Warning: Constant WPCF7_VALIDATE_CONFIGURATION already defined in /home2/ltg37jq5/public_html/wp-config.php on line 92 Search Results agriculture robot « Limits to Growth
Down on the farm in Salinas California, a new robot harvester uses “water knives” — actually high-powered water jets — to pick lettuce. To hear the industry flacks describe it, the machines end unhealthy stoop labor in lettuce fields. But details in the story suggest that President Trump’s border enforcement is having an effect when it says, “Fewer immigrant workers are coming to the fields.” Big ag is explaining in a way to portray itself as a humanitarian when other factors are the cause.
The story also does a little dance when it says the machines reduce the need for labor, but workers won’t lose their jobs. In the case of the lettuce robo-harvester, the workers are now doing different tasks like sorting and packing, but how long until automation does those jobs as well? Growers are always looking for less expensive means of production, and that means more smart machines are coming in the long run.
So the Salinas case is another example that America’s cheap worker immigration must end: unskilled foreigners will just end up on the welfare rolls.
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
Below, a robot lettuce harvester moves through a Salinas field.
JUST AFTER DAWN in the Salinas Valley south of San Francisco, a raucous robot rolls through a field spitting clouds of vapor. It’s cutting lettuce heads with water knives—super-high-pressure beams—and gobbling up the produce. The heads roll up its mouth and onto a conveyor belt, where workers in hoodies and aprons grab the lettuce and tear off the loose leaves.
Right across the road, workers are harvesting lettuce the agonizing old-fashioned way—bent over with knife in hand. “If you’re a beginner, it kills you because your back really hurts,” says Isabel Garcia, a harvester who works atop the robot. “It takes somebody really strong to be doing that kind of work.”
Garcia and the other workers here didn’t lose their jobs to a robot—they work in tandem with one. And just as well, because California farms are facing a serious labor shortage of perhaps 20 percent. Increasingly sophisticated robots have to pick up the slack, here and around the world. Because if humanity expects to feed its booming population off a static amount of land, it’s going to need help.
Here in the Salinas Valley, farmers and tech types are teaming up to turn this into a kind of Silicon Valley for agriculture. And they’re not stopping at water-knife-wielding robots. Because it’s data that will truly drive this agricultural revolution. It’s not just about robots doing jobs humans don’t want to do, but AI doing jobs humans can’t do. And AI can’t go anywhere without data.
For sure, the robots will definitely support the dwindling farming workforce. Fewer immigrant workers are coming to the fields, and their demographics are shifting. “Just with a changing population here in California, we’ve got an aging workforce,” says Mark Borman, president of Taylor Farms California, which operates the robot. “So people who are coming out to do agricultural, we’re not getting that younger population into the job.”
It’s nearly summer and that means the time has come for media boilerplate articles about a shortage of immigrant workers down on the farm — so couldn’t Washington kindly arrange for a few hundred thousand to be sent to California?? Right on schedule, a Google News search (which covers the last 30 days of listings) for Immigrant Farm Labor Shortage brings up 14,600 results.
You would think there was no such thing as the H-2A visa which allows for unlimited foreign farm workers. Open borders are so much more convenient for everyone concerned — except law-abiding citizens.
“Who will pick the strawberries?” used to be an argument for open borders. But now the answer is robots.
Even the immigration-worshiping left media now says that machines are coming to the fields, and the need for foreigners may need to be adjusted. The PRI radio station chats up the changes, including hopeful remarks from immigrant workers. The have no idea what sort of labor revolution is about to happen, but people much better educated than they are similarly naive.
Certainly America won’t need H-2A visas or any immigrant workers at all for that matter, given the automated future that will similarly affect most workplaces.
