It’s a rare thing for the massive job loss associated with future automation to be discussed on television, but Wednesday’s coverage on Fox Business followed the Sixty Minutes report last Sunday — a two-fer in one week. But unlike CBS’ Scott Pelley, who seemed afraid to confront the idea that artificial intelligence would displace 40 percent of world jobs within 15 years, Charles Payne waded right in to the thorny topic of technology-caused unemployment in the millions.
Payne’s guest was Karen Harris, Bain & Company’s Macro Trends Group managing director, who is knowledgeable on the topic of the automated future. She was one of three authors in a major paper, Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality from that company, which reports that “automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs.”
Below, a chart from Bain & Company’s report Labor 2030 showing that 40 million US jobs are at risk from automation:
So America won’t be needing any more low-skilled immigrants, like the thousands streaming here from Honduras etc. Think of all the billions of dollars we could save on various benefits for the uninvited moochers. But Washington remains asleep to the social and economic earthquake facing the nation from the jobless automated future.
Here’s the conversation from Fox Business:
CHARLES PAYNE: The long anticipated age of robots and artificial intelligence is upon us, and as we cheer innovation many wonder what the eventual human toll would be? I was hoping it would blow up the so-called supply chain, the excuse for offshoring American jobs, but then this morning I read about a US camera-equipped robot patrolling grocery store aisles, looking for spills. Now what happens is the robot will detect one and alert a human worker in the control center — in the Philippines. Joining me is managing director of Bain and Company’s Macro Trends Group, Karen Harris. Thanks for joining us.
KAREN HARRIS: Thanks for having me.
PAYNE: We’re all excited about all the automation right there; we’re in the midst of it, right? We are making that transition right now, and there’s a lot of questions about how it impacts jobs, and don’t worry about it, but this time it feels different, doesn’t it?
HARRIS: I think you’re absolutely right. We’re early in the phase of robotics and automation, especially in the service sector. When Bain looked at this project, what we see with machine learning, the kind of sensors you have and human hand dexterity that’s available today — between now and 2030, we could lose 30 to 40 million jobs, which is about 20 to 25 percent of the workforce. So, the most disruptive thing that’s happened to the labor pool in 100 years.
PAYNE: In the past of course, the fears were overcome by productivity, the different jobs that were opened up. I mean, there won’t be a parallel 20 or 30 million jobs that replace those that are lost?
HARRIS: Eventually — I believe in the innovation of the American economy — but eventually we’ll be better off.
PAYNE: But if a robot builds a robot, if a computer gets smarter and smarter — where do we fit in that equation?
HARRIS: Good question. We know there are jobs that humans are better at doing: for example, if you think about elder care. There is a physical labor of helping a older person, but also the cognitive stimulus, playing games, listening to stories. . .
PAYNE: Reading a teleprompter.
HARRIS: Reading a teleprompter, that forestalls dementia. We’ll see innovation, I think to your point, the transition, this is twice as broad and twice as fast as the transition from agriculture to industry — so it’s going to be a turbulent period while we go through this.
PAYNE: It’s interesting, we’re in the midst of a big dispute with China, and a lot of big businesses are arguing, hey, you’re disrupting supply chain. To me it’s a euphemism for cheap labor. And if robots are doing so many jobs, wouldn’t the supply chain change in and of itself, and shouldn’t we be bigger beneficiaries of that?
HARRIS: The sequencing is something really important here. So when Bain looked at this work, we looked at demographics, automation and the impact on inequality. And what we saw was, right now we’re in a period where for the first time in decades, the labor pool is getting smaller globally. So to your point, as the labor pool is expanding, labor got cheaper overseas, we built the long supply chains.
Now that the labor pool is shrinking in China and Germany, growing more slowly in the US, costs rise, robotics get cheaper, and we see this uptick of automation replacing workers. And so that should and will bring more and more production onshore in developed countries like America and create some real strengths for emerging markets that count on shipping to us.
