Below is an excerpt from a new book, The Culture of AI, Everyday Life and the Digital Revolution. Unlike most books now available about the coming technological transformation, it is written by a sociologist rather than a Silicon Valley type. So it may address the cultural effects that arise from automation and smart machines taking a bigger place in the workplace and society generally.
The enormous changes about to descend upon the modern world should be considered more carefully by political leaders in Washington who now seem mostly asleep. America’s jobs economy is booming now, but tech experts think that a more widespread use of robots, automation and artificial intelligence is coming in a few years.
It’s likely that the US won’t need an extra million low-skilled Hondurans (which is current rate of inflow through America’s open border, more or less) in a decade or so when the smart machines become less expensive to hire than even the cheapest illegal alien.
With the AI-powered workplace of tomorrow arriving sooner than expected, what does this mean for us?
The debate about robotics on the future economy and job market is one divided squarely between transformationalists and sceptics, but that debate has in fact been increasingly undermined by the dynamics of AI and its relentless acceleration. Recent evidence indicates that robotics and AI are heavily impacting the economy, destroying low-wage jobs and increasingly eating away at higher-skill occupations as people are increasingly replaced by intelligent algorithms. There is evidence that the workplace of tomorrow, powered by AI and accelerating digital technology, is about to arrive much sooner than anticipated by many analysts.
A 2017 report from the World Economic Forum estimates the net loss of over 5 million jobs across 15 developed countries by 2020. Another report, published by the International Labor Organization, predicts that over 137 million workers in the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia are likely to be replaced by robots in the near future. Moreover, as this tipping point in robotic job deployment is reached, advancing technology is driving many developed economies towards higher inequality. The global digital economy is generating more monopolies and resulting in greater income gaps between rich and poor, with many workers ending up unemployed and many highly skilled professionals increasing their wealth.
Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs has explored the stunning historical impact of machines in reducing the overall burden of work, and also their adverse distributional consequences on wealth. Drawing on US census data, Sachs notes that, whilst agricultural workers comprised 36% of the American labor force in 1900, they made up less than 1% of the labor market in 2015.
There has also been a sharp decline in the numbers of production workers (those working in mining, construction and manufacturing), from 24% in 1900 to 14% in 2015 of the US labor force. For Sachs, mechanization and machines lie at the core of the global shift from rural to urban life.
“Machines”, writes Sachs, “have dramatically eased the toil of most Americans and extended our lives, in stark contrast to the hard, long toil and lower life expectancies that continue for hundreds of millions of people around the world who are still trapped in subsistence agriculture”. Sachs argues that there is a clear disconnect between ongoing labor productivity growth and wages, which is leading to a decline in the share of labor in national income, and one principal reason for this is the displacement of workers by robots and smart machines. Workers most impacted by the astonishing growth in automation, according to Sachs, are those in jobs which are repetitive, predictable, and requiring only low to moderate levels of expertise.
But automation as a system should not be held to involve the progressive displacement of employment in toto. Sceptics have been quick to caution that robots cannot (at least as yet) reprogram or service their own operations. This point is often made by sceptics to underscore that technological innovation creates new, high-skilled jobs. The argument is that robotic automation, in fact, generates job creation for technicians, computer programmers and other newly generated digital workers. But the evidence for this claim looks increasingly brittle. Futurist Martin Ford convincingly shows that the US economy, for instance, has become progressively less effective at creating new jobs. This is largely because disruptive technological shifts are driving people out of the labor force. Most significantly, recent evidence demonstrates that every new robot entering the workplace leads to at least six job losses. Continue reading this article
It’s rare to see workers fight back against automation taking their jobs, but it’s useful for them to have a union that actually helps its clients. That’s what has been going on in the LA docks, where automation has been a source of contention for several years.
Unfortunately for the workers, the containerized shipping industry lends itself very easily to automation: its uniform boxes go smoothly from enormous ocean carriers through the ports to trucks which deliver Asian-produced merchandise to American consumers.
The enormity of Pacific trade is enabled in part by the efficiency of containerized shipping, and roboticized ports are an important cog in the global money-making machine. Having driverless electric cargo trucks is apparently seen by the top office brains as speeding up the process and cutting the large paychecks of workers — funny how the captains of industry forget that well-paid employees are also big-spending shoppers.