Blue River Technology’s LettuceBot uses sensors and cameras similar to those in self-driving cars to thin lettuce. Engineer Ken Hickman says the machine is “doing its own thinking” as it thins lettuce, about three times faster than a human crew. Credit: Valerie Hamilton
At Lakeside Organic Gardens, a vegetable farm on California’s central coast, field-workers bundled up against the sun are thinning lettuce crops, chopping out some plants to make room for others. The farm’s owner, Dick Peixoto, walks through the rows, complimenting his workers as he moves along.
“Swinging that hoe from that distance, being able to pick out one plant and not the other, they’re really experts at what they do,” he says. “They’re artists, you know what I mean?”
That’s why I’m surprised at his answer when I ask him if he would replace these workers with a robot doing the same job.
“Not if,” he says, “the question is when.”
Immigrants do the majority of California’s field labor. But as demand grows, workers are becoming scarce. It’s hard for field-workers to come to the US legally. It’s dangerous for them to come illegally. The people working the fields now are getting older, and younger workers want different jobs.
“The handwriting is already up and down the wall that we’ll never have the labor force that we had before,” Peixoto says. “Anyone who’s not adapting to that today has got their head in the sand.”
Automation’s threat to jobs is not entirely negative, considering that robot pickers can replace an agricultural workforce that is generally estimated to be half illegal alien. The Associated Press article below notes that in Washington state, “several counties near the Canadian border are now majority-Hispanic.”
Abundant Robotics has developed a vacuum-based system that doesn’t bruise the apples. It doesn’t pick particularly quickly, but on balance, the machines can literally work 24 hours a day and don’t require lunch. In the video below, the developers describe how they moved from experimental versions to building a commercial machine.
Apples are easily bruised so hand picking has been the norm. Robot developers think they have that problem solved.
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Harvesting Washington state’s vast fruit orchards each year requires thousands of farmworkers, and many of them work illegally in the United States.
That system eventually could change dramatically as at least two companies are rushing to get robotic fruit-picking machines to market.
The robotic pickers don’t get tired and can work 24 hours a day.
“Human pickers are getting scarce,” said Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics. “Young people do not want to work in farms, and elderly pickers are slowly retiring.”
FFRobotics and Abundant Robotics, of Hayward, California, are racing to get their mechanical pickers to market within the next couple of years.
Harvest has long been mechanized for large portions of the agriculture industry, such as wheat, corn, green beans, tomatoes and many other crops. But for more fragile commodities like apples, berries, table grapes and lettuce — where the crop’s appearance is especially important — harvest is still done by hand.
Members of the $7.5 billion annual Washington agriculture industry have long grappled with labor shortages, and depend on workers coming up from Mexico each year to harvest many crops. 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
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
Is it too early to suggest ending the H-2a agricultural visa? The increasingly affordable cost of agricultural robots is making them an attractive choice for farmers rather than hiring foreign workers who are now often more expensive than the machines. Some of the new farmbots are compact, rentable and therefore suitable for small-scale farmers.
In most instances of automation taking jobs, American citizens are the ones harmed. But since so many farm workers are illegal aliens, agricultural robots must be seen as a plus because it would reduce one of the employment magnets that attract unlawful foreigners here.
Who will pick the strawberries without illegal immigrants? ROBOTS!
Within the next decade, farming as we know it is expected to be revolutionized by the use of self-driving tractors and robots that can perform time-consuming tasks now done by humans.
Sales of major farm machinery have been in a continued slump amid weak prices for key crops such as corn and soybeans, but the ever-present need to control farm costs and increase output will eventually drive farmers to adopt autonomous technologies.
“They (farmers) are a pretty cautious bunch, which is understandable,” said Kraig Schulz, co-founder and CEO of Autonomous Tractor Corp., a small private company based in Minnesota that is developing AutoDrive technology for tractors. Its technology is aimed at turning existing tractors into semi-autonomous machines.
Experts say the first wave of autonomous tech in ag will go primarily to higher-value crops, such as tree nuts, vineyards and fresh produce. Also, some suggest that the big tractors could be replaced with self-propelled autonomous implements, such as sprayers in row crops, orchards and vineyards or with other robotic equipment for other specific tasks on the farm.