PAYNE: That’s tough for the emerging markets, great news for America, but in the transition period — in the minute we have left — in your report, you talk about the 10- or 15-year boom, but you also talk about highly skilled or high income labor. When General Motors announced that they were closing a plant, they couldn’t say, hey, we know the people are working at this plant have been working here 30 or 40 years, they couldn’t say but they don’t have the skillset to do what we need them to do, and yet that is really probably what is going on here. How do we get Americans those skillsets?
HARRIS: That is the third step, the demographics, inequality and automation, that the early phases of this go to highly skilled workers. . .
PAYNE: Who is responsible — government or business or a combination of both?
HARRIS: It has to be combination. Our clients are really worried about helping people who work for them find new jobs and new opportunities, but each individual company can’t help everyone, so we all need to participate in that.
Here’s an interesting take on automation-caused employment reduction in the office environment: not every job-killing change comes from a mandate sent down by corporate headquarters; sometimes a simple procedural adjustment suggested by a worker or an improvement to more efficient software can result with a co-worker’s job made obsolete.
During his first day on the job at a small 3D-modelling company, Griffith noticed that his new colleagues’ workstations were hopelessly out of date. So he took the initiative to suggest some automation upgrades to the higher-ups, who concurred. Two years later, 20 employees—some of them good friends—were out of work.
“I feel bad because I knew these people well,” Griffith, which is not his real name, tells me. He says feels responsible because he kicked off the project, and after it was underway, he quickly realized they’d lose their jobs. “But I was powerless to stop it.”
Automation is too often presented as a faceless, monolithic phenomenon—but it’s a human finger that ultimately pulls the trigger. Someone has to initiate the process that automates a task or mechanizes a production line. To write or procure the program that makes a department or a job redundant. And that’s not always an executive, or upper-, or even middle management—in fact, it’s very often not. Sometimes it’s a junior employee, or a developer, even an intern.
Inside many companies, automation doesn’t simply unfold as a top-down imperative. It can stem from random efficiency experiments or pilot programs initiated by employees who don’t always intend for their ideas to cascade into large-scale job loss. In some cases, management will ask a junior staff to spearhead an automation initiative (perhaps, some speculate, to help redirect blame for the job-eliminating policies). When either happens, it can lead to long-term guilt, confusion, and regret on the part of the automator—few people want to delete their friends’ or colleagues’ jobs—and embitterment and anger on the part of the automated.
In a series of interviews with coders, technicians, and engineers who’ve automated their colleagues out of work—or, in one case, been put in a position where they’d have to do so and decided to quit instead—I’ve attempted to produce a snapshot of life on the messy front lines of modern automation. (Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the automators.) We’ve heard plenty of forecasting about the many jobs slated to be erased, and we’ve seen the impacts on the communities that have lost livelihoods at the hands of automation, but we haven’t had many close up looks at how all this unfolds in the office or the factory floor.
So, I was hoping to examine the politics of automation within today’s workplaces, and how the phenomenon unfolds in smaller businesses and in circumstances beyond corporate fiat. To take stock of the personal impacts this strain of automation might unleash. Some automators carry regret and guilt for years; others say they’re only automating bad jobs, or are doing work assigned to them—and expected of them—by management.
So how does automation roll through a workplace in real-time? Who suffers the consequences, and who lives with the responsibility? Sometimes, those who are left feeling guiltiest are the ones made to pull the trigger—enterprising junior employees or staffers with innovative ideas—who see their colleagues get the ax, usually without even seeing any of the profit gains or material benefits the company subsequently enjoys.
Erin Winick was a sophomore mechanical engineering student when she took a summer internship at a southern California tech company. She was enthusiastic about 3D printing, so a manager there soon asked her to use the technology to streamline an older mold-making process. That meant studying up with the man then in charge of the process, whom I”ll call Gary. It soon dawned on both of them that if her project succeeded, Gary would be out of a job.
“I remember explicitly feeling my heart beat faster when we had the initial conversation,” Winick tells me in an email. “It was some nervousness and some guilt for sure. When I first got the project I didn’t realize what it would involve.” Winick would later write about the experience for MIT Technology Review, where she’s now an associate editor: “As he described the process and his role in it, I realized that making molds was Gary’s sole responsibility. He had spent over 30 years perfecting these tools and parts.” This was his life’s work.