Below, a Detroit paper reprinted the LA Times article posted below:
Los Angeles – A fierce struggle over automation has erupted at the Port of Los Angeles, as local union officials representing some 12,000 dockworkers demand that one of the world’s largest shipping firms abandon a plan to introduce driverless electric cargo trucks.
Shouting, whistling and jeering, more than 1,200 union members, local business owners and community activists packed a four-hour hearing Thursday before the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners. The board voted to postpone a construction permit for the automated system after an offer by Mayor Eric Garcetti to mediate the dispute.
“The decision before the board may have far-reaching impacts on the pace of automation at our port and could define how the port will compete and sustain jobs into the foreseeable future,” Garcetti wrote in a letter unveiled at the hearing.
The mayor called for a 28-day delay in deciding on the permit, adding that negotiations “should serve as the basis of a new task force to explore automation and its impacts on the future of the Port of Los Angeles and others across the state.”
Port automation dates to the 1960s, when dockworker unions agreed to the introduction of containers, and consequent job losses, in exchange for higher pay and benefits. Today a typical full-time Southern California longshore worker earns more than $100,000 a year. But thousands of so-called “casuals,” who are not yet registered union members, earn far less, are eligible only for part-time hours, and do not yet get health or retirement benefits.
A 2008 International Longshore and Warehouse Union contract, renewed in 2015, explicitly allowed West Coast ports to continue automating. Two large terminals – one at the Port of Long Beach and one in Los Angeles – have already introduced the driverless vehicles known as UTRs, or utility tractor rigs.
But automation at the 484-acre facility operated for Denmark’s Moller-Maersk by APM Terminals is prompting an uproar from local union members who are having second thoughts about the current contract and believe the permit will lead to automation across all 12 of the port complex’s terminals.
The struggle comes as Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest ports in the nation, are enjoying record cargo traffic, despite the threat of an escalating trade war with China. The twin ports handle a third of U.S. container traffic, but they have lost market share to facilities along the Gulf of Mexico and, since the widening of the Panama Canal, along the East Coast.
APM officials decline to say how many jobs will be eliminated if what they call “self-guided container handling equipment” is introduced. Union officials say hundreds are at stake. One in nine jobs in the five-county region is linked to commerce flowing through the port complex, according to port officials.
APM characterizes its proposed automated, battery-powered vehicles, which would replace diesel-fueled rigs, as a response to the port’s clean air rules. But union officials say APM could introduce manned electric vehicles instead. (Continues)
Of particular interest here is the public’s increased awareness of the automation revolution while Washington remains on snooze mode about the issue.
Posted below is the online article’s section on automation that’s just three paragraphs and one chart. The question used for the graph is curiously restrictive because it asks whether the respondent’s particular occupation will someday be performed by a robot or some form of technology. A better question would be whether the industrialized world will suffer massive, permanent job loss due to automation and artificial intelligence.
The nature of Pew’s question makes it easy for the pollster to disparage less educated persons when their blue collar jobs are indeed more likely to be endangered by technology at first, although few occupations will escape some effects over the long term. White collar jobs are also disappearing because software is crunching the numbers and text, making fewer humans needed in the office.
The good news is that 82 percent of those polled believe that future workplaces will be “heavily automated.” By comparison, a Gallup survey from August 2017 found that only 13 percent of workers were worried that tech would would eliminate their jobs, so awareness seems to be growing.
Hopefully, more citizens will come to realize that smart machines will change the world and Washington must wake up and smell the software. There should be appropriate education and retraining initiatives that suit the unique challenges of the 21st century. And of course America won’t need millions of unskilled Third Worlders because. . .
Automation makes immigration obsolete
For more details, see section 5. The future of work in the automated workplace, starting on page 48 of the full report. In general, Americans are apprehensive of the techno-future, believing that there will be less job security, and economic inequality will worsen. That’s not surprising since nearly half of adults already think the new technology in the workplace has hurt US workers more than it has helped.