All told, Goldman Sachs predicts farm technologies could become a $240 billion market opportunity for ag suppliers, with smaller driverless tractors a $45 billion market on its own. Tens of billions could be spent on advanced tech for major farm uses such as precision fertilizer, planting, spraying and irrigation, Goldman predicts.
Rising costs for farm labor and falling costs for self-driving technology also will provide further catalysts for the shift.
On Monday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill giving farm workers in the state — the nation’s largest agricultural producer — historic overtime pay.
“This is going to have a serious effect on farming out in California,” said Schulz, who expects rising labor costs to be an opportunity for autonomous and even semi-autonomous equipment to replace some of the human labor needed in farming.
“Rising labor costs would certainly be a positive for adoption of automated processes,” said Jerry Revich, an analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Self-driving tech prices falling
At the same time, the progress in self-driving technology for automobiles — including both object detection capabilities using multicamera systems, radar and lidar technology — could help speed up and lower the cost of developing autonomous farm machinery.
“Some of the new sensors that help you autonomously park your car, parallel park, backup sensors, cameras and things like that — all that stuff — the cost has come way down on it and it’s allowed us to leverage it more in our machines,” said Matt Rushing, a vice president in charge of precision ag and advanced technology for AGCO.
The content and technology to move to driverless cars cost about $2,700 per vehicle, according to Goldman Sachs. In agriculture, autonomous driving equipment would require technology where there is a slightly higher complexity, but “not disproportionately higher,” Revich said.
“We’re watching the sensor and technology prices really move down,” said Rob Zemenchik, global product marketing manager for Case IH’s precision farming unit, Advanced Farming Systems.
Europe’s CNH Industrial, known for its Case IH tractor brand, unveiled an autonomous concept tractor last month in Iowa at the Farm Progress Show, one of the world’s largest farm shows. CNH’s autonomous tractor could presumably work unmanned around the clock and uses GPS and sensor technology. The grower could remotely monitor and control the machine using a device such as a tablet.
CNH’s concept tractor does maintain the driver cab so the operator can perform tasks not presently suited to automation, such as commuting between fields or going through suburban or rural community roads to reach a farm.
“We’re focusing on perfecting the off-road parts of the solution and we’re very comfortable with our progress to date,” said Zemenchik. CNH’s autonomous tractor could come to market as early as 2020.
Deere and AGCO, two rival farm machinery manufacturers, have similar technologies.
A Deere spokesman said the farm equipment giant does not have a driverless tractor on the market, although the company has done some work on driverless technology in orchards.
Deere’s strategy has been generally to develop ag technologies internally, although it recently tried to buy Monsanto’s Precision Planting, but the Justice Department blocked that deal.
Swarms of farming robots
The autonomous driving trend isn’t limited to large farm machinery. There’s also interest in smaller tractors and ag robots, and some see them working in groups of five or more in a swarm-like action.
One lure for the smaller machines is they would be lighter and reduce soil compaction, a problem today with heavy tractor machinery and one that can reduce crop yields. Continue reading this article
Robot technology is getting smarter, smaller and cheaper. While this evolution is a growing threat to American jobs in general, the applications for agriculture make immigration truly outdated in that employment category, which is a good thing for this nation.
We know the argument: without largely illegal immigrant workers to pick the crops, food would rot in the fields, so deportations should stop. But even though that prediction never materializes, nevertheless we are told our food supply depends on open borders and welcoming lots of Mexican pickers.
But that dependence does not exist — if it ever did. When a robot weeding machine (Little Oz) can be rented for $300 per month as noted in the article below, that technology definitely makes foreign farm workers an unattractive financial choice for farmers.
Earlier farming robots like the harvester shown below were large and expensive.
Today’s farmbots can be compact and less expensive, putting them within the reach of the small farmer.
