Below, billionaire Amazon owner Jeff Bezos chats up technology at his re:MARS conference.
Many reports from attendees centered around all the sparkly new automation and A.I. advances, so it was a relief to find one that addressed the coming threat to human employment from smart machines. Author Kyle Wiggers (linked below) even included a list of dire predictions near the end of his article, somewhat similar to my collection in the following paragraph:
The point is that the automated future is bearing down on us with little attention from our political leaders — what’s to be done when significant numbers of American workers become unemployed because of robots, automation and artificial intelligence?
Some tech experts estimate that serious automation is only a few years off, as indicated by the chart below from a 2017 PwC report, How will automation impact jobs?
As we see from the re:MARS event, the tech community is industrious, goal-oriented and cares little about upending the existing economic order of wages for human work that has sustained our civilization for millennia.
Today marked the end of Amazon’s inaugural re:MARS event in Las Vegas, where roughly 3,000 engineers, academics, programmers, astronauts, artists, entrepreneurs, and NBA players from over 40 countries gathered to glean insight from luminaries in machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, and space travel. It didn’t disappoint with respect to sheer breadth of content: Roughly 100 breakout presentations, workshops, and a technical showcase doomed this writer’s mission to cover everything on hand.
Robert Downey Jr., channeling his inner Iron Man, on Wednesday announced the Footprint Coalition, which seeks to significantly “clean up” the planet within the next 11 years. Rohit Prasad, Amazon VP and head scientist for Alexa, introduced Conversations, a deep learning-based way to create Alexa skills with multi-turn dialogue that can interconnect with other Alexa skills. Zoox CEO Aicha Evans detailed the hardware and software underpinning the company’s custom-designed and shuttle-like driverless vehicles. And that was just the tip of an enormous iceberg.
But what stood out most were perhaps the advancements in robotics and what they could mean for the workforce of the future.
During the first re:MARS keynote, Brad Porter, head of robotics at Amazon, unveiled two platforms bound for Amazon’s hundreds of fulfillment centers around the world. The first is Pegasus, an item-categorizing system that cuts down missorted goods by 50%. The other is Xanthus, a modular drive system that quickly adapts to new applications. Both make up a portion of the over 200,000 machines that now work alongside the 300,000 human workers in Amazon’s warehouses — up from 100,000 machines a year ago.
“Customer expectations for convenience, selection, costs, and especially delivery speed continue to increase, and we realize we need step function changes in robotics,” said Porter.
During that same keynote address, Amazon worldwide consumer CEO Jeff Wilke revealed a new six-propeller, electric, and fully autonomous Prime Air delivery drone that will soon begin delivering packages to customers as part of pilot tests. Amazon is aiming to fulfill deliveries of packages weighing up to five pounds within 30 minutes for shoppers who are within 7.5 miles (up to a maximum of 15 miles) of its warehouses.
And on the penultimate day of re:MARS, Amazon chief technology officer and vice president Werner Vogels highlighted RoboMaker, the company’s cloud robotics service designed to expedite developing, testing, and deploying intelligent machines at scale. “We’re now getting lots of attention and interest [in this],” said Vogels. “If we do this right, we will see the next generation of explorers working on the next generation of robotics technology.”
Amazon’s increased investment in robotics — which arguably began in earnest with its $775 million acquisition in 2012 of Kiva Systems, a Massachusetts-based company that manufactures mobile robotic fulfillment systems — accelerated with its recent purchase of Canvas Technology. The Colorado-based startup is developing a fully autonomous cart system. Even more recently, in warehouses in Seattle, Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam, and Manchester, Amazon has doubled down with $1-million-per-unit machines — CartonWraps and SmartPacs — capable of packing up to 700 products in an hour.
The moves are doubtless reducing operations costs — the savings with CartonWraps and SmartPacs are so substantial that each robot is amortized in less than two years. And they will likely further Amazon’s ambitious plan to reduce its free shipping option for all Prime subscribers from two days down to one.
But it’s a less encouraging development for the human workers whose jobs are at risk due to partial or complete automation.
A 2017 analysis published by Quartz found that Amazon’s investment in automation and robotic employees will cause the combined employment at the company and related retailers to decline by a net 24,000 in 2018. Separately, Forrester found that AI could eliminate 10% of U.S. jobs in the coming months, and in the past year, analysts at the World Economic Forum, PricewaterhouseCoopers, McKinsey Global Institute, and Gartner have predicted it could make redundant as many as 75 million jobs by 2025. (Continues)
Amazon has presented its re:MARS conference in Las Vegas over the last few days, discussing new tech advances in robotics, AI and other topics. For example, actor Robert Downey Jr. announced a project to clean up the environment using robots which he thinks could largely do the job within ten years or so.
Jeff Bezos — who became a billionaire by skillfully adding robots to his online Amazon store — opined at re:MARS that advanced robotic hands will be achieved in a decade. That techno advance would be a serious game-changer as far as replacing humans in the workplace, because manual dexterity has been much harder to create than basic functional intelligence of the sort that is often used in business machines now.