At first, Gary was friendly, eager to show a new hand the ropes. After he realized what was happening—well, less so. “Each time we spoke, I was closer to making a working product—and more nervous about telling him how things were going,” Winick writes. “I felt that by doing so, I was letting him know how close he was to losing his job.” But the project moved ahead, and the company said it would retrain Gary to work on the new printers. It turned out he wasn’t much interested in learning a new job three decades into his career, however, and took the news as the latest in a long line of slights from management. “More of the feeling of guilt came about over the summer,” Winick tells me, “as I saw he was unhappy and didn’t want to work in another role.”
[. . .]
In perhaps the most cited study on the topic, researchers found that 47 percent of American jobs are still susceptible to automation. A more recent one estimated 800 million jobs worldwide will be wiped away. So there’s a fairly pressing imperative to understand how automation is instigated, how it flows through departments, how it’s coped with by employees—and even how it can be mitigated or better harnessed to yield more equitable returns. (Continues)
Jeff Bezo’s incorporation of automation into online shopping has made Amazon the world leader in e-commerce by utilizing the technology of robots. His business acumen has also made him the richest man on earth, worth around $150 billion.
Now the holiday sales statistics are in, and the system is working well: there were more items ordered and shipped worldwide than ever before — with fewer human workers.
It has long been a talking point among businesses going big on automation that they were adding the machines to “help” human workers, not replace them. Of course it make no sense for a business to invest heavily in modern robotics just to make work easier for the humans — the long term plan is large scale replacement, such as has taken place in automotive manufacturing.
Below, humans have largely disappeared from some aspects of building cars.
The jobs economy is booming now — thanks to Trump’s economic policies — but when machines become cheaper than human workers, replacement will happen. Amazon is a leading indicator of robotic trends, which we should watch closely.
Finally, it goes without saying that low-skilled immigrants are totally obsolete in the future automation economy.
The day after Christmas, Amazon celebrated its own annual holiday tradition: announcing record-breaking sales in a very long press release that affirms its status as the largest retailer in the known universe. As such, Jeff Bezos’s Big Store said that in 2018, it surpassed its own sales records with “More Items Ordered Worldwide Than Ever Before.” Of course, Amazon announces some version of that milestone just about every year, as it continues to upend brick-and-mortar stores and march into new digital markets around the globe.
What is notable, though, is that this time, Amazon hit its record with fewer seasonal employees than, yes, ever before. As Alison Griswold reported in Quartz at the beginning of the holiday hiring season, Amazon brought on 20,000 fewer part-time workers than in 2017 or 2016. And it still managed to moved more products than any time in its history. More items shipping, fewer people shipping them—the equation’s pretty clear. Amazon’s embrace of automation is beginning to show itself, and it’s beginning to bear fruit for Bezos and co.
Amazon bought Kiva Systems, a company that built warehouse robots, back in 2012, and has long been integrating automation into its supply chain. It is experimenting with autonomous delivery vehicles. Last year, Amazon expanded its cashier-less grocery store chain. And Amazon has pursued more fantastical autonomous visions, from its ever-ephemeral delivery drones to robot-proof worker cages employees might use to navigate a heavily autonomous environment. It even automates its top-tier white collar jobs.
But it’s only now that it looks like the company’s initiatives are poised to seriously impact hiring—the company had been expanding and growing at such a rapid clip (sometimes upwards of 40 percent revenue per quarter) and so had been hiring (especially in its fulfillment centers) like crazy too. There was room for both, and Amazon, ever sensitive to claims that it is automating jobs away, stressed that its robotics augmented work, not eliminate it.
In September 2017, the New York Times ran a short documentary about Amazon’s palletizer robots, which the company claimed had not led to any job cuts. “Amazon has preserved job growth at its factories so far,” the Times wrote. “Whether it can continue to do so is a subject of debate.” A year later, the answer seems to be that it will not. With the company’s growth rates currently expected to slow and to settle in the 20-30 percent range, and its automation technology maturing, the smart money says we’ll see it chip into job availability.
