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Smart machines will likely fuel social turmoil in ways we can barely imagine now. Automation has already contributed substantially to the jobless recovery here at home. In addition, the decreasing cost of the machines means they are already taking jobs from humans in the third world and will do so to an increasing degree.
The basic Baxter robot costs around $25,000, and Martin Ford reported in “Rise of the Robots” that “Delta hopes to offer a one-armed assembly robot for about $10,000” which would really open up machine use for poor countries and small companies.
Robot arms spray-paint motorcycle gas tanks in a factory in India.
The report below is based on the recent Davos meeting that focused on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, aka automation.
In the following video included with the text item, the reporter notes, “There have been some reports that maybe 40 percent of jobs are going to be destroyed by the rise of robots, of automation, digitization, which is a frightening prospect for many people,” but he doesn’t specify a time frame.
It’s likely that when Guatemalans (and others) suffer sufficiently from the “premature deindustrialisation” mentioned below, many will head north hoping to get lucky in stupid-generous America. Why wouldn’t they?
Automation threatens 85% of jobs in Ethiopia and many more across emerging markets, study says
Automation and the march of the robots will prove most disruptive to the world’s poorest nations, with 85 per cent of all jobs in Ethiopia in danger of being lost, according to new analysis.
Nepal, Cambodia, China, Bangladesh and Guatemala are among the other countries most at risk from “premature deindustrialisation”, according to research by Citi, the US bank, and the Oxford Martin School, a research and policy unit of the UK university.
“There is a really strong [negative] relationship between countries’ level of income and their susceptibility to automation,” says Carl Benedikt Frey, co-director of the Oxford Martin programme on technology and employment.
The findings come a week after the World Economic Forum said more than 5m jobs will be lost globally by 2020 as a result of advances in artificial intelligence, robotics and other technological change. (The scale of this growth, in robotics at least, is indicated in the first chart).
To date, the debate on the impact of the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” has focused on the developed world. Analysis by the Martin School in 2013 concluded that 47 per cent of US jobs were at risk of automation over the coming two decades.
However, its follow-up analysis suggests the impact will be greater still in the developing world. Continue reading this article
National Public Radio reports that a major meat processor is considering the addition of robotic machines to its production plants. The machines continue to get smarter and are likely to become equipped with sensing technology before too long that allows them to feel where bones are, a vital skill in butchering a carcass. The improving technology means a quarter million meatpacking jobs may eventually disappear.
Meat processing is one of the few jobs that cannot be outsourced and is therefore a popular occupation for unskilled, sometimes illegal immigrants, from Mexicans to Somalis. But they are about to be made obsolete by smart machines, just like many American workers.
At the least, the automation juggernaut should make first-world nations rethink the idea of importing millions of immigrant workers, since jobs for humans are becoming increasingly rare. A 2013 study from Oxford University researchers estimated that 45 percent of US jobs were at risk from automation in the next 20 years. The Gartner tech consulting firm has forecast that one-third of jobs will be done by smart machines by 2025.
A few decades back, meatpacking was a good blue-collar job that could support a family. In 1990, a documentary titled American Dream (Watch) won an Oscar for showing the struggle of workers to keep their highly valued jobs. Later the companies brought in cheap foreign workers and wages have been low ever since.
At one point in the NPR discussion, an expert mentions that “Workers are really cheaper than machines.” When meat-processing robots become affordable, as they surely will, then the humans will be gone in a heartbeat.
Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants throughout the country employ a lot of people. About a quarter of a million Americans prepare the beef, pork and chicken that ends up on dinner tables.But some of those jobs could eventually be replaced by robots. The world’s largest meatpacking company is looking at ways to automate the art of butchery.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
About a quarter of a million people work in slaughterhouses to prepare the beef, pork and chicken that ends up in America’s dinner tables. Some of those jobs could eventually be replaced by robots. Luke Runyon from member station KUNC reports the world largest meatpacking company is looking at ways to automate the art of butchery.