Older adults, those with less education more negative about the impact of automation

While only 37% of all currently employed Americans personally see automation as a direct threat to their current occupation, less well-educated workers are likelier than those with more formal schooling to say the type of work they do will be done by robots or computers in the future. About half (47%) of those with a high school diploma or less education say this change will occur compared with 38% of those with some college experience and 27% of those with a bachelor’s or advanced degree.
Most Americans agree that the workplaces of the future will be heavily automated. About eight-in-ten (82%) predict that robots and computers will do much of the work currently done by humans – a possibility that many adults with less education view with suspicion, if not outright dread. Among those who say robots and computers will do much of the work currently done by humans, about eight-in-ten of those with a high school diploma or less education say this would be a bad thing for the country (39% say it would be very bad; 39% say it would be somewhat bad). Those with a bachelor’s degree or more education are less fearful: Roughly six-in-ten say an automated workplace would be very (13%) or somewhat bad (45%).
Regardless of educational background, most Americans predict that automation in the workplace will increase inequality between the rich and the poor and will not result in new, better-paying jobs.
In November of 2017 it was reported that Walmart was trying out floor-scrubber robots in a few of its stores. That testing must have gone well because now the machines are part of a company decision to use technology “to help keep costs in check.”
Walmart’s robot floor cleaner scrubs and polishes all by itself with no worker required to guide it, as shown below:
The following article talks as if regular Walmart employees clean the floors and the robots will allow them more time for “customer-centric” work — don’t the stores have janitors for that chore?
In fact, industrial janitor is a job which many low-skilled immigrants take, so perhaps we needn’t continue importing them when so many such occupations will soon be done by smart machines.
The world’s largest retailer is making a growing bet on robots and artificial intelligence to gain a competitive edge.
Competition in the retail industry has never been more cutthroat. The dawn of e-commerce has caused a paradigm shift, with traditional retailers having to change with the times or fall by the wayside.
Walmart (NYSE:WMT) is representative not only of the old guard of retail, but also of the transition that is happening among brick-and-mortar stores to adapt to this new reality. In addition to a fierce move into e-commerce, the once-stodgy retailer has embraced cutting-edge technology to help keep costs in check and provide a better shopping experience for its customers.
Case in point: Self-propelled robots are now taking on an increasing role in Walmart’s operations.
Walmart is using self-driving robots to scrub floors. Image source: Brain Corp.
The coming of the ‘bots
Walmart recently revealed it’s bringing self-driving robots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to its stores to handle the mundane task of floor cleaning. The Auto-C — Autonomous Cleaner uses assisted autonomy as it navigates around Walmart stores, employing a variety of lasers, cameras, and sensors to scan its surroundings for people and obstacles. This technology allows the self-driving robots to function effectively and safely in complex, crowded environments, which leads to increased productivity and efficiency.
This often-overlooked chore would typically take Walmart associates (what the retailer calls its employees) about two hours per day, on average. Multiply that by more than 11,000 stores worldwide and that’s a lot of time cleaning floors. Having a robot complete the task frees up Walmart employees for other, more customer-centric tasks.
The self-driving floor cleaners were initially tested in about 100 Walmart stores, and the company recently expanded that rollout to 360 stores. (Continues)
Perhaps America needn’t be importing low-skilled foreign workers when smart machines will be replacing humans as soon as the mechanical devices can do the jobs less expensively.
=> MGM is thinking about replacing workers with robot technology in its Las Vegas Strip properties
=> Its 2020 plan calls for reducing thr workforce by about 2,1000 people to save $300m in the coming years
=> Unions and workers will likely react strongly to such a move
=> A McKinsey and Company report estimates that by 2030, 800 million jobs will get robot replacements
Robots taking over employment
Many corporations are embracing the latest robotic technology. Companies can make many processes more cost- and time-efficient by using robots and other types of technology.
In a lot of industries, robots can now be more efficient and productive than people. This sparks the debate about protecting these jobs for humans or to allow robots to make these processes more efficient.
MGM, one of the major global casino companies, is considering replacing some workers with robots, which will cause some concern for their employees and those in the industry as a whole.
The company has been looking into doing this at their MGM properties on the Las Vegas Strip as a way of cutting costs considerably. It is likely that the casino worker unions in Nevada will soon be up in arms about this issue.
