it was like five years ago, not to mention 15 or 20 years ago.
And it isn’t just a different economy. It’s changing faster than ever. You know, it took the telephone 75 years to reach 100 million users. It took Candy Crush one year to reach some 100 million users.
(LAUGHTER)
Yes, Senator, we are living through a massive economic transformation, one that indicates Washington’s immigration input going forward should be ZERO, because machines will be doing the jobs.
Drones are coming, no matter whether or not the citizens want their skies filled with buzzing machines dropping shoppers’ merchandise into neighborhoods. Tech elites like Jeff Bezos think drones are a cool addition to the smart machines already speeding the processing of mail-order businesses like Amazon, which has pioneered automation with its Kiva robot warehouse system.
Below, a Google Project Wing Drone dangles an object to be lowered to the ground.
Why is nobody discussing the safety hazard of robotic flying machines running into people? A database titled Domestic Drone Accidents reports several dozen within the US. At least one lawyer specializes in Drone Injuries, and the website includes drone crash videos. The March issue of the Scientific American had a list of injuries in a piece titled, 5 Epic Drone Flying Failures. A recent Google search for Drone Accident brought over 11 million results.
Plus, will drones cause slingshots to make a comeback among sharp-eyed kids who like to aim and shoot?
Of course, thousands of delivery drivers working for UPS and Fedex will have to find something else to do for a paycheck if drones become a big thing. America certainly won’t need more immigrant workers in the automated near-future where jobs continue to disappear and technological unemployment becomes the new normal.
Tech elites appear to have a rivalry going on to see who can have the coolest, most futurist gadget, like Mark Zuckerberg’s giant drone to beam the internet to the third world and Sergey Brin’s self-driving cars. Hazardous noisy drones for everyday deliveries sound like a terrible idea for the average person’s quality of life, but that doesn’t matter because tech leaders want it to be so.
The topic of drone delivery was discussed on Fox News Tuesday morning:
BILL HEMMER: Google wants to fly its deliveries. The Internet giant want to begin commercial package delivery by use of a drone by 2017. Melissa Frances, After the Bell on Fox Business Network, here with me — nuts-and-bolts 2017, that’s right yeah Google wants to do this?
MELISSA FRANCIS: Yeah, it’s a little over a year from now. They are already testing in Australia and they’re doing it for emergency supplies, for medical supplies. Why Australia? Not densely populated, there’s a lot of sparse areas so they can go and sort of work the kinks out but they’re doing it, I mean it’s called Project Wing and Google’s not the only one. This is coming, I mean it’s like driverless cars. It sounds impossible but you can’t stop it.
HEMMER: So a year ago Amazon said we’re gonna do this, we’re going to deliver your pizza, we’re gonna deliver your six pack of beer. It’s happening now, so how would it work? Continue reading this article
Christmas is coming, and the online shopping megastore is revving up to send packages even faster by increasing the number of robot warehouse transporters from 15,000 at the end of last year to 30,000 now in its 13 “fulfillment centers.” The company believes that more of the amazing Kiva robots will enable it to ship its increasing volume of merchandise more rapidly.
Interestingly, Amazon is hiring up a storm, even with the added automation, although you have to wonder how many workers would be needed if there were no robots. The company added 39,300 employees during the most recent quarter and total workforce stands at 222,400.
The increased hiring looks like it will be temporary over the longer term, however, because Amazon is working to develop a picker robot that can discern, grasp and pack various objects, which is the job that humans perform now. The Amazon Picking Challenge is a yearly competition to develop a machine that can replace the humans, and Hitachi already has a potential contender.
Certainly given the automated future of the industrialized world and its shrinking jobs universe, neither America nor Europe needs to import immigrant workers. For example, the tech researcher firm Gartner estimates that one-third of jobs will be done by smart machines by 2025.
Furthermore, adding millions to the jobless angry underclass makes civil unrest far more likely. Wouldn’t it be better to avoid future Ferguson-style riots in Spanish by seriously decreasing immigration?
Amazon Robotics, formerly Kiva Systems, now has 30,000 robots working in 13 of its fulfillment centers across the country.
Amazon will now have your orders delivered twice as fast thanks to its robot army — which is now 30,000 strong.
The Seattle-based e-commerce company bought Kiva Systems for $775 million back in 2012, and the number of robots working across 13 of its fulfillment centers had increased to 15,000 by the end of 2014, according to VentureBeat. Continue reading this article
The New York Times rolled out its sob-story chops on Thursday for a front-pager about kiddie migrants arriving in Germany: They’re young, alone and frightened!
Perhaps some or even most of the estimated 30,000 claiming to be minors really are age 17 or below; certainly all the photos in the story show youngish teens. Foreigners know that German law gives more benefits to adolescents, a fact even the Times recognized in a companion piece today: Distinguishing Minors From Adults in a Tide of Young Migrants. So some invaders are most certainly adults pretending to be needy youngsters.
The main article is reminiscent of the Times’ coverage of another victim group: The Lost Boys of Sudan; The Long, Long, Long Road to Fargo (April 1, 2001). The liberal press loves sympathy-evoking tales of suffering and redemption, brightened up with culturally sensitive details. The Lost Boys were a favorite subject for displaying liberal values of diverse rescue, although details of PTSD and crime were mostly overlooked. However, some of the Lost Boys have persevered and succeeded despite great difficulties, which is commendable.
But the Syrian Boyz are Muslims whose religious ideology resists assimilation. Muslims are Allah’s special barbarian task force, whose job it is to convert the whole world to Islam by any means necessary.
Just what are these young males supposed to do in Germany when they reach adulthood? Germany has a good economy but it is turning to automation like the rest of the industrialized world and many jobs are disappearing. The factory work that once offered decent pay for the low-skilled is now increasingly performed by robots.