LUKE RUNYON, BYLINE: We’re walking through a meat-cutting line and through JBS here in Greeley, Colo. There are workers in white frocks and white hats using hooks and knives to trim up some of the meat and get rid of the fat.
BILL DANLEY: There’s right now 850 people right out in this building alone. We’re go down through some of the tables. We won’t go in between them, but you’ll get a good view of what we do out here on the floor. Continue reading this article
Watching snotty globalist Fareed Zakaria is generally a waste of time, but the segment of his CNN show with writer Derek Thompson was informative because it discussed automation’s threat to ordinary American jobs. Thompson wrote the May Atlantic article about the subject, A World without Work, that got some attention.
The only clip I could find was incomplete, but still contains important points about how people in the Rustbelt city of Youngstown are scrambling to earn a living now, although the piece omits the severe economic restructuring that may face us. That part is a scary future without a roadmap, and the TV segment was only five minutes.
The headline here is that America’s most common jobs are likely to be automated: those are driver (cab and truck), retail salesperson, cashier, food and beverage worker, office clerk.
Thompson’s solution is a big government one, namely a universal basic income. If there is a conservative fix, I haven’t heard it. In fact, the right-wing press and politicians have been ignoring the problem. One notable exception is Sen Jeff Sessions who connected automation with a reduced need for immigrants in an op-ed. None of the Presidential candidates of either party have mentioned the automated future, and that is worrisome.
Thompson mentioned the Oxford University study in passing. That was the 2013 report estimating 47 percent of US jobs were susceptible to automation within 20 years. Millions of American jobs are going the way of the buggy whip, so the nation certainly does not need to import millions of immigrant workers to do work that no longer exists. Let’s just avoid that stupid foreseeable mistake.
ZAKARIA: The great economist John Maynard Canes [sic] looked at his crystal ball in 1930 and imaged life 100 years later, in 2030. In a piece entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he envisioned those descendants of his working only 15 hours a week yet producing enough to live happy and fulfilled life with lots of leisure time.
It’s not 2030 yet but a not-so surprising survey by Gallup last year found that only 8 percent of American full-time workers work less than 40 hours a week, 42 percent work the standard 40 hours, and the other 50 percent, well, they work more than 40 hours a week. But are we at a turning point? Will the huge advances in robotics and artificial intelligence strip away more and more jobs from us humans until we are all working about 15 hours a week? And will that be the fulfillment of Canes’ dream or a nightmare of part-time work, low wages and job insecurity?
Derek Thompson has written a great long read for “The Atlantic” called “A World Without Work” about all this and much more.
Welcome, Derek.
THOMPSON: Thank you. Good to be here.
ZAKARIA: You start with Youngstown, Ohio. Explain why. What’s the story there?
THOMPSON: Youngstown, Ohio, in many ways, was the American dream of the 20th century. It had one of the highest typical incomes for young people, it had perhaps the highest rate of home ownership of any city in the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century. But then something happened in the next 20 years. The steel industry started to collapse for a variety of reasons, globalization and technology. Continue reading this article
The article on publishing technology struck home because I worked in the field for some years while it was changing from paper layout to pages produced entirely on machines. What’s eye-catching here is how the newspaper workforce shrunk from 310 workers to 140 over a period of years, like many other businesses where greater efficiency brought by technology has meant that fewer people were needed to do the work.
It’s another reminder that America shouldn’t continue importing low-skilled foreigners via immigration. Oxford researchers have estimated that nearly half of US jobs are susceptible to automation by 2033, and all evidence indicates that smart machines are creating substantial job loss now and the trend is partially responsible for the jobless recovery.
Not so many years ago, before the Internet encroached into the journalism industry, I came to work each day here at the Argus Leader with 310 other people.
People laying out the news pages. People working the phones and trying to sell subscriptions. People editing copy and making sure we wrote and spelled correctly. People who took a newspaper out to your house when the delivery boy or girl failed you.
It just doesn’t seem like it was all that many years ago. Yet here I am still coming to work at the Argus Leader every day, but now there are only 140 walking in the door with me.