Among those who could be replaced are cashiers and bartenders. Automatic technology that can make drinks would replace the bartenders and monetary transactions could be done through standard payment technology.
There would also be mobile payment processors going around the floor with the wait staff, eliminating the need for cashiers. There is no indication as to how many such jobs would be replaced at the MGM properties.
Reaction to this potential move
The unions and workers will not be happy with this news. Jobs will be lost and it may also violate the labor agreement that MGM struck with the unions last summer.
The Las Vegas Culinary Union (LVCU), which represents bartenders, kitchen staff, and wait staff, reached a five-year deal in June 2018 with the MGM.
The agreement guarantees that MGM will not implement any technology that would have a negative impact on employment. However, the news that the MGM is considering replacing some workers with robots could mean that the company is not willing to fulfill this agreement. (Continues)
Andrew Yang is a technology expert who is running for president in 2020 on what might be called a Tech-Caution platform. Unlike the clueless characters currently running our national government, Yang understands the danger of automation and artificial intelligence — that when smart machines take over major employment categories in America, the economy will fail from massive, permanent job loss. Curiously, the brilliant captains of industry are big on developing the cheapest possible manufacturing, but have forgotten that shoppers with healthy incomes are a big part of the economy equation.
For more details on the issues, see the candidate’s website Yang2020.
Why isn’t Washington paying attention to tech experts’ warnings? There’s not a whole lot to be done in the face of such fundamental social change, but certainly America won’t need more immigrant workers, as President Trump has recently suggested in a major reversal of a top campaign promise. That flip-flop is doubly bad because:
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
Audio version:
TUCKER CARLSON: Big tech knows a lot about you, in some cases more than you know about yourself. They certainly know where you go and what you eat. May even know what you think. The only thing it can’t control is what your thoughts are, but they are working on that, too.
In a 2018 phone recording obtained exclusively by this show, Adam Kovacevich — he is Google’s head of U.S. Public Policy — explains to Google employees why the company was a sponsor for CPAC that year. Google sponsored CPAC, he says, because it wouldn’t let them push the party toward a more open borders agenda. Listen:
GOOGLE EXECUTIVE ADAM KOVACEVICH: The Republican Party and the conservatives in general, is also going through a lot of internal debates about what should be the sort of position of the Party and I think that’s one that we should be involved in because we, I think, want probably, the majority of Googlers wants to steer conservatives and Republicans more towards a message of liberty and freedom and away from the more sort of nationalistic incendiary nativist comments and things like that.
CARLSON: Now, as noted, Google has more power than any company has ever had. It has the power of its massive data reserves technology, of course, it has financial power. It has one highest market capped companies in history. It also increasingly has political power though they don’t typically admit it in public.
Kovacevich did admit it. He said that companies like Google are playing quote, “a leadership role” in American politics. He bragged that the company got a support of mass immigration on to a CPAC panel and that person argued in support of Google’s agenda. It shows a lot about big tech’s attitude toward the country. They are in control — elections, parties, democracy, just a hindrance to their control.
So we told you a lot on this show about the potential dangers of big tech. Some of those dangers are imminent, and they are technological, and the main one is robotics and artificial intelligence.
Remarkably, the person, the political figure who is making the most sense on this subject, who has thought about it most deeply is a Democrat who is running for President. He is Andrew Yang. He is an entrepreneur and as we said, he is a Democratic presidential candidate. He says that artificial intelligence and expanded automation could potentially cause violence in this country and that we need to do something about it right now. Andrew Yang joins us tonight.
Andrew, thanks very much for coming on, and I meant that with sincerity. I haven’t heard anybody in our political conversation describe the threat as clearly and compellingly as you have. Why should would he be worried about automation?
CANDIDATE ANDREW YANG: Well, if you look at the backdrop, 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.
CARLSON: What will be the effects of that? That’s a massive displacement of people. What will happen once that happens?
YANG: Well, as you said, I think it’s going to be disastrous, where if you look at truck drivers alone, being a trucker is the most common job in 29 states. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in this country, and 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 and imagining that community recovering from their income going from let’s call it $50,000 a year to much, much less than that catastrophically, it’s going to be a disaster for many, many American communities. Continue reading this article
That approach may have been too gloomy at a time when the jobs economy had been booming, so he is back with an offer of free money — a sure-fire attention getter.