As noted in a July New York Times article, the focus of Silicon Valley has moved from social media to smart machines: “The new era centers on artificial intelligence and robots.” Those innovations will have broad applications from industry to the internet of things. Silicon Valley may not be a farmbot center per se, but the technologies created there are being developed elsewhere in different forms.
Given the rapid expansion of agricultural technology, Congress should be considering a winding down of the H-2A ag visas, as well as of immigration in general. When experts forecast that nearly half of American jobs will be taken by robots and software by 2033 as two Oxford University researchers did, then it’s time to get realistic about the world’s automated future.
For starters, Automation makes immigration obsolete.
Washington needs to wake up and smell the software.
Earlier this summer, I took a dive into the world of small farm machines that will soon be crawling farm fields near you. In the sort of thoughtful, enthusiastic reaction that makes any storyteller smile, I was inundated with tips from robot builders, imaginers, investors and watchers from around the world.
Most important, I now know that the global farm robot space is bigger, more intelligent and closer-to-commercialization that I realized. We are perhaps a few short years from a day when you will drive past a farm or walk past a community garden and see a robot working the ground. Continue reading this article
The photo below caught my eye during the morning peruse of newspaper front pages. The Sacramento Bee picture shows a Democrat Assembly member, Lorena Gonzalez, glowing with hispanic pride at farmworker fans in the gallery after the passage of her bill expanding overtime pay for agricultural labor. The photo illustrates the tribal nature of human beings, something little analyzed but widely celebrated today: the liberal assumption is everybody’s tribe has equally worthy values (clearly not true, as we observe from violent jihadists), but calling out the bad stuff is racist. Everybody holds their own tribe close with a passion that comes from the attachment being hard-wired.
This being California, we must assume that many of the field workers are illegal aliens who not only pick food but also mooch benefits like school for the kiddies along with food stamps and subsidized housing.
Interestingly, the comments following the Bee story reflected a knowledge that automation is coming to the farm — if only politicians were so well versed!
The California Assembly on Monday sent Gov. Jerry Brown a hard-fought and historic expansion of overtime rules for farmworkers, but it remains uncertain whether the Democratic governor will sign off on the measure.
A nearly identical bill fell three votes short of passage on the Assembly floor in May, with 15 Democrats voting against the measure or declining to vote. But on Monday, an amended version of the measure, now contained in Assembly Bill 1066, passed on a 44-32 vote.
Agricultural workers already receive some overtime pay under California law thanks to a 2002 state directive that entitles them to extra wages if they work more than 10 hours in a day or more than 60 hours in a week. AB 1066 would expand that to bring it more in line with other industries, offering time-and-a-half pay for working more than eight hours in a day or 40 in a week and double pay for working more than 12 hours a day. The pay boosts would kick in incrementally over four years, and the governor could suspend them for a year if the economy falters.
Business groups quickly condemned the vote. “We are deeply concerned with the passage of AB 1066 today and the devastating impacts this bill will have on our small, independent farmers and the workers they employ,” said Tom Scott, state executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business. “This mandate does not consider the thousands of agricultural workers who will lose their jobs and the billions of dollars in lost crop production resulting from these new overtime regulations.” Continue reading this article
The PBS Newshour has a chipper little story that begins with informing viewers about the fastest turkey tail lopper in a poultry processing plant in Huron, South Dakota — who happens to be a refugee. In fact, when Nyo Maung is on vacation, his supervisor says, the productivity of the place slows down.
Isn’t that heartwarming? You wouldn’t expect an American to work that hard — particularly for a crummy $13 per hour.
(It’s doubtful PBS will check up on Maung’s health, particularly his hands, in a few years. Repetitive movements, like cutting off turkey tails even with a swell electric knife, have a tendency to cause strain and eventual injury.)
The group that has moved in the town of Huron en masse is from the Karen tribe of Myanmar. The BBC reports some locals say they are “befuddled” by the new residents, but the turkey business likes them very well.