For example, Amazon warehouses are run by a big computer brain that keeps track of stock, individual orders and where items are located on various racks of merchandise. But the little orange robots deliver the customer orders to workers to pack them up for shipment. When robot hands reach human-like dexterity, then Bezos can get his desired totally automated warehouses.
Below, Amazon’s Kiva warehouse robots are wired in to a computer system that tracks customer orders as well as where everything is located on the floor.
The basic Kiva warehouse robot will be getting an assist from a new smart machine called Pegasus that moves individual parcels from packers to sorting chutes. Note how the robot is characterized as a helper to workers rather than a future replacement for them in the company video below:
Finally, here’s a report about Bezos’ plan for dexterous robot hands to come in the automated future:
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said on Thursday he expects there will be commercial robots in the next 10 years that can grasp items as reliably as humans, a development that could lead to the automation of warehouse jobs around the world.
The remark, made on stage at Amazon’s “re:MARS” conference in Las Vegas, underscored how companies and university researchers are rapidly developing technology to perform human tasks, whether for elder care in the home or for the picking and stowing of goods in retail warehouses.
“I think grasping is going to be a solved problem in the next 10 years,” he said. “It’s turned out to be an incredibly difficult problem, probably in part because we’re starting to solve it with machine vision, so (that means) machine vision did have to come first.”
Bezos did not discuss any Amazon deployments of the technology, which it has tested from the Boston-area startup Soft Robotics, for instance, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters previously here
The company has said it views automation as a way to help workers.
Still, Amazon is known for its drive to mechanize as many parts of its business as possible, whether pricing goods or transporting items in its warehouses. It employs hundreds of thousands of people, many of whose primary task is grasping, scanning and placing customer orders.
A variety of companies other than Amazon have also rolled out robotic hands for limited warehouse pilots. (Continues)
This is a somewhat curious article from the Wall Street Journal because of course women will lose employment when automation takes hold since many millions of women work. The piece uses a new McKinsey study, The Future of Women at Work, that specifically notes, “Women and men face a similar scale of potential job losses and gains, but in different areas.”
So the focus on women does supply a specific sub-topic of automation to explore.
Robot sales continue to rise, so there is no sign of the smart machine wave disappearing. In fact, when machines become cheaper than workers to perform a task, the humans will be replaced.
The article includes a fascinating video with an interview of Chinese businessman Michael Zeng who assures the interviewer that his layoff of 700 will be no problem because the workers will be able to find new employment.
Women are at nearly equal risk to men to lose their jobs to automation by 2030 as labor-saving technology spreads, study says
Automation could force more than 100 million women globally to find new occupations by 2030, according to a study from McKinsey Global Institute.
The study, released Tuesday, shows technological advancements affect the genders nearly evenly.
That finding upends the notion that automation hits predominantly male manufacturing workers the hardest.
Emerging automation technologies will look different and displace a large number of women, said Mekala Krishnan, fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute and one of the report’s authors. Advancements could take the form of Alexa-like virtual assistants replacing clerical tasks, wider adoption of cashierless checkouts and artificial intelligence replacing customer-service workers at call centers.
And that technology could change the jobs done by women in the way robotic arms in factories put downward pressure on mostly male manufacturing jobs in the U.S. in recent decades.
“The new wave of automation is much more than manufacturing and robots,” she said in an interview. “The sectors and occupations for which automation will play a role will vary widely and women could be equally impacted as men.”
Clerical work, such as by secretaries, schedulers and bookkeepers, is an area especially susceptible to automation, and 72% of those jobs in advanced economies are held by women, the McKinsey study said. Service workers, including those employed in retail and food service, are also susceptible to automation, and include women in high numbers.
The study looked at 10 of the world’s largest economies, including the U.S., China and India, and found that 107 million jobs held by women are at risk of being displaced by automation, or 20% overall of female employment. That nearly matches the 21% of jobs held by men at risk of being displaced.
The McKinsey study isn’t projecting mass job loss due to automation. It forecasts that 171 million new jobs held by women will be created by 2030—and the rate of job growth could be slightly larger for women than for men over that time period. That is largely because women hold the majority of jobs in one of the fastest-growing fields: health care.
The study considers the number of full-time equivalent jobs at risk, allowing that many jobs will be partially automated. For example, a nurse may spend less time in the future on data entry as smart diagnostic machines and voice-recognition technology improve.
In developed countries, a larger share of jobs are on the line. In the U.S., 24% of female jobs and 26% of male jobs are at risk to automation, McKinsey said. (Continues)
A major reason why Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world ($132B in 2018) was his early adoption of robots in his warehouses — see my 2016 article Amazon Robotics in The Social Contract for background.
Below, the Kiva robots of Amazon scoot under the appropriate rack of merchandise and bring it to a human packer for shipment.
Therefore it’s not surprising that knock-off machines have been designed to fill the desire of business owners to run their warehouses as cheaply as possible. One is from the GreyOrange company of Asia:
Keep in mind that whenever robots become less expensive than workers, the humans will be replaced. So it makes no sense to continue importing low-skilled foreigners via immigration when it has become clear that the future will be operated by smart machines. In fact. . .