Where did all the others go?
The layout people work in a centralized hub in Des Moines, Iowa, now. The copy editors? We edit our own copy (and we can debate how well we do that later). The telemarketers working the phones trying to drum up subscriptions? Put out of a job by the Do Not Call mandate. Continue reading this article
It’s helpful that Terry Gross introduced the piece by observing that the now-common self-checkout aisle at the grocery store is “doing work real people used to do.” That’s happening a lot. These technological innovations are springing up more rapidly in many economic sectors from automated Amazon warehouses to robot bellhops delivering items to hotel rooms.
But some in Congress still believe that America needs millions of immigrant workers to keep wages low-low-low for their business cronies, even as those same companies install cost-saving and job-killing smart machines. The Senate’s Gang of Eight amnesty bill of 2013 would have doubled legal immigration if it had become law, which is not the direction we should be going. Given the unprecedented advances in technology in the workplace, the prudent and intelligent number of immigrant workers should be ZERO.
Here is NPR’s text with highlights of the interview with Martin Ford:
From the self-checkout aisle of the grocery store to the sports section of the newspaper, robots and computer software are increasingly taking the place of humans in the workforce. Silicon Valley executive Martin Ford says that robots, once thought of as a threat to only manufacturing jobs, are poised to replace humans as teachers, journalists, lawyers and others in the service sector.
“There’s already a hardware store [in California] that has a customer service robot that, for example, is capable of leading customers to the proper place on the shelves in order to find an item,” Ford tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies.
In his new book, Rise of the Robots, Ford considers the social and economic disruption that is likely to result when educated workers can no longer find employment.
“As we look forward from this point, we need to keep in mind that this technology is going to continue to accelerate,” Ford says. “So I think there’s every reason to believe it’s going to become the primary driver of inequality in the future, and things are likely to get even more extreme than they are now.” Continue reading this article
The replacement of traditional American people continues briskly, according to Census projections out to 2060. In the near term, the US population will reach a record high percentage of immigrants in 2023, just eight years from today.
The Center for Immigration Studies issued an analysis of the Census report which includes the chart below:
The future America planned by elites will be more crowded and therefore regulated, because order must be enforced to prevent chaos among the increasingly diverse population. Plus, Americans will experience more pavement, less open space and more water shortages. It sounds stressful, but Happy Belated Earth Day anyway!
U.S. Census Bureau: 1 in 7 U.S. residents will be foreign-born
While they did not receive much attention when they were released last month, new projections from the Census Bureau show the enormous impact of immigration on the U.S. population. For the first time, the Bureau projected the future size of the immigrant (foreign-born) population and found that by 2023 immigrants will account for more than one in seven U.S. residents (51 million) — the largest share ever recorded in American history. Driven largely by legal immigration, not illegal immigration, the immigrant population will grow to nearly one in five U.S. residents (78 million) by 2060, the Bureau projects. The total U.S. population will grow to almost 417 million — 108 million more than in 2010. Continue reading this article
Congress is back in Washington today after a two-week recess, and Senator Sessions hasn’t wasted any time in getting back to work. His office posted an informational press release with an illustration showing the coming decade’s gross number of legal immigrants compared with the combined populations of seven American cities:
Does America need 10 million additional immigrants? Will they be a net positive or an overall negative?
In addition, 50 years of unrelenting immigration is pushing the nation toward a record level of foreignness: the Census projects that within eight years, more than one in seven residents will be foreign-born. In 1970, fewer than one in 21 residents were foreign-born.
The predominant supply of low-wage immigration into the United States occurs legally, and the total amount of immigration to the United States has risen dramatically over the last four decades.
Under current federal policy, the U.S. issues “green cards” to about one million new Legal Permanent Residents (LPRs) every single year. For instance, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. issued 5.25 million green cards in the last five years, for an average of 1.05 million new permanent immigrants annually.