Below, a refugee worker at a South Dakota turkey processor.
The PBS narrative is a stream of excuses for hiring foreigners rather than Americans — the local kids can’t wait to leave town, the newbies don’t mind being underpaid for hazardous work, the business claims it couldn’t survive without foreigners to exploit, etc.
There’s no mention that decent wages would likely attract American workers, as it did in decades past when meatpacking was a good blue-collar job that provided a middle-class life for families.
And what about the 46 percent of the K-12 students who are diverse and require ESL teachers? That’s an extra expense for the local taxpayers, yet the story makes that cost sound like economic growth. Even with the special educational services, there is a high dropout rate, as reported by RefugeeResettlementWatch.
The Karen tribe is happy in Huron now, but they won’t be pleased if they are replaced by machines and can’t keep up payments for the houses the government helped them buy.
As rural America sees its populations shrink, one town in South Dakota is embracing new communities, including Karen people, an ethnic minority from Myanmar. Home to Dakota Provisions — a turkey processing plant that produces 200 million pounds of turkey meat annually — Huron, South Dakota is being revitalized by Asian and Latino workers. NewsHour Weekend Correspondent Christopher Booker reports.
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER: At Dakota Provisions, a turkey processing plant in Huron South Dakota, worker Nyo Maung takes only a second-and-half to remove the tail of a turkey. With his electric knife, he completes 40 cuts a minute and 2,400 every hour.
Huron is a small city of 13,000 residents halfway between Sioux Falls and the state capital, Pierre. More than 40 turkey farms supply the plant, which distributes meat all over the U.S.
It runs like an auto factory assembly line with about a thousand workers processing 20,000 turkeys a day. That adds up to 200 million pounds of turkey meat a year. And no one is faster with his blade than Nyo Maung.
MARK HEUSTON: He cuts tails off the turkeys with a wizard knife.
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER: Mark “Smokey” Heuston is the company’s human resources director.
The foreman was saying that they’ve actually noticed when he’s on vacation the productivity levels go down, the yields go down. Continue reading this article
Self-driving cars and trucks are touted as improving road safety (once all the tech kinks are worked out) and will perform jobs that “people don’t really want to do.” according to the article below. Hmm, where have we heard that phrase before??
Self-driving trucking is moving ahead briskly. The main article linked below notes that a convoy of self-driving trucks recently crossed Europe, which leaves out important details. The trucks were connected wirelessly, as part of the 2016 European Truck Platooning Challenge. The event was a test of the platooning concept, meaning the vehicles were following in a close line to save fuel and the lead truck had an active driver:
Michael Kropp typically spends his days behind the wheel of a big, freight-hauling truck, navigating the high-speed curves, offramps, and stop-and-go traffic typical of European highways. On a recent trip to Rotterdam, he was able to relax and take in the sights. Kropp was one of about 30 drivers participating in a test of a new automated driving technology called platooning, which links trucks via Wi-Fi, GPS, sensors, and cameras so they can travel semiautonomously behind one another. The leading rig dictates speed and direction, while the rest automatically steer, accelerate, and brake in a closely spaced convoy. [. . .]
Although driverless cars grab headlines, it may take decades before truly autonomous vehicles rule the road. In the meantime, semiautomated convoys can help manufacturers hone the technology while cutting emissions and fuel consumption, says Anders Kellström, who managed Volvo’s test run to Rotterdam. “Platooning is one of the first steps toward automated driving,” he says. “The technology is mature.”
Eventually, the passive drivers in the convoy will disappear and the group of trucks will be semi-autonomous with one human driver in charge. That will likely be the next step.
This video shows the platooning concept:
The following article is useful because it names some of the costs and savings in dollar amounts. These are the facts the trucking company owners are considering. Naturally they believe that someone else will provide jobs for Americans so they can purchase goods being transported by truck.