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
Here’s a story about the knock-off warehouse robots:
Padmanabhan Raman, chief production manager, shows off charging station at Project Verte in McDonough, Georgia, on May 2.
ATLANTA — Tephnee Usher stands in a McDonough, Georgia, warehouse, separated from the stored goods by a black chain-link fence, and waits for robots to deliver the goods to her.
Human workers are confined to opposite edges of this 17-acre roofed space: delivery bays and shipping bays about a football field apart. The vast concrete area between them belongs to 225 electric powered, eerily silent robotic Butlers that perform tasks people used to do.
E-commerce, growing at 15 percent a year, is driving a second boom in Georgia’s robust warehousing and logistics industry, which employs about 118,000 packers and material handlers across the state. Companies setting up ready-to-ship warehouses here last year included Target’s furniture line, Wayfair home furnishings and Dynacraft bikes and scooters. Amazon has four “fulfillment” centers scattered from Braselton to Macon.
It’s clear the industry is changing. What’s less clear is how much that will translate into a jobs boom or bust as automation and artificial intelligence increasingly take over the work.
The robot-powered warehouse in McDonough just south of Atlanta will begin operations in June after test runs. It belongs to Verte, a Sandy Springs, Georgia, start-up aiming to compete with Amazon. Verte targets mom-and-pop to midsize sellers, offering to help them track, keep inventory, sell and move their goods ranging from shoes to cosmetics from manufacturer to home.
The low-slung Butlers are manufactured by GreyOrange in Alpharetta, Georgia, the American headquarters of the Singapore company. It can retrofit any warehouse with a flat floor into a roboticized one that can endlessly reconfigure its movable shelves for maximum efficiency. Products that arrive at one door can be stocked and on their way to buyers in as little as two hours, touched by human hands only two or three times.
The Butlers at the McDonough warehouse look like giant Roombas, the disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaners. They glide among 6,000 refrigerator-size shelving units lined up in rows 85 deep between the delivery and shipping bays. They roll precisely under a unit holding an item someone has ordered, jack it up with enough electric power to lift more than 3,000 pounds, and move it to the waiting Usher, a human picker.
Usher then grabs the item out of one of its bins, scans it and hands it to team members who pack it and label it for shipping to a customer’s home.
The warehouse is cutting edge when it comes to automation. But it isn’t alone. E-commerce giant Amazon is adding highly roboticized warehouses across the nation similar to Verte’s. The closest one to Georgia is in Jacksonville, Florida, which uses movable shelving units and scooter-like robots that look like GreyOrange’s.
Repetitive work, like warehouse jobs, is widely predicted to be among those more vulnerable to disappearing thanks to robots and artificial intelligence.
At the same time, new jobs are created through the industry’s growth and adoption of technology.
Programmers and robot mechanics are now on staffs, but they typically take more education or skills. There is unsettled debate about whether continuing technological and social changes will create as many jobs as those shorn off.
“I think there’s definitely going to be fewer workers in warehouses, but warehouses are also experiencing labor shortages,” said Nancey Green Leigh, a Georgia Tech professor who studies robots and works with a National Science Foundation grant.
Packing goods for shipping is often tedious work at low pay, which has led to employee turnover and unfilled jobs. With the unemployment rate below 4 percent, there also are fewer available workers. Indeed.com lists more than 6,000 warehouse jobs in Georgia, the bulk of them paying $25,000 a year or less.
“On the one hand, we can be concerned about the job loss, but on the other hand, many of the jobs are not great jobs,” said Green Leigh.
Georgia long has been a logistics and warehousing center.
Atlanta has the sixth-most warehousing space among metro areas, with 683 million square feet. It is home to companies such as UPS and Manhattan Associates and has major operations for big global logistics providers such as XPO.
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is a cargo hub and Savannah is the fourth-busiest U.S. container port in the U.S., connecting Georgia businesses to the world. The state boasts excellent rail and interstate access.
Verte, backed by $45 million in venture capital, is hoping to leapfrog larger and older competitors with the help of GreyOrange’s robots. GreyOrange, also a startup, has received more than $170 million in venture capital.
“Anybody who built five or 10 years ago was too early,” said Verte founder Julian Kahlon, in reference to fast-changing technology.
Kahlon added that he wanted to build a warehouse capable of doing Black Friday business volumes every day, to keep up with the explosion in demand as consumers increasingly opt to have goods shipped directly to their homes.
Low-skilled warehouse work is not well paid, the average job paying about $13 an hour, according to the Georgia Department of Labor. And the work can be arduous. Before mobile delivery robots, pickers could walk up to 12 miles a day finding and moving items, said Green Leigh, the Georgia Tech professor.
But the drive for efficiency means companies also are searching for additional ways to replace humans with robots. Both Amazon and GreyOrange say they have built and are perfecting picking robots — the same job that Usher is currently doing at Verte’s McDonough warehouse.