New lifetime immigrants admitted with green cards gain guaranteed legal access to federal benefits, as well as guaranteed work authorization. LPRs can also petition to bring their relatives to the United States, and both the petitioner and the relatives can become naturalized citizens.
If Congress does not pass legislation to cut immigration rates, the U.S. will legally add at least 10 million new permanent immigrants over the next 10 years—a bloc of new residents larger than the cities of Atlanta (population: 447,000), Los Angeles (3.88 million), Chicago (2.7 million), Boston (645,000), Denver (650,000), St. Louis (318,000), and Dallas (1.25 million) combined. Continue reading this article
It’s disappointing to see the often conservative Washington Times report so erroneously about Muslim immigration to Germany, particularly that those newbies are needed for skilled jobs Germans allegedly won’t do.
BERLIN — Europe’s divisive debates over immigration and Islam may be putting sand in the gears of Europe’s economic engine.
Saying Germany needs skilled laborers to work in the factories and laboratories of its export-heavy economy, German corporate and industrial leaders are denouncing the string of anti-Islamic marches that have attracted growing crowds throughout the country in recent weeks.
“We distance ourselves from this movement and any xenophobic movement that damages Germany’s reputation,” said Alexander Wilhelm, deputy head of the Confederation of German Employers Associations, a national umbrella group.
“The PEGIDA movement is not representative of Germany, its people and its economy,” he said, using the German acronym for the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West group that has organized the marches. [. . .]
This article is wrong on at least two counts — the real threat of Islam and the nature of the employment market.
PEGIDA stands for Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes). Started by Lutz Bachmann in Dresden, PEGIDA’s Monday night rallies grew from 350 participants last October 20 to 25,000 on January 12. Officials canceled the march on January 19 because of threatening Muslims, but Bachmann promised to resume next week.
Below, growing PEGIDA rallies against the Islamization of Europe show that many of the German people don’t want Muslim diversity.
Following is an upbeat video segment from Deutsche Welle about young Spaniards moving to Germany to pursue professional careers. Spain is moving very slowly out of recession, but still has a jobless rate of 23 percent. Borderless Europe means that job seekers can go anywhere within the EU for employment, so Germany has plenty of available workers from the continent.
In addition, the idea that Muslims have extra-special work skills is a new one on me. They do not have a reputation for STEM expertise.
Finally, Germany is like all other first-world economies that are turning to robots, computers and automation to reduce its need for human workers. So the complaints of business are not based on genuine need, just the desire for cheaper workers.
BERLIN — Right-wing protesters marching against immigration and the so-called Islamicization of Germany may soon face a new foe: the rise of the machines.
With low unemployment and a shrinking workforce, the economic engine of Europe continues to endeavor to reinvent itself as a nation of immigrants, even as the demise of the welfare state and fear of multiculturalism have brought tens of thousands of protesters to the streets.
But recent reports suggest that robots, not immigrants, may pose the greatest threat to German workers — though the European Union has placed a $4 billion bet that robots will create rather than eliminate jobs.
The new wave of automation will hit white-collar workers hardest, according to Jeremy Bowles, a researcher at the Brussels-based Bruegel Institute.
“What’s fundamentally different is that (these advances) have the ability to affect a broader set of workers,” Bowles said, comparing the next generation of computerization to the first wave of robots that hit assembly line jobs in the 1980s.
The impact of these innovations will vary across Europe, Bowles argues. But in Germany, as in the U.S., robots may soon take as many as half the existing jobs, according to the Bruegel Institute’s analysis of the labor market. Continue reading this article
Farmers say they are worried that the government’s awarding thousands of illegal aliens with amnesty work permits will cause them to leave for the greener pastures of legal American jobs.
The farmers are probably right. Ag has long been a doorway for illegals to worm their way into decent employment after they have learned a little English and how to work the system. So naturally the owners think the answer to their labor problem is More Immigrants.
Many illegal alien farm pickers, like the fellow shown below, will certainly use Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty to steal a more profitable American job.