And of course, America won’t need any more immigrant workers in the techno-future, given the shrinking workforce caused partially by automation of jobs that were once done by humans. Oxford University researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were susceptible to being automated within 20 years.
A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. No technology will automate away more jobs — or drive more economic efficiency — than the driverless truck.
Shipping a full truckload from L.A. to New York costs around $4,500 today, with labor representing 75 percent of that cost. But those labor savings aren’t the only gains to be had from the adoption of driverless trucks.
Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverless truck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost.
And the savings become even more significant when you account for fuel efficiency gains. The optimal cruising speed from a fuel efficiency standpoint is around 45 miles per hour, whereas truckers who are paid by the mile drive much faster. Further fuel efficiencies will be had as the self-driving fleets adopt platooning technologies, like those from Peloton Technology, allowing trucks to draft behind one another in highway trains. Continue reading this article
On Monday, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation to raise the state’s minimum wage gradually to $15 in 2022, even though he admitted, “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense.” Jerry isn’t stupid: he knows how California was among the hardest hit by the great recession in terms of employment returning.
Plus, the governor must be aware that the machines are coming, and when costs of human workers increase then the economics of replacing them are unavoidable. The $15 demanders are literally hastening their own unemployment. Some will survive the cuts, but fewer will have jobs.
Much of the $15 dollar activism has been centered around fast food, where basic automation is already making inroads.
Now that a steep rise in labor costs is the law in California, automation developers are rubbing their robot hands in glee.
The article below from Silicon Valley region also observes the other industries that are moving away from human workers, and there are many as machines become more capable of replacing millions of human workers. One business sector mentioned is agriculture. So there is no more need to import immigrant field pickers of varying legality — right? Any mention of that by-product of technology is missing.
Automation makes immigration obsolete — something neither the press nor the national government has yet noticed.
The state’s new minimum wage law, signed into law Monday by Gov. Jerry Brown, is expected to give a boost to Silicon Valley’s burgeoning robot and automation industry as businesses seek to replace increasingly expensive workers.
With wages rising and technology advancing and becoming cheaper, agriculture, restaurants and hotels are expected to turn more to automation. It’s an unintended consequence of a law designed to improve the lives of lower-paid workers struggling in pricey California.
“The higher the compensation, the greater the incentive to replace labor with capital. The other thing to figure in here is the declining cost of automation,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “Likely there will be some greater demand for automation, but meanwhile, others will likely find other solutions using the people they have.”
The law raises the minimum wage incrementally to $15 an hour through 2022.
“Clearly, a large enough minimum wage is good for our business,” said Steve Cousins, CEO of Savioke, a Santa Clara company whose Relay service robots deliver items to guests in six Bay Area hotels, including the Holiday Inn Express in Redwood City and the Grand Hotel in Sunnyvale. “Delivery’s the obvious low-hanging fruit, but there’s a lot of possibilities — staging things, or observing things or even just answering questions, as in a mobile kiosk.”
At E la Carte, a Redwood City company started by Lyft ride-booking co-founder Rajat Suri, calls from potential customers of E la Carte’s automated restaurant ordering and payment system began increasing after last week’s wage-hike announcement. “There was demand before but now it’s gone up even higher,” said Suri, an MIT dropout who spent time as a waiter. “Back in the day, restaurants would just have to absorb higher minimum wages. Now they actually have the tools, like ours, to find ways around it.”
News of the wage increase also generated calls to Blue River Technology of Sunnyvale. The firm makes the Lettuce Bot, an automated lettuce-thinning machine that’s operating in the Salinas, Central, and Imperial valleys, as well as in Yuma, Arizona. “Rising wages make automation more palatable, make more sense,” said Blue River vice president of business development Ben Chostner. Continue reading this article
Fair Use: This site contains copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues related to culture and mass immigration. We believe this constitutes a "fair use" of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information, see: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000107----000-.html. In order to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond "fair use", you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