Amazon also has a test delivery program in Washington state, where a wheeled robot traveling on sidewalks is delivering packages to doorsteps, and has made investments in self-driving vehicles, including shipping trucks. (Continues)
Automation designers have a two-fer human job killer on the drawing boards — a combo self-driving van equipped with a separate robot that can deliver customers’ order mail-order boxes right to the door. The robot hops out of the van, grabs the package and carries it to the delivery point, even managing several stairs.
Navigating complicated steps is a problem little mentioned in these cheerful tech reports, as if America were a flat suburb designed for shopping carts. The latest creation manages a few steps well enough but nothing like what millions of homes have before reaching the front door. Most people want their packages left as close to the door as possible, not left on a lower landing.
So delivery jobs for humans are safe for a few more years, but the plans are clear to eliminate expensive workers as soon as possible.
Below, the creepy headless robot called “Digit” can carry 40 pounds.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has a posting for the category Delivery Truck Drivers and Driver/Sales Workers that shows an average wage of $14.66/hour and the number of jobs counted in 2016 was 1,421,400. The median annual wage for light truck or delivery services drivers was $32,810 in May 2018, which seems decent for an occupation that requires only a high school education, a driver’s license and a few weeks of on-the-job training.
The tech industry aims to reduce that employer cost considerably. Of course, America won’t need any low-skilled immigrants to deliver packages in a few years when this and similar automation is deployed.
● The robot known as Digit, designed and built by Agility Robotics, walks upright and can carry packages weighing up to 40 pounds.
● Ford and Agility Robotics are still researching exactly how Digit would work with the autonomous vehicles.
It’s not fast and may be years from visiting your neighborhood, but a walking robot is part of Ford’s vision for how its autonomous vehicles will someday deliver packages and goods.
The robot known as Digit and designed and built by Agility Robotics, walks upright on two legs, goes up and down stairs and can carry packages weighing 40 pounds.
So why is Ford interested in a walking robot?
Digit may be how Ford solves one of the biggest issues confronting the self-driving vehicles it’s developing for companies like Domino’s Pizza and the food delivery firm Postmates: how to get deliveries from cars to the front door?
“As we’ve learned in our pilot programs, it’s not always convenient for people to leave their homes for packages or for businesses to run their own delivery services,” Ken Washington, Ford’s chief technology officer, said in a post on Medium.
“If we can free people up to focus less on the logistics of making deliveries, they can turn their time and efforts to things that really need their attention.”
Ford envisions a future where Digit is part of an autonomous vehicle that could be delivering pizzas, packages or other items.
Designed to fold up when not deployed, Digit could be programmed to carry deliveries from the autonomous vehicle to the front door or exact location of the final destination. (Continues)
Bloomberg reports that farm robots are coming on strong, and that assessment makes perfect sense. The tasks of smart agricultural machines are generally simple and distinct, like weeding, plowing, spraying and picking: unlike self-driving cars, safety issues are minimal because human workers have disappeared from automated fields.
In addition, recent robots have become increasingly autonomous, meaning there’s more intelligence in the cab making judgements about actions to take regarding the crop.
Below, picker robots are making human workers disappear from the fields.
As low-skilled jobs disappear with the increase of automation, there will be even less demand for foreign labor like the illegal aliens now streaming across our open borders at the rate of 100,000 per month. It is crazy for Washington to continue to allow such anarchy now, that will look even more insane from the coming years when low-skilled labor will be as common as horse-drawn carriages.
The near-future of agriculture is within view, and it’s all about machines and technology. Automation makes immigration obsolete, and particularly so in the agricultural sector.
SwarmFarm robot spraying on a farm in Australia. Photographer: David Stringer/Bloomberg
Robots are taking over farms faster than anyone saw coming.
The first fully autonomous farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means machines will be able to completely take over a multitude of tasks. Tractors will drive with no farmer in the cab, and specialized equipment will be able to spray, plant, plow and weed cropland. And it’s all happening well before many analysts had predicted thanks to small startups in Canada and Australia.
While industry leaders Deere & Co. and CNH Industrial NV haven’t said when they’ll release similar offerings, Saskatchewan’s Dot Technology Corp. has already sold some so-called power platforms for fully mechanized spring planting. In Australia, SwarmFarm Robotics is leasing weed-killing robots that can also do tasks like mow and spread. The companies say their machines are smaller and smarter than the gigantic machinery they aim to replace.
Sam Bradford, a farm manager at Arcturus Downs in Australia’s Queensland state, was an early adopter as part of a pilot program for SwarmFarm last year. He used four robots, each about the size of a truck, to kill weeds.
In years past, Bradford had used a 120-foot wide, 16-ton spraying machine that “looks like a massive praying mantis.” It would blanket the field in chemicals, he said.
But the robots were more precise. They distinguished the dull brown color of the farm’s paddock from green foliage, and targeted chemicals directly at the weeds. It’s a task the farm does two to three times a year over 20,000 acres. With the robots, Bradford said he can save 80% of his chemical costs.
“The savings on chemicals is huge, but there’s also savings for the environment from using less chemicals and you’re also getting a better result in the end,” said Bradford, who’s run the farm for about 10 years. Surrounding rivers run out to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s eastern cost, making the farm particularly sensitive over its use of chemicals, he said.