FRESNO, CALIF. — Farmers already scrambling to find workers in California — the nation’s leading grower of fruits, vegetables and nuts — fear an even greater labor shortage under President Barack Obama’s executive action to block some 5 million people from deportation.
Thousands of the state’s farmworkers, who make up a significant portion of those who will benefit, may choose to leave the uncertainty of their seasonal jobs for steady, year-around work building homes, cooking in restaurants and cleaning hotel rooms.
“This action isn’t going to bring new workers to agriculture,” said Jason Resnick, vice president and general counsel of the powerful trade association Western Growers. “It’s possible that because of this action, agriculture will lose workers without any mechanism to bring in new workers.”
Although details of the president’s immigration policy have yet to be worked out, Resnick said the agricultural workforce has been declining for a decade. Today, the association estimates there is a 15 to 20 percent shortage of farmworkers, which is driving the industry to call for substantial immigration reform from Congress, such as a sound guest worker program. Continue reading this article
Many people believe that Obama has checked out from his responsibilities as President. And it’s true that he prefers the golf course to the stresses of leadership. However, he is quite engaged when it comes to the care and feeding of illegal aliens who will soon become grateful Democrat voters.
Obama got his socialist healthcare from an all-Democrat legislature but now his remaining leftist legacy depends on his unconstitutional pen. And putting millions of big-government voters into the pipeline will bend America to the Democrat model for decades if not permanently.
Now we learn that the administration has done more than just endlessly promise a mass amnesty; it is gearing up to physically create the work permits that are the real amnesty, and a stab in the back of the 20 million unemployed citizen workers.
President Barack Obama deputies are secretly preparing to print work permits for up to 11 million illegal immigrants over the next two years, despite the nation’s high unemployment, stalled wages and increasing automation.
If Obama actually goes ahead with the plan that is sketched in a federal contract document, he would provide employers with the ability to legally hire 13 million foreign workers even as 12 million Americans turn 18 in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
The plan to print millions of work permits and green cards — dubbed “permanent resident cards” — is outlined in Oct. 3 and Oct. 6 federal announcements to contractors.
The contract plan was discovered by the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors a lower level of immigration.
“The objective of this procurement is … to produce Permanent Resident Cards (PRC) and Employment Authorization Documentation (EAD) cards,” said the Oct. 6 official announcement at FedBizOpps.gov.
“The requirement is for an estimated 4 million cards annually with the potential to buy as many as 34 million cards total,” the document says.
But the proposed five-year contract includes a so-called “surge” capability to produce an additional five million work-permit cards in one year. Continue reading this article
The machine age is hard upon us, yet its implication for the economy of America is not discussed by anyone in government. Humans are rapidly becoming less necessary in the workplace where computers, automation and robots are performing tasks that would have been thought science fiction just a few years ago.
Now an expert from the Gartner consulting firm predicts that one-third of US jobs will be done by a computer or robot by 2025 — that’s 11 years from today. How is society supposed to work when a third of the working-age population cannot find jobs?
Some in the government, in particular Rep Paul Ryan, advocate hugely expanded legal immigration to replace the boomer generation’s retirement. Increased immigration would be a terrible mistake in terms of what the future workplace will need, because many tasks will be performed by machines. Millions of additional workers imported from abroad according to the wishes of elites and billionaires would mostly end up in the growing permanent underclass.
At its Symposium/ITxpo conference in Orlando, Florida, the technology research firm’s forecast pointed toward a future of not only automated physical work, but cognitive tasks as well.
“Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025,” said Gartner research director Peter Sondergaard. “New digital businesses require less labor; machines will make sense of data faster than humans can.”
We’ve long heard of automatons replacing factory jobs, but Gartner said, for example, the technological advances in software have allowed machines to perform a variety of tasks that has already infiltrated many industries, including financial analysis and medical diagnostics.
In February, PBS NewsHour’s Making Sense talked to authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of “The Second Machine Age” about what was different with this new wave of technological advancement:
“We are at an inflection point. The first big inflection point in human history was about 200 years ago, when the steam engine started the industrial revolution,” Brynjolfsson said. “That was a period that saw a whole set of new machines come along that could automate muscle power, physical work.”