When Fox News host Pete Hegseth asked his guest on Sunday what was up with the cash giveaway, Yang answered, “In my mind, the reason why Donald Trump is our president today is that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, and now we’re about to do the same thing to millions of jobs in retail, call centers, truck drivers, fast food and on and on through the economy. And this message is resounding loud and clear when I talk to Americans in early states around the country.”
Certainly, it is insane for America to continue admitting low-skilled foreigners from peasant economies when machines will be replacing them in a few years. It was disappointing to hear President Trump remark recently that he wanted “more people coming into our country” — a policy which won’t help citizen wages rise and does not recognize the technological train wreck coming our way.
Sunday’s San Jose Mercury-News had a big spread on automation with photos and two articles. One is of the Don’t-Worry style — Robot-made coffee and burgers in SF? How automation is affecting jobs — produced by the SJM and appropriate to the tech-friendly view of the Silicon Valley town.
Below, a front page photo asks the big question of job displacement:
The other article is from the New York Times and it takes a more critical view of the brave new world that technology is creating. It looks realistically at the bifurcated workforce of the future, where a small techno-literate group is financially safe and the remaining millions of ordinary workers are left out to dry.
The article is filled with facts about historical trends arising from mechanization and bears careful reading. It notes how the 2018 Brookings study (Is Automation Labor-Displacing?) found that “over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.” So now “productivity” is a buzzword that may indicate potential job loss.
Certainly the workplace is about to change fundamentally, and low-skilled people like the thousands of Central American aliens claiming asylum will not be needed at any wage because the machines will soon be cheaper and more efficient. Indeed, the United States will not need any low-skilled immigrant workers, because:
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
The New York Times article is reprinted in another paper, linked below:
PHOENIX — It’s hard to miss the dogged technological ambition pervading this sprawling desert metropolis.
There’s Intel’s $7 billion, 7-nanometer chip plant going up in Chandler. In Scottsdale, Axon, the maker of the Taser, is hungrily snatching talent from Silicon Valley as it embraces automation to keep up with growing demand. Startups in fields as varied as autonomous drones and blockchain are flocking to the area, drawn in large part by light regulation and tax incentives. Arizona State University is furiously churning out engineers.
And yet for all its success in drawing and nurturing firms on the technological frontier, Phoenix cannot escape the uncomfortable pattern taking shape across the U.S. economy: Despite all its shiny new high-tech businesses, the vast majority of new jobs are in workaday service industries, like health care, hospitality, retail and building services, where pay is mediocre.
The forecast of an America where robots do all the work while humans live off some yet-to-be-invented welfare program may be a Silicon Valley pipe dream. But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.
Automation is splitting the U.S. labor force into two worlds. There is a small island of highly educated professionals making good wages at corporations like Intel or Boeing, which reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per employee. That island sits in the middle of a sea of less educated workers who are stuck at businesses like hotels, restaurants and nursing homes that generate much smaller profits per employee and stay viable primarily by keeping wages low.
Even economists are reassessing their belief that technological progress lifts all boats, and are beginning to worry about the new configuration of work.
Recent research has concluded that robots are reducing the demand for workers and weighing down wages, which have been rising more slowly than the productivity of workers. Some economists have concluded that the use of robots explains the decline in the share of national income going into workers’ paychecks over the last three decades.
[. . .]
In 1900, agriculture employed 12 million Americans. By 2014, tractors, combines and other equipment had flushed 10 million people out of the sector. But as farm labor declined, the industrial economy added jobs even faster. What happened? As the new farm machines boosted food production and made produce cheaper, demand for agricultural products grew. And farmers used their higher incomes to purchase newfangled industrial goods.
The new industries were highly productive and also subject to furious technological advancement. Weavers lost their jobs to automated looms; secretaries lost their jobs to Microsoft Windows. But each new spin of the technological wheel, from plastic toys to televisions to computers, yielded higher incomes for workers and more sophisticated products and services for them to buy.
Something different is going on in our current technological revolution. In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.