Costs savings have become especially crucial as a multi-year rout for prices depresses farm incomes and tightens margins. The Bloomberg Grains Spot Index is down more than 50% since its peak in 2012. Meanwhile, advances in seed technology, fertilizers and other crop inputs has led to soaring yields and oversupply. Producers are eager to find any edge possible at a time when the U.S.-China trade war is disrupting the usual flow of agriculture exports.
Farmers need to get to the next level of profitability and efficiency in farming, and “we’ve lost sight of that with engineering that doesn’t match the agronomy,” said SwarmFarm’s Chief Executive Officer Andrew Bate. “Robots flip that on its head. What’s driving adoption in agriculture is better farming systems and better ways to grow crops.” (Continues)
Here’s a new robot from the Ford company designed to work in its factories. It’s basically a filing cabinet on wheels that delivers replacement parts on the floor.
Below, Ford’s Survival robot consists of cubby holes for parts — each with its own identifying number on the door.
Users in the Valencia, Spain, plant report success with the machine, and the company may expand its implementation.
The Ford delivery robot is a simple thing, but it indicates a much larger trend in business. Remember that industry is not spending millions overall in its automation redesign to make work easier for employees; the change is to save money. And when smart machines become cheaper than workers, then the humans will be laid off.
As the work universe changes, First World nations like America won’t need many (any?) Third World migrants/aliens to work cheap and simple because machines will do it better.
Note how the article below includes a couple job loss studies associated with automation:
• The Ford Motor manufacturing plant in Valencia has a new delivery employee — an autonomous robot named “Survival.”
• The self-driving robot uses lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to visualize its surroundings and deliver spare parts.
• The robot made its debut at Ford as workers around the world become increasingly worried their jobs will one day be stolen by technology.
The Ford Motor manufacturing plant in Valencia, Spain, has a new delivery employee — an autonomous robot named “Survival.”
The self-driving robot uses lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to visualize its surroundings and deliver spare parts to where they’re needed in the facility. It was manufactured by Ford engineers and is the first of its kind to be used at one of the company’s European plants.
Ford said Survival gives employees more time to undertake more complex tasks.
“When it first started you could see employees thinking they were in some kind of sci-fi movie, stopping and staring at it as it went by,” Eduardo García Magraner, manufacturing manager at the Valencia factory, said in a statement. “Now they just get on with their jobs knowing the robot is smart enough to work around them.”
The robot made its debut as workers around the world become increasingly worried their jobs will one day be stolen by technology.
Nearly half of the world’s jobs face some risk of being automated, according to research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. A Brookings Institution report warns that a quarter of Americans are at high risk of losing their jobs to automation.
Workers in food services, manufacturing, administrative support, farming, transportation and construction have the greatest likelihood of being replaced by robots.
In 2018, a record number of robots were put to work in North America. According to the Robotic Industries Association, 35,880 robots were shipped to the U.S., Canada and Mexico last year, with 53% going to the automotive industry. (Continues)
Here’s a new robot the tech-whizzes have built that will further automate the Amazon-fueled mail-order economy — and eliminate jobs for humans. Apparently Fed-Ex and UPS are cranking up their services to keep up with the delivery business, and they think a truck unloader will be just the ticket to speed the process along.
The Honeywell company has offered up a robot that utilizes suction cups and conveyor belts to unload trucks — a tricky chore when the items are different sizes and shapes as they often are. Replacing human dexterity in a world of diverse objects is one of the toughest challenges for automation.
Below, on the Honeywell machine, the yellow circles are suction cups which lift items from the truck and drop them onto the conveyor belts below.
The thing has a rickety look, like non-sturdy items might be at risk of being damaged by such a crude machine.
But the robots will be cheaper than human workers which is the point of the technology. However it’s still unclear how the economic Masters of the Universe imagine how the coming automated economy can work when millions of willing shoppers cease getting paychecks — nevertheless business continues to plan replacement of humans with smart machines.
Given such basic economic changes, we won’t be needing any unskilled foreigners (like the thousands currently streaming across America’s open border) to be doing simple physical jobs like unloading trucks when machines become cheaper.
Robots are increasingly picking up the slack in package distribution centers.
Honeywell and Siemens have unveiled new machines that are capable of autonomously ferrying packages from the tractor trailer to the fulfillment center with surprising accuracy, according to Bloomberg.
It comes as consumers increasingly expect two-day or even same-day delivery, causing shipping companies to embrace automation as a solution to meet the spike in demand.
Both Honeywell and Siemens’ robot unloaders drive up to the back of a tractor trailer and use machine learning to identify packages.
And, the companies say their machines work just as fast, if not faster, than human employees.
For example, it takes Siemens’ robotic unloader about 10 minutes to empty a tractor trailer, whereas it would take one person up to an hour to move the boxes, according to Bloomberg.
Honeywell said its device is capable of unloading packages at a rate of 1,500 cases per hour.
Its machine works via an apparatus that extends into the back of the truck, scooping the packages up using a conveyor belt.