“We’ve seen an acceleration in the use of robots within their fulfillment centers, and that has corresponded with fewer and fewer workers that they’re hiring around the holidays,” Citi analyst Mark May told CNBC last November. This was, he said, the “first time on record” that Amazon planned to hire fewer holiday workers than it did the previous year, in the company’s 20-year lifespan. (Continues)
This is an interesting report, showing that Americans are not all ready to be marched by corporate elites into the automated, jobless future.
Below, Waymo self-driving cars are being tested — and abused by citizens — in Chandler, Arizona.
In an earlier time, workers known as Luddites destroyed factory machinery to protest technology seen as taking their employment. Today, the job-eliminating machines are visible in the community, seen by taxpaying drivers and pedestrians. As a result, the self-driving cars are convenient targets for citizens who don’t accept the corporate automation agenda. The physical attacks on self-driving cars suggest a building anger on the part of the public.
CHANDLER, Ariz. — The assailant slipped out of a park around noon one day in October, zeroing in on his target, which was idling at a nearby intersection — a self-driving van operated by Waymo, the driverless-car company spun out of Google.
He carried out his attack with an unidentified sharp object, swiftly slashing one of the tires. The suspect, identified as a white man in his 20s, then melted into the neighborhood on foot.
The slashing was one of nearly two dozen attacks on driverless vehicles over the past two years in Chandler, a city near Phoenix where Waymo started testing its vans in 2017. In ways large and small, the city has had an early look at public misgivings over the rise of artificial intelligence, with city officials hearing complaints about everything from safety to possible job losses.
Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.
In one of the more harrowing episodes, a man waved a .22-caliber revolver at a Waymo vehicle and the emergency backup driver at the wheel. He told the police that he “despises” driverless cars, referencing the killing of a female pedestrian in March in nearby Tempe by a self-driving Uber car.
“There are other places they can test,” said Erik O’Polka, 37, who was issued a warning by the police in November after multiple reports that his Jeep Wrangler had tried to run Waymo vans off the road — in one case, driving head-on toward one of the self-driving vehicles until it was forced to come to an abrupt stop.
His wife, Elizabeth, 35, admitted in an interview that her husband “finds it entertaining to brake hard” in front of the self-driving vans, and that she herself “may have forced them to pull over” so she could yell at them to get out of their neighborhood. The trouble started, the couple said, when their 10-year-old son was nearly hit by one of the vehicles while he was playing in a nearby cul-de-sac.
“They said they need real-world examples, but I don’t want to be their real-world mistake,” said Mr. O’Polka, who runs his own company providing information technology to small businesses.
“They didn’t ask us if we wanted to be part of their beta test,” added his wife, who helps run the business.
At least 21 such attacks have been leveled at Waymo vans in Chandler, as first reported by The Arizona Republic. Some analysts say they expect more such behavior as the nation moves into a broader discussion about the potential for driverless cars to unleash colossal changes in American society. The debate touches on fears ranging from eliminating jobs for drivers to ceding control over mobility to autonomous vehicles.
“People are lashing out justifiably,” said Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist at City University of New York and author of the book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.” He likened driverless cars to robotic incarnations of scabs — workers who refuse to join strikes or who take the place of those on strike.
“There’s a growing sense that the giant corporations honing driverless technologies do not have our best interests at heart,” Mr. Rushkoff said. “Just think about the humans inside these vehicles, who are essentially training the artificial intelligence that will replace them.” (Continues)
It’s unusual to hear a national leader pointing out the approaching danger to workers and the economy posed by smart machines — in fact, I can’t recall another example. Perhaps top politicians of smaller countries feel more free because unusual remarks won’t upset the international order.
If only President Trump would do likewise — he could say, correctly, that automation makes immigration obsolete because machines will soon be doing a lot of the work. But he hasn’t.
The Taoiseach has said many professions could be affected, meaning people will need to upskill and retrain.
LEO VARADKAR HAS warned that robots and artificial intelligence (AI) pose a risk to people’s jobs.