Thousands of disconnected Muslims with no jobs and no connection to their new community sound volatile. Many will probably turn to the local mosque for a connection with something culturally familiar, if nothing else. But bad things can happen at mosques, which are political structures that advocate the idea of Islamic conquest.
How many of those sweet-looking boys will be Allah’s energetic jihadists in a few short years? They blow up so fast, as the joke says.
PASSAU, Germany — Reza Mohammadi lost his parents in a forest in Macedonia. Or Serbia. He does not remember. What he does remember is that it was raining: Thick mud clung to his shoes and weighed down his 7-year-old legs.
His family had fled from Afghanistan to Iran, then to Turkey. They had boarded a rubber boat to Greece and were rescued by the coast guard before moving on, mostly by foot, toward Germany.
That rainy night near the Macedonian-Serbian border, Reza and his mother, father and two sisters were walking in a group of about two dozen, he recalled. When he realized that his family was no longer behind him, he sat down on a tree stump and waited. There was a commotion farther down the path. Then a shadow emerged from the trees.
“What are you doing?” a man whispered in Dari.
“I am waiting for my parents,” Reza replied.
The man was from Herat Province in western Afghanistan, like Reza’s family. He said the forest was full of police officers. They had arrested several families in the back. It was not safe to stay. The boy took his hand and ran. Continue reading this article
Such a fundamental transformation to the workplace suggests a severe reduction in immigration would be wise, but the Masters of the Universe in Washington seem unconscious to the worsening problem of technological unemployment. The arguments one hears about joblessness are the same old positions: the left demands a higher minimum wage (which causes employers to switch more rapidly to automation) and the right argues that less government regulation will expand employment, which is likely true to a degree. Meanwhile, 93 million Americans are not working and labor participation is at a record low level, so it’s reasonable to think the jobs universe has shrunk at least partially because of automation. And mass immigration continues on auto-pilot.
Surely America shouldn’t continue importing millions of unskilled third-worlders when there will be no jobs for them, even given their extremely low wage cost.
For example, bricklaying is a low-skilled job that can now be done by machine:
The Gartner company recently came out with its annual top ten list of predictions of important trends in the tech industry and by extension, the world we inhabit.
Machines will replace more writers, and by 2018, 2 million workers will be required to wear health monitors
ORLANDO — Chances are robots aren’t mowing your yard, teaching your children, or bossing you around at work – yet.
But according to Gartner’s annual top-10 list of strategic predictions, robots, robotic systems and automation will have an expanding role.
Sooner or later, there will be robots that train your children and help them with their homework. That “might seem a little strange to us, but is it really stranger than being trained by a purple dinosaur named Barney?” said Daryl Plummer, a Gartner analyst, to the laughter of his audience at the research firm’s Symposium ITxpo.
Here are Gartner’s predictions:
1. Writers will be replaced. By 2018, 20% of all business content, one in five of the documents you read, will be authored by a machine, Plummer said.
“Robowriters” are already producing budget reports, sports and business reports, and this trend is sneaking in without notice. One advantage for machines: They don’t have biases or emotional responses, he said.
2. By 2018, 6 billion connected things will be requesting support. These non-human “things” are nonetheless customers requesting services and data, and other methods of support. Marketing to them (and by extension their human owners) can help build a business.
3. By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in 5% of all economic transactions. Smart algorithms are already beginning to perform transactions without our help.
4. By 2018, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a roboboss. “The problem with this is that robot bosses don’t have human reactions,” Plummer said. “The reality is we have to see if robots can get human mannerisms right.” Continue reading this article
The thousands of refugees pouring into Germany every day could offer Europe’s largest economy an opportune solution to plug the ‘gray gap’ in its aging workforce. But integrating the new arrivals could be costly.
But wait. Germany is rejiggering services and production via automation just as rapidly as America, so a lot fewer workers are needed in the near future and going forward. Merkel is quite aware of the technological transformation because she has seen it firsthand.
Check out the German video below that promotes the idea of robots as “helpers” to workers — a ploy of business owners to disguise the inherent job loss of automation. Note the use of the word “colleagues” to describe the human-robot relationship.
The point is that Germany is getting automated, and fast. There’s no need to import hostile Muslims who will bring crime and jihad. Plenty of jobless Europeans, like Spaniards for example, are willing to move to Germany for employment.
Merkel is crazy to endanger Germany and all of Europe by admitting millions of Muslims, the historic enemy of the West.
NARRATOR: Workplace accidents like this simulated one are horror scenarios for companies that rely on robots, but soon transmitters embedded in work clothing will enable robots to recognize their human colleagues better. Scientists at the University of Bremen are working on sensor technology to help intelligent machine tools respond more flexibly to their surroundings. Continue reading this article
I’ve been following the topic of automation destroying employment for a few years and am still waiting for a conservative response of what to do if indeed half of America’s jobs become displaced by smart machines in 20 years, as Oxford researchers have forecast. Coverage of the robot workplace revolution has been slim from conservative media, while liberdoodle PBS has done some very good programming about labor-saving robots replacing human workers.
The famous physicist Stephen Hawking remarked recently that capitalist elites will become even more wealthy as robots they own gobble up increasing numbers of jobs. Perhaps to a degree, but the automated, unemployed future will have fewer shoppers with money to spend.
This is the technological change that is partially causing the miserable jobs economy today, and we are only at the beginning. But few in government are willing to talk about how the economic earthquake should be handled now and going forward.
“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed.”
Machines won’t bring about the economic robot apocalypse — but greedy humans will, according to physicist Stephen Hawking.
In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Thursday, the scientist predicted that economic inequality will skyrocket as more jobs become automated and the rich owners of machines refuse to share their fast-proliferating wealth. Continue reading this article
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