The only reason employment didn’t fall across the entire economy is that other industries, with less productivity growth, picked up the slack. “The challenge is not the quantity of jobs,” they wrote. “The challenge is the quality of jobs available to low- and medium-skill workers.”
Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work does not grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.
“Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject: The Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right,” Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary and presidential economic adviser, said in a lecture at the National Bureau of Economic Research five years ago. “I’m not so completely certain now.”
It’s hard to feel sorry for journalists losing their employment because of automation since so many of them have never been sympathetic to the job loss of American workers caused by inexpensive immigrants. But now smart machines are moving into news offices and are already cranking out articles that are heavy on numbers, like finance and sports.
The techno-trend is called “efficiency” and is supposed to allow writers to pursue more interesting subjects, but the bottom line is always the money: when machines or software can do the job more cheaply, then the humans are history.
As a result of smart machines, not only are Honduran laborers likely to become obsolete in a few years, so are H-1b foreigners working white collar jobs. It makes no sense to continue importing immigrants when the future will be automated. America will need all its remaining jobs for citizens.
As reporters and editors find themselves the victims of layoffs at digital publishers and traditional newspaper chains alike, journalism generated by machine is on the rise.
Roughly a third of the content published by Bloomberg News uses some form of automated technology. The system used by the company, Cyborg, is able to assist reporters in churning out thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter.
The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures. And unlike business reporters, who find working on that kind of thing a snooze, it does so without complaint.
Untiring and accurate, Cyborg helps Bloomberg in its race against Reuters, its main rival in the field of quick-twitch business financial journalism, as well as giving it a fighting chance against a more recent player in the information race, hedge funds, which use artificial intelligence to serve their clients fresh facts.
“The financial markets are ahead of others in this,” said John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg.
In addition to covering company earnings for Bloomberg, robot reporters have been prolific producers of articles on minor league baseball for The Associated Press, high school football for The Washington Post and earthquakes for The Los Angeles Times.
Some examples of machine-generated articles from The Associated Press:
TYSONS CORNER, Va. (AP) — MicroStrategy Inc. (MSTR) on Tuesday reported fourth-quarter net income of $3.3 million, after reporting a loss in the same period a year earlier.
MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — Jonathan Davis hit for the cycle, as the New Hampshire Fisher Cats topped the Portland Sea Dogs 10-3 on Tuesday.
Last week, The Guardian’s Australia edition published its first machine-assisted article, an account of annual political donations to the country’s political parties. And Forbes recently announced that it was testing a tool called Birdie to provide reporters with rough drafts and story templates. (Continues)
In the roboticized, automated and artificially intelligent future that the world faces, Third World nations will have even fewer possibilities for coping than more advanced countries. Africa, for example, now offers cheap labor for manufacturing, and the Economist called the continent An awakening giant in 2014.
However, Africa’s industrial boomlet may be cut short by cheaper automation in the United States:
Automation in US factories could increase global migration by wiping out employment opportunities in Africa, according to a development industry expert.
Sara Pantuliano, acting executive director of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), told the Davos summit that unemployed Africans would be more likely to leave the continent if local manufacturing jobs dried up in the face of renewed US competition.
She highlighted recent ODI research which suggested operating robots in US factories could become cheaper than hiring Kenyan workers by 2033.
The cost of creating and using robots is expected to fall in wealthier countries, and could reach a tipping point where it becomes more efficient than using cheap labour in poorer countries.
On some manufacturing floors, human workers can be hard to find.
Of course, Africa won’t be the only underdeveloped region to be hit by automation; they will all be affected. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything other than severe social disruption arising from areas where severe job loss occurs.
Two problems developing countries face in an AI future
Artificial Intelligence is likely to make a dramatic impact on developing countries that rely on lower wages to generate a competitive advantage. This will include countries that provide low cost offshore manufacturing as well as countries like India, which are more focused on service offshoring.
There are two problems developing countries face in an AI future:
1. Much of the work available in developing countries is relatively unskilled and routine, repetitive and predictable in nature. Work of this type is destined to be automated. This will be true in both developed and developing countries, but some economists believe the impact could be especially hard on poorer nations because a greater fraction of their workforce is engaged in work of this type.