When asked about how this could impact workers in Ireland, the Taoiseach said most jobs are “vulnerable to digitalisation or automatisation”, adding: “The important thing now is that we think ahead.
“Almost anyone in employment at all levels could potentially lose their jobs as a result of AI, robotics or automation.
“Even some jobs done by doctors – looking at slides could well be done by machines much more accurately using machine-learning and AI so it’s jobs at absolutely all levels that can be affected by changes in technology.”
Varadkar then joked: “I’m not sure if we’ll have artificial intelligence to replace TDs and Senators or robot ministers, who knows. You get accused of being robotic sometimes.”
Drivers
The Taoiseach noted that about 16% of men in the country drive for a living – including as taxi drivers, bus drivers, train drivers and delivery drivers.
He said if this type of work is automated “that would change that whole world of going to work”. (Continues)
Year-end lists can be an interesting review of the blur that modern life has become, and the evolution of technology is extra rapid by its nature.
Wired’s list of robotics shows no interest in associated job loss for human workers, but if you look closely, the improving capabilities of smart machines are a warning of things to come. In one example, robots are placed in Airbnbs to familiarize themselves with the environment — with duties in housekeeping to follow, presumably.
DEPENDING ON YOUR perspective, 2018 either brought us closer to salvation by way of robots, or closer to doom by way of robots: Where some see the end of meaningless work, others see the end of humanity, also meaningless. (We’re in the former camp, by the way.) Whatever your biases toward the machines, this year has been a big one for the field of robotics, which continues to roll around joyously in the convergence of falling prices, better software and hardware, and skyrocketing demand from industry.
Given that it’s That Time of Year again, we’ve collected a list of the biggest moments in robotics in 2018, from the continued ascendance of Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini quadruped to the rapid rise and fall of the home robot.
Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog, Finally Unleashed — Taking a quick break from uploading videos of its humanoid robot Atlas doing backflips, Boston Dynamics announced that one of its machines, the four-legged SpotMini, will finally go on sale in 2019. The question now becomes: What do you do with a robot that can fight off stick-wielding humans? One idea might be to load it up with cameras to run security details, or to inspect construction sites. Whatever the case, SpotMini’s forthcoming career in the real world is a big deal for robots of all kinds, which have struggled to escape factories and labs to walk among us.
Goodbye Baxter, the Gentle Giant Among Robots — Alas, as one robot’s career begins, another ends. In October, Rethink Robotics said it was folding, meaning its most famous offering, Baxter, faces retirement. It’s hard to overstate the impact Baxter has had on robotics—because of its low price point and ease of use, it’s become the go-to research platform in universities the world over. Inevitably, though, another more advanced platform will take its place. But let’s give a hand to Baxter, the Robot That Launched a Thousand Discoveries.
Darpa’s Robots Go Underground — Baxter had the luxury of relatively clean, dry, climate-controlled environs, but not so for the machines of Darpa’s next robotics challenge (the same variety of challenge that gave us the unintentionally hilarious face-planting bipeds of 2015). This year the far-out research wing of the Pentagon detailed a grueling underground course through caves and tunnels and bunkers. Unlike previous challenges, teams will be able to deploy a variety of robots that work together to overcome one of the most brutal environments on Earth.
Robots Take Vacations in Airbnbs — Even robots need the occasional change of scene. This year Carnegie Mellon University researchers booked their robots rooms in Airbnbs. The rooms were rented to teach the robots how to manipulate objects in unfamiliar environments. Because teaching a robot how to grasp things in the lab just won’t cut it: To get the machines to work well in the real world, researchers have to train them how to recognize objects against unfamiliar backgrounds, like patterned carpet. And yes, in case you were wondering, the owners of the Airbnbs were notified beforehand that their renters were robots. And yes, they got along famously. (Continues)
It’s disappointing that nobody in official Washington is paying attention to the threat of automation to the human workforce and existing economy. After all, the predictions from experts about the automated future are daunting — remember the worst unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 25 percent, but far worse is forecast for coming decades.