The machine then pulls them out and carries them into a distribution center.
Additionally, another apparatus is located at the top of the machine with suction cups attached, so as to be able to grab packages that are stacked up high inside the truck. (Continues)
It’s a rare thing to hear anyone in politics discuss the threat of automation to the economy — certainly no candidates did in the 2016 presidential campaign, and I watched closely. You would think that a genuine leader would have a plan to lessen the shock of massive job loss when it becomes cheaper to use a robot than hire a human over a wide swath of the jobs economy.
Some tech experts estimate that time is only a few years off, as indicated by the chart below from a PwC report concerning How will automation impact jobs?
So it’s a relief to see a technology-cautious candidate appear for 2020, and I have written several times about Andrew Yang because he says things like:
“We automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, and those communities have never recovered. Where if you look at the numbers, half of the workers left the workforce and never worked again, and then half of that group filed for disability.
Now what happened to the manufacturing workers is now going to happen to the truck drivers, retail workers, call centers and fast-food workers and on and on through the economy as we evolve and technology marginalizes the labor of more and more Americans.”
On Friday, Carlson commented about a few 2020 candidates on Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream. The first one of them discussed was Andrew Yang:
SHANNON BREAM: You have talked with a lot of these 2020 contenders: I want to play a little back and forth with Andrew Yang and then we will discuss:
ANDREW YANG (in March 1 interview): My friends in Silicon Valley are working on trucks that can drive themselves because that’s where the money is, where we can save tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars by trying to automate that job. But I was just with truck drivers in Iowa last week. . . it will be a disaster for many American communities.
TUCKER CARLSON: You are one of the only people I have met who is honest about the effects of de-industrialization.
BREAM: I’m not assuming you’re going to vote for him, but you agree with him on this point.
CARLSON: I definitely would vote for a candidate like that, but I don’t agree with everything he says. I don’t know all of his views, but I can’t think of many more people on either side who are thinking more deeply about what the actual problems are.
Automation by every estimate will eliminate a huge percentage of jobs in the United States at exactly the moment when we’re importing millions of new people every year to fill jobs that probably won’t exist three years from now or ten years from now — it’s lunatic.
Indeed. Automation makes immigration obsolete — and certainly of low-skilled Hondurans et al trooping here over America’s open border at the rate of 100,000 per month. What will happen when millions of non-tech Third-Worlders find themselves priced out of the coming robot jobs market in a few years? There will likely be increased crime and possibly civil unrest.
The transition to whatever economic system is next won’t be easy even without millions of low-skilled illegal aliens — but Washington is worsening an already bad future problem with its crazy sovereignty failure.
CARLSON: And nobody is saying anything about it other than Andrew Yang. I’m not sure why it’s falling to him, but I don’t care. I want somebody to tell the truth about it.
BREAM: You are worried about the jobs, not this whole AI worry that people have that robots are going to come eat us and kill us.
CARLSON: Of course, anybody running a business wants to eliminate labor costs or reduce them to the extent possible. That’s the imperative of the market. There is no sin in that, but it’s real and we can’t pretend otherwise.
And so we often hear ‘We need more workers for agriculture’ — we don’t know anything about agricultural really; very few parts of the ag economy aren’t automated now. It’s a completely real thing.
Lawyers, physicians — huge sectors of white collar America are about to be overturned by AI, and nobody is talking about it because RUSSIA!
There are two great social changes occurring on the planet now that are not getting the public debate they deserve — one is automation with its associated massive job loss, and the other is population growth in the Third World.
Regarding the latter, it is routinely overlooked in the current media coverage of the thousands of illegal aliens crossing America’s open border daily. We hear some about the pull factor of US jobs and free stuff, but the push factor of basic poverty combined with huge population growth looms large: for example, backward Honduras has quadrupled its human numbers since 1960.
Artificial intelligence (AI) could displace millions of jobs in the future, damaging growth in developing regions such as Africa, says Ian Goldin, professor of globalisation and development at Oxford University.
I have spent my career in international development, and in recent years have established a research group at Oxford University looking at the impact of disruptive technologies on developing economies.
Perhaps the most important question we have looked at is whether AI will pose a threat – or provide new opportunities – for developing regions such as Africa.
Optimists say that such places could use rapidly advancing AI systems to boost productivity and leapfrog ahead.
But I am becoming increasingly concerned that AI will, in fact, block the traditional growth path by replacing low-wage jobs with robots.
As Kai-Fu Lee, a Beijing-based venture capitalist who invests in artificial intelligence, tells us, AI is potentially the most revolutionary technology to emerge this century. It is also, along with the associated technologies of machine learning and robotics, advancing at breakneck speed.
Already AI has the capacity to replace many work tasks that are rules-based and repetitive, and which do not require great dexterity or empathy.
In developed economies, for instance, robots have replaced well over half of the jobs in the car and related industries in recent decades.
Automated systems are already getting higher customer satisfaction ratings than people in call centres, threatening a key source of jobs in many countries.