2. The traditional path to economic development has been to build factories which employ large numbers of unskilled workers. As AI and robotics advance there will be less and less need for such labor-intensive factories (or for service offshoring) of this kind. Much of this production will end up being “reshored” to developed countries where it will be produced using highly automated facilities.
As this traditional path to economic growth begins to evaporate, this will pose a real challenge. In fact economists have already identified what they call “premature deindustrialization” in many developing countries — in other words, companies are replacing their factory workers with automation before they have the means to do so.
The present low unemployment is likely to end in a few years when robots, automation and artificial intelligence become more widely used in the workplace. The article linked below observed that at the recent Davos meeting of elite globalists, in private, rather than promoting re-training, leaders admitted “the more automation, the better.”
So that’s the future economic elites plan for the rest of us.
Below, long unemployment lines will certainly reappear in the automated future.
We often think of automation as affecting physical occupations like farming and manufacturing, but the SynOps technology developed by Accenture is office oriented, performing tasks in finance, accounting, marketing and procurement. The company brags that it eliminated 40,000 human workers within its own ranks.
Over the last five years, the global management consulting company Accenture has developed proprietary automation software called the SynOps platform that it says has helped it cut 40,000 jobs within the company.
First, allow me to apologize for being forced to string together some of the dullest words in the English language, as few industries manage to deaden the soul and glaze over the eyes as potently as business consulting. Second, let me get to the news: Accenture is now putting this software up for sale, ostensibly allowing any mid-to-large-sized companies to automate their lower-level employees out of jobs.
According to Bloomberg, SynOps “suggests ways to streamline and automate processes in areas such as finance and accounting, marketing and procurement.” Synops is part of the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) boom, which is led by companies like UiPath, and which seek to automate jobs that occupy the so-called “repetitive cognitive” quadrant of jobs, like, say, data entry.
Accenture Operations, the company’s outsourcing unit, once used human workers in mostly low-wage countries such as India, to handle routine data entry and customer service tasks for clients. Now that unit is hoping this new software will help clients’ achieve further savings by — at least in some cases — eliminating the need for humans altogether.
For instance, if used in procurement, the SynOps system can take an order, generate an invoice, check that invoice against a contract, correct any errors and then email it to the customer.
Accenture insists that all of the workers whose jobs were cut were retrained, and the group chief executive officer of Accenture Operations gives the oft-repeated bromide that, “This is not trying to get rid of the human… but to make them as productive as possible and get them to focus on the work that a human really needs to do.”
To which I say—right. And the aim of automating factories was definitely not eliminating human labor, but giving workers more fun and efficient things to do on the assembly line As Kevin Roose pointed out in his recent column about the public and private sides of the Davos set’s true motivations on automation, executives and management are beyond eager to start cutting headcount. Though they may bandy about terms like “retrain workers” and “make humans more productive” in public, privately, the aim is clear: the more automation, the better. (Continues)
It’s not news that when an economic downturn hits, business looks to cut numbers of expensive employees, but these days, the entrance of smart machines into the workplace makes the layoffs even easier for executives. It has happened before and it will happen again.
In fact, a 2013 investigation by the Associated Press found that good jobs lost in the economic downturn aren’t coming back: AP IMPACT: Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs. Companies chose to become more efficient by laying human workers off and substituting automation and software for a range of employment from farm pickers to educated office workers.
We can therefore expect similar behavior in the next recession, as is forecast in a Washington Post article, reprinted in the Houston Chronicle, linked below.
The piece utilizes the recent Brookings report, Automation and Artificial Intelligence. It presents a reassuring tone, suggesting that robots “will bring neither an apocalypse nor utopia.”
So forget about those scary predictions like the shocker on a recent Sixty Minutes show that “in 15 years, [automation is] going to displace about 40 percent of the jobs in the world.”
All in all, the best course is probably to bet on the profit urge among business executives — and when machines become cheaper than workers to perform a task, the humans will go.
The Post article observes, “Hispanic workers are more exposed than any other race or ethnic group” to the automation threat, though without connecting the educational component or ability to speak English.
Immigrants are not mentioned at all in the Brookings report, although the recent batch of illegal aliens from Honduras won’t be suitable for any useful work before too long. Foreigners whose skills consist of Third-World farming techniques will not be employable even at menial labor when the cheap robots come galloping into the workplace.