It’s refreshing to hear a tech-wise Silicon Valley guy speak up about the threat in a political sense. In a February article in the New York Times (His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming), Andrew Yang (pictured at right) observed, “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society. . . That one innovation will be enough to create riots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”
Earlier this year, Yang’s book “The War on Normal People” was published. The Introduction includes a discussion with an automation executive who works to replace call center workers: “We are getting better and better at things that will make large numbers of workers extraneous. And we will succeed. There needs to be a dramatic reskilling of the workforce, but that’s not going to be practical for a lot of people. It’s impossible to avoid a lost generation of workers.”
So it’s unwise to America to continue low-skilled immigration, like the thousands of Central American caravansters who enter as asylum seekers but never show up for their hearings. Most jobs they could handle will be performed by machines in a few years.
Andrew Yang announced he is vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination back in February. His mission? Preparing America for automation.
But how is he going to do that? I got the chance to sit down with him at the Work Awesome conference in New York yesterday to ask him about his stances on trucking automation, AI policy, and his favorite topic, universal basic income (UBI).
ERIN WINICK: Why focus on automation and UBI? They aren’t common topics for presidential candidates.
ANDREW YANG: The reason why I’m focused on this issue is I’m convinced it’s driving the social, economic, and political dysfunction we are seeing. The reason why Donald Trump is our president today is we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa, all the swing states he needed to win and did win. And everyone who works in technology knows full well we are about to do the same to millions of retail workers, call center workers, fast food workers, truck drivers, and on and on throughout the economy.
For me, there was no choice in the matter. It wasn’t like, “I’m going to run for president and I’m going to decide which issue to focus on.” I’m running for president because I know that we’re in the third inning of the greatest economic transformation of industry in the world and that our politicians don’t understand it all.
Do you view automation as something that is bringing primarily negative change to the US?
I tend to focus on truck driving because it’s something people understand. We should be celebrating the possible automation of truck driving as a job, because it would save thousands of lives—about 4,000 Americans die in accidents due to truckers every year.
But on the flip side, you have 3.5 million Americans who drive trucks for a living. Yes, it will potentially cause riots and mass strife, especially when you consider there are an additional 5 million Americans who work at truck stops, motels, and diners who rely on the trucks stopping. So it’s overly simplistic to say is automation a good thing or is automation a bad thing. My mission as president is to make it as good a thing as it can be for as many people as possible.
What is the time frame you see for these changes to the trucking industry? Because there’s a shortage of workers in trucking right now, and some think these technologies could help solve this shortage.
There are massive trucker shortages. It’s a very difficult, turnover-prone job because it’s a very hard job on your body. That’s actually going to hasten the automation of the job, because they say, “It looks like we are missing half a million people, so let’s get to automating this.”
The time frame you are looking at, the experts tell me, is five to 10 years away. We will see a hybrid model at first. To start, you are going to have a human driver in one truck and a robot truck following. But before long you will see mini convoys, and the human beings getting into the cab of the truck 15 miles out of a densely populated urban area. (Continues)
It’s one thing to have an automotive factory filled with robots that perform specific simple tasks very precisely. However, the next step is adding machines with intelligence, and it’s hard to tell how far it will go ultimately, but AI promises even more disruption into the world of work and the economy.
The format of the book is a series of interviews with experts in the field which is probably the most promising approach to a topic that is still experimental and open ended.
Here’s a review, with a warning in the last paragraph that is rather chilling:
In Martin Ford’s last book, the best-selling “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” (Basic Books, 2015), the noted futurist explained how software that can leverage Big Data and predictive algorithms is poised to “transform the nature and number of knowledge-based jobs in organizations and industries across the board.” In other words, it’s not just blue collar workers whose jobs are threatened by the advent of AI and machine learning. If your white collar gig can be automated, add it to the endangered species list.
In his new book, “Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building It” (Packt Publishing), which just hit the shelves this month, Ford assembles a fascinating series of in-depth, one-on-one interviews with 23 of the world’s leading researchers and entrepreneurs working in various aspects of the fields of AI and robotics.
“Over the last decade, ‘AI’ has been primarily about deep learning,” Ford told Pure AI, “so I made sure to include the most prominent people I could find working on that technology. But I also picked a number of people who have been critical of it, as well as people researching other areas, such as emotional AI, and some people with serious entrepreneurial ambitions.”