“In recent years, we are seeing a wave of technologies that can augment, automate all sorts of cognitive tasks,” he added, “and we think, ultimately, those will have as big, or an even bigger effect on humanity as the first industrial revolution.”
Sondergaard said drones are an example of an emerging smart machine that’s competing with the human worker’s cognitive abilities, reported Computer World. Drones’ uses have now extended into agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections and their contributions may become standard in five years.
“One day, a drone may be your eyes and ears,” he said.
This item from Stanislaus County has some fascinating frontline farm information about the changing job market in agriculture because of machinery. Almond trees are easy to manage, compared with pickier crops like peaches, so the nuts are growing in popularity among farmers.
Part of almond attractiveness is the application of mechanical technology. Farm robots and simpler machines have been improving rapidly in recent years, from hand-like pickers to milk robots to take care of the cows.
Actually, the mechanical almond picker shown in the video below doesn’t look that high-tech compared with some of the new gizmos.
The important point of the increased mechanization is the reduction of jobs, particularly for illegal aliens who account for many of the picker workforce. The good news is the reduced need for foreign workers; the bad news is Washington’s disregard for facts deemed inconvenient. Clearly advances in farm robotics lessen the need for foreign workers in the fields, just as in every other area of employment in America.
The remarkable expansion of almond orchards in Stanislaus County has been an economic boom for growers, but it’s come at a price: fewer farm jobs and less crop diversity.
Literally millions of almond trees have been planted in the county during the past decade. Stanislaus agriculture officials calculate 160,200 acres of almonds were harvested last year, which is about double the acreage harvested 15 years ago.
Thousands of additional acres of almonds are being harvested for the first time this fall.
While many of those are new trees now growing on what had been non-irrigated pastures on the county’s east side, others have replaced once-coveted fruit trees, tomato fields, vegetable farms and dairies.
[. . .]
‘Less stress’ with almonds “There was a time when you made more money growing a cling peach than an almond. That’s not the case anymore,” said Paul Van Konynenburg. His Stanislaus farming operation, Britton Konynenburg Partners, grows 1,100 acres of apples, cherries, apricots and peaches.
But Van Konynenburg said he’ll soon start planting some almond trees. Besides providing a higher return on investment per acre, he said, there’s “absolutely less stress … less headaches and less heartaches” growing almonds than growing fruit.
That’s particularly true because there are fewer labor issues to deal with in almond orchards. For one thing, Van Konynenburg said, farmworkers are “hard to come by” during the fruit harvest season.
“All our fruits are very labor-intensive,” he explained. At the peak of harvest, between his farm’s hired hands and contract laborers, “over 400 people are working” on his 1,100 acres west of Modesto.
Compare that with Trinitas Partners, which has more than 7,000 acres of almonds outside Oakdale. This season, Trinitas employed about 70 full-time and 100 seasonal workers. The Oakdale almond grower managed six times as much acreage with fewer than half as many farmworkers as the Modesto fruit grower.
“It’s not like back in the old days” when farm laborers did all the almond pruning, knocking and raking by hand, said Guadalupe Sandoval, who grew up in Riverbank. “My parents did that work back in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Almonds these days are mechanically harvested. The old joke about why farmers pronounce the word “almond” like they do – “because they have to knock the ‘l’ out of them during harvest” – has been modified, with the word “shake” replacing “knock.”
Machines shake trees, sweep up nuts, prune branches and spray chemicals in modern almond orchards.
“What used to take hundreds of workers is being done by machines now,” said Sandoval, who is managing director for the California Farm Labor Contractor Association. “I wish I could say (those machine operators) are making significantly more money (than hand laborers), but I don’t think they are.” Continue reading this article
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The future America planned by elites will be more crowded and therefore regulated, because order must be enforced to prevent chaos among the increasingly diverse population. Plus, Americans will experience more pavement, less open space and more 