The coming automation spurt will likely bring enormous welfare costs because of crazy liberal immigration of unskilled persons.
In this May 3, 2018, file photo a worker lifts a lunch bowl off the production line at Spyce, a restaurant which uses a robotic cooking process, in Boston. Robots aren’t replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of today’s work, according to a new Brookings Institution report published Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019.
Robots’ infiltration of the workforce doesn’t happen gradually, at the pace of technology. It happens in surges, when companies are given strong incentives to tackle the difficult task of automation.
Typically, those incentives occur during recessions. Employers slash payrolls going into a downturn and, out of necessity, turn to software or machinery to take over the tasks once performed by their laid-off workers as business begins to recover.
As uncertainty soars, a shutdown drags on, and consumer confidence sputters, economists increasingly predict a recession this year or next. Whenever this long economic expansion ends, the robots will be ready. The human labor market is tight, with the unemployment rate at 3.9 percent, but there’s plenty of slack in the robot labor force.
This next wave of automation won’t just be sleek robotic arms on factory floors. It will be ordering kiosks, self-service apps and software smart enough to perfect schedules and cut down on the workers needed to cover a shift. Employers are already testing these systems. A recession will force them into the mainstream.
A new analysis from Mark Muro, Robert Maxim and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, finds much of the nation will be susceptible to the upheaval caused by automation in coming decades, particularly young people, minorities and Rust Belt workers.
The total number of jobs will rise in the long run, but many workers will be forced to adapt. Robots will continue to roil the long-suffering manufacturing sector, Brookings finds. They will also move into low-skill service jobs such as food services workers once considered too cheap or too difficult to automate.
Economists generally focus on workers performing repetitive tasks, including rote mental or clerical work in an office cubicle and rote manual labor on a factory floor, to measure the influence of technology.
Middle-income work has evaporated in recent decades. Americans are now divided between the high-paid employees who design machines, the low-paid workers who sweeps up after it, or the even lower-paid service workers who serves fast-casual sandwiches to the other two.
In an upcoming paper from Review of Economics and Statistics, economists Nir Jaimovich of the University of Zurich and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia found that 88 percent of job loss in routine occupations occurs within 12 months of a recession. In the 1990-1991, 2001 and 2008-2009 recessions, routine jobs accounted for “essentially all” of the jobs lost. They regained almost no ground during the subsequent recoveries.
Firms in cities hit hardest by the Great Recession raised their skill requirements for new employees and invested more in technology, according to economists Brad Hershbein of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Lisa Kahn of the University of Rochester.
Their 2018 American Economic Review analysis of almost 100 million online postings collected by Burning Glass Technologies in 2007 and 2010-2015 found strong signs companies were replacing workers who performed routine tasks with a combination of technology and more skilled workers. The effect was especially pronounced for “cognitive” workers such as office clerks, office administrators and salespeople.
The economy is near full employment – the point at which everyone who wants a job has one. The unemployment rate has been at or below 4.0 percent for 10 straight months.
But the labor market for robots has room to grow. As wages rise and human help gets pricey, companies have experimented with alternatives.
The Washington Post’s Peter Holley has tapped into a deep vein of corporate automation efforts in recent months. Cooler-sized robots deliver food for $1.99 at George Mason University in suburan Washington. Tall, slim robot assistants patrol Giant supermarkets in search of spills and hazards. Walmart planned to install 360 floor-cleaning robot zambonis by the end of January. A start-up called Robomart hopes to start running mobile supermarkets in robotic minivans in the Boston area in partnership with Stop & Shop.
But while many businesses dabble, few have gone all-in — yet. (Continues)
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The debate about robotics on the future economy and job market is one divided squarely between transformationalists and sceptics, but that debate has in fact been increasingly undermined by the dynamics of AI and its relentless acceleration. Recent evidence indicates that robotics and AI are heavily impacting the economy, destroying low-wage jobs and increasingly eating away at higher-skill occupations as people are increasingly replaced by intelligent algorithms. There is evidence that the workplace of tomorrow, powered by AI and accelerating digital technology, is about to arrive much sooner than anticipated by many analysts.