Many of the interviews included in this book are high-level conversations with extremely smart engineers and scientists about a topic some readers might feel is beyond them. But even the techie talks in this book are surprisingly accessible — and Ford helps readers gear up with an introduction that includes a great basic AI/ML vocabulary list.
Among the marquee names on Ford’s interview list is inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who is probably best-known as the author of “The Singularity is Near” (Penguin Books, September 2006) and “How to Create a Mind” (Penguin Books, August 2013). Kurzweil is currently director of Engineering at Google, but his long resume is, well, Wikipedia-worthy. (He also maintains the Accelerating Intelligence Web site that’s well worth a look.) Another is Andrew Ng, the co-founder of Coursera who also led the Google Brain Team. Also, there’s a conversation with Jeffrey Dean, Google senior fellow and current head of AI and Google Brain.
[. . .]
One of the things about this book that will make it stand out from the sky-high-and-growing stack of publications on this newly popular subject is that it demonstrates, with compelling conversations that, at least for now, there’s really no consensus among AI mavens about where these technologies are leading us and when we’ll get there.
“Their differences on some very important things was truly striking,” Ford said. “For example, the one question I asked everyone, of course, was ‘When will we achieve human-level AI.’ It’s really the most fascinating question of all, and the predictions ranged from Rodney Brooks’ (chairman of Rethink Robotics) estimate of nearly 200 years to Ray Kurzweil’s estimate of 11 years.”
“One thing they all agreed on to some extent,” Ford added, “is that AI is going to be tremendously disruptive. Everyone agreed that its potential impact on jobs and the economy is not overhyped, but very real. If you look at the improving dexterity of the robots in, for example, the Amazon warehouses. Within five years or so, those environments are probably going to be a lot less human-labor-intensive. For people who can learn these technologies, the opportunities are there. Some of those folks are making millions, but it’s rare that you can take a fast-food worker and turn him or her into a deep learning expert.” (Continues)
America’s automated AI future does not need low-skilled, minimally educated Third-Worlders like the Hondurans now flooding the border demanding admittance as immigrants.
The Christian Science Monitor recently took a good long look at how the automated future will affect workers in one of the nation’s largest job categories — trucking. Self-driving vehicles will likely cause a great number of the two million-plus truck drivers in America to be put out of work.
Below, a 2015 map of employment in the US from National Public Radio (NPR) shows the most common occupation in every state, where truck driving now predominates.
It would be nice if official Washington were paying attention to the fundamental economic changes coming our way from the automation wave. There’s not a whole lot that can be done, since machines will be utilized whenever they become cheaper than humans. Still, an emphasis on appropriate technical training would help, and of course we needn’t be importing foreign workers when nearly half of Americans will be made jobless in 20 years if the forecast of Oxford researchers is correct. Therefore:
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
The Christian Science Monitor looked at the technology largely from the viewpoint of the drivers who will be affected, which is a pleasant change from the Silicon Valley opinion that any tech advance is totally cool, no matter the human consequences.
POMPANO BEACH, FLA. — On a muggy morning, Matt Brauneck noses his semi with its 53-foot trailer out of the yard, past the puddles left by a tropical storm. From his driver’s seat in the cab he has a clear view of the road and of the light suburban traffic leading to Interstate 75 in southeastern Florida. Atop the pearly-white cab are six cameras and three radar sensors that are feeding data to a computer stack behind Mr. Brauneck’s seat and to a remote operating base in Jacksonville, Fla., 300 miles away. Brauneck’s boss, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, the head of a small robotics company, is wedged in the back. I’m sitting up front.
And we’re about to turn over command of 16 tons of aluminum and steel to an algorithm.
After the truck eases onto the highway, Brauneck talks into his headset to the technicians in Jacksonville. Ten minutes later he gets the all-clear: Time to engage automation. He turns a cracker-sized red knob on the dashboard and flicks a switch. “We’re rolling. It’s on,” he says.