Similarly, AI enabled systems are leading to significant job losses in back-office administrative functions in banking, health, insurance and accounting. These are roles that had in recent years been outsourced to developing countries such as India, Vietnam, South Africa and Morocco.
Jobs at risk?
According to our research at Oxford, about 40% of jobs in Europe are vulnerable to AI over the coming decades, almost half of jobs in the USA, and an even greater share in developing countries.
Some argue that AI will create as many new jobs as those lost to robots, and that we shouldn’t worry too much. But I believe that those new jobs will be concentrated in certain parts of the developed world, and that the developing world will miss out. (Continues)
The recent New Yorker Magazine has a thorough story about automated agriculture, with strawberry picking getting particular attention. The magazine does like its articles long and rambling, so the reader learns about assorted agro-facts like grower complaints about the H-2A visa, the manual skills required to pick delicate strawberries (“a wristy twist that prevents bruising around the calyx”) and even some background on the general history of modern farming:
Picking strawberries takes speed, stamina, and skill. Can a robot do it?
[. . .] At the beginning of the twentieth century, about a third of the U.S. population lived on farms; today, less than one per cent does. Mechanization brought tractors and combine harvesters, which were initially used for grains, such as wheat, rye, oats, and barley. They automated the manual labor formerly done by small armies of threshers and bundlers. Mechanical harvesters made industrial farming possible, and led to the consolidation of small family acreages into the megafarms that dominate U.S. agriculture today.
The author opines that the hundreds of thousands of new illegal aliens from Central America won’t be interested in doing farm work because they have better things in mind. Good luck with that:
Migrants coming more recently from Central America, many of them also looking for better jobs and opportunities for their families, and often fleeing violence in their home countries, haven’t traditionally entered the crop-farm workforce in enough numbers to compensate for the loss of those Mexican workers—they’ve instead found jobs at meatpacking plants and in the service industries.
However, this article examines automation, and the farmers want smart machines that will reliably do the jobs so they needn’t worry about finding foreign workers when crops need picking. In fact, the strawberry grower featured, Gary Wishnatzki, helped raise investment money to develop the machines that will free him from depending on humans, and other growers have joined him. The technology people are happy to oblige — it’s a win-win for both.
The tech keeps improving, as suggested by a look at the new gadgets coming online. The upshot is that low-skilled workers will be replaced by robots when the machines become cheaper to use than humans. So it is crazy for Washington to continue admitting a hundred thousand menial laborers per month from Central America — the United States is not the welfare office for the Third World; it is the home of citizens.
And anyway, the US needs skilled workers, not backward rustics.
Continuing with a slice of the article:
All these prototypes rely on a handful of converging technologies—artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, G.P.S., machine vision, drones, and material science—that have been slowly finding their way onto the farm. Many row-crop farmers in the U.S. employ G.P.S.-guided tractors to lay out their fields. John Deere has been offering G.P.S. for its tractors since 1997. At first, satellite-assisted steering was simply a way for a farmer to keeps his rows straight, rather than rely on a tractor driver’s dead-reckoning skills. But for forward-thinking farmers G.P.S. offers much more than straight lines. A G.P.S.-planted farm provides a foundation on which to build a whole new class of automated farm tools that can use artificial intelligence to solve the hard problems that twentieth-century agricultural automation could not.
Berry 5.1’s Pitzer wheel features “obtainers,” which can cup and pick berries.
To get an idea of what might be possible, I arranged to visit Professor David Slaughter in his office at the University of California at Davis. Slaughter leads the university’s Smart Farm Initiative, which explores how future farmers might employ emerging technologies. Drones, for example, can automate the inspection of fields for pest or weed outbreaks, and can use high-resolution cameras and algorithmic processing of the images to pick up incipient problems before a farmer or a hired hand might spot them. Another possible application is plant breeding. Breeders currently rely on humans to evaluate seedlings produced by new combinations of already existing varieties. At a large operation, such as the University of Florida’s strawberry-breeding program, which is run by Vance Whitaker, people must manually inspect thousands of seedlings each year to see if any carries the desirable traits that the breeder is looking for. A robot, equipped with machine vision and enough artificial intelligence to recognize the traits the breeder is seeking, could automate the laborious process.
Slaughter showed me a prototype of a robotic weeding machine in the engineering department’s lab. His students built it and trained it to weed a field of tomato plants, each of which has its own G.P.S. coördinates. Because the robot knows exactly where the tomato plants are and has the machine vision and intelligence to know the difference between a tomato plant and a weed, it can navigate around the tomatoes and kill the weeds either with a miniature hoe or with a micro-jet of herbicide, which Slaughter described as “an inkjet printer for agriculture.” The farmer saves the cost of weeding the field by hand, and spares it a coating of herbicide that many of the tomato plants might not need. It was the nearest thing I saw in what venture capitalists call “digital agriculture” to a Roomba, the indoor robotic vacuum cleaner—a Farmba, maybe?