Brauneck lifts his hands from the wheel, which jerks occasionally to correct our path. The accelerator pedal at his feet is working itself up and down, or so it seems, as we cruise along I-75. Brauneck says the first time he “drove” a truck in automation it felt like the first time he scuba dived. Like breathing underwater, “it didn’t feel right,” he says. Now it’s routine for him.
Yet it’s not routine for me. I can’t stop watching the twitching wheel. Outside, the narrow highway shoulder is hemmed by a 10-foot fence to keep out alligators from the surrounding swampland. I see vultures wheeling overhead – seriously.
Welcome to tomorrow on the nation’s highways. Your local truck stop is one of the latest places where machines may soon replace jobs now done by humans.
For decades, robotic devices have been remaking the world of work, principally on the factory floor. They build our cars. They fetch our TVs and toasters in massive consumer warehouses. They weld the turbines used in jet engines.
But with advances in artificial intelligence, machines are poised to invade workplaces that once seemed immune to automation. A 2013 study by Oxford University found that fully 47 percent of jobs in the United States were at risk of being automated based on existing AI and robotics capabilities.
Transportation is one of the key areas where machines are on the march. People are both captivated – and frightened – by the prospect of self-driving cars pulsing through the nation’s streets. But for all the hype about automated cars, trucks may well begin hauling freight along highways, without the grizzled trucker at the wheel, first. Highway driving is more straightforward to automate than unpredictable urban driving and holds the promise of lower fuel costs, higher productivity, and improved safety.
Automated trucking is already a reality in remote mines and logging camps, and the US military has built its own robo-trucks to deploy in war zones. Volvo recently unveiled a prototype of an electric self-driving truck that doesn’t even have a cab for a driver.
While all this represents progress to many people, others worry about a looming loss of jobs. Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and author of a book on automation, says AI could replace millions of semi-skilled humans in industries from fast food to retail. No job is immune, not even in white-collar fields such as accounting, insurance, and pharmacology.
“People talk about this as if it’s speculative and in the future, and we’re in the midst of it,” says Mr. Yang.
That warning may be premature – or prescient. What can the trucking industry tell us? (Continues)
How can anyone who knows about the automation threat see the multiple illegal alien caravans marching on our country without concern? America needs workers in the busy Trump economy, but skilled legal people are required, not grade school dropouts from Honduras who may turn to crime when wealth is not forthcoming.
The mass invasion scenario is not why I voted for Donald Trump. The president needs to treat the caravans as a direct assault on US sovereignty. He will be a one-termer if he doesn’t fulfill his top campaign promise of border security.
TUCKER CARLSON (3:30): I don’t understand how you can look at the projections for what automation is about to do to our economy, eliminating a huge percentage of low-skilled labor in this country, and say we need more low-skilled labor — all low-skilled labor — how can you make that argument?
BRYAN DEAN WRIGHT: You can’t. The top ten jobs that we see that immigrants take, both legal and illegal, make less than $20 an hour which by the way even the Obama administration said, jobs earning less than $20 an hour are going to be automated into obsolescence. So the argument that we need an increasing number of poorly qualified folks who don’t speak English, don’t have a skill set we need for the economy, or frankly, the one that is already here, that is a silly argument. It doesn’t hold water,
CARLSON: So I always want to believe the best about people, that they have honorable motives, and I think most people do have honorable motives, but if you can’t even martial an economic argument in favor of your immigration policy, I’m left believing maybe it is only about getting more votes for your party.
WRIGHT: How cynical.
CARLSON: I don’t want to be cynical. I just don’t see any other rationale.
WRIGHT: Look, I appreciate the argument; you may be correct. there may be parts of the party — make no mistake about it — they want open borders. Just the other day — I think it was yesterday, in fact, Senator Gillibrand from New York was buddy-buddy with the guy Sean McElwee who wants to remove the border between the United States and Mexico. So there is an element in this country, not just an activist community, but within the left of this nation, my own party, I hate to say, who want open borders. And that of course then feeds into this issue, not only how do we take care of them, but ultimately, who are they going to vote for? There is a play there that I think one could argue, this is a political play, this