Summarizing the potential, Slaughter said, “For the first time, farmers can know what’s going on in their fields on the level of the individual plant. The idea is that you can run a farm with the same intimate care you would use on a back-yard garden, where you know each plant individually.” Farmers could irrigate and fertilize only those plants that needed it, and not waste resources on the current one-size-fits-all approach. Agriculture accounts for seventy per cent of fresh-water consumption worldwide, and, in the U.S. alone, farms use more than a billion pounds of pesticide each year; strawberry farms are especially heavy users. “Precision agriculture,” the name given to this slowly unfolding revolution, could dramatically reduce such wasteful and chemical-dependent practices.
Selective-harvesting machines are another application of smart-farm technology. But as a practical matter a farmer would need a different harvesting machine for each crop. As Slaughter’s colleague Stavros Vougioukas, an associate professor with the department of biological and agricultural engineering at U.C. Davis, pointed out, “building a machine to harvest watermelons is totally different from building a machine to harvest apples.” This is not the case with commodity-crop combines: the same machine can be adapted to harvest different crops. The capital investment required to develop the machine also has to make sense economically, and only a few specialty crops have a high enough value to justify a large outlay of funds. (For example, the harvest of peaches, a small-market crop that requires delicate handling, is unlikely to be automated anytime soon, if ever.) Vougioukas ticked them off: “Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big enough to justify automation.
So far, Berry 5.1 has cost nearly ten million dollars to develop; Wishnatzki raised most of the money from investors, many of whom were other strawberry growers, including the industry giant Driscoll. “My closest competitors realize we’re all in the same boat,” he told me. . .
So much of TV commentary concerns news-of-the-day trivia that it’s nice occasionally to have reflections on the Big Picture. Tucker Carlson did just that during his opening monologue on Thursday about the ways that immigration anarchy is changing America’s future — and not for the better.
In particular, extreme population growth fueled by foreigners (what’s happening now) will change the culture, since the newbies come only for the dollars, not to become Americans.
Assimilation is generally expected by citizens of new residents, but the topic is little discussed by the current crop of Democrats vying for a White House slot. In fact some, like Julian Castro, embrace invasion via open borders even though traditional citizens once took pride in America as a “nation of laws.” Now, the left demands Diversity above all else, more than any other value.
The United States used to value educated immigrants who could help with the work that needed done. Instead, we are now helpless to stop a million uneducated Hondurans and other Central Americans from illegally entering the country this year. They will supply cheap, simple labor for a while to insatiable business owners, but that will end soon when the smart machines take their jobs, as described on this blog for years and observed by Tucker in his remarks.
You could slide over to 3:05 minutes in the video below to avoid a couple nonsense clips from AOC delivered from the floor for some odd reason:
Spare Audio:
TUCKER CARLSON (3:05): Negativity. That’s what the activist left now calls disagreement. They are not interested at all in what anyone outside their tiny little world has to say. Every day, you see Democratic presidential candidates endorsing some new policy that has pretty much zero public support, but it sounds like something woke baristas in Brooklyn would be excited about.
Banning ICE, ignoring federal immigration law, giving amnesty to millions. Decriminalizing illegal border crossings which is to say totally open borders. Anyone can come. When they get here, give them free stuff. Nobody really wants any of this even most of the people saying know, it wouldn’t work.
The public would revolt if you tried it. If half of Guatemala moved here tomorrow, which is exactly what would happen, it wouldn’t help anyone. This is all fantasy.
Countries have borders. That’s what makes them countries. Someday, the AOC moment will pass. It’s too stupid to continue. And at that point, sober Democrats will wake up and rejoin the adult conversation and progress. What do we want from our immigration system?
Well, here are some of the questions they should have to answer when that happens. First and most obvious, how many immigrants should we admit every year? What’s the ideal number? We currently take a little over a million every year, legally. Should we double that to over two million? How about 10 million immigrants a year? How about 20 million? Is there any number that’s too high? And if so, why?
While we are at it, what’s the ideal population of the United States? Immigration effects population size more than any other factor. We’re at about 325 million people in the United States today and that’s a lot.
Our highways are crumbling, many of our cities are painfully overcrowded. How big should we get? Four hundred million? Six hundred million? A billion people? And if you are pushing to increase the size of our population and they are, what’s your plan for keeping our natural environment pristine?
Crowded countries are polluted. Every single one of them. Tell us why we should want that here? What sort of skills and education should we look for in immigrants? Not all immigrants are the same? Some start wildly successful companies. Many others go on food stamps. They are not interchangeable widgets, they are human beings. Who should we prefer? What’s the ideal level of education an immigrant to this country should have?
Big business doesn’t want you to ask this question, they like their immigrants low-skilled and cheap. Ocasio-Cortez does, too. But what happens when technology kills their jobs? And it will. All the major Democrats running for president take money from the technology barons, many of them support self-driving cars. So what do you do with hundreds of thousands of unemployment immigrant cab drivers? Do they all go on welfare?
And speaking of, what sort of government services are immigrants entitled to exactly? Democrats promise universal healthcare. Do immigrants get that, too? Who pays for it? How many immigrants can our system support? Do we have enough doctors and nurses and hospitals to treat the number of immigrants we want to admit? Same question for schools. 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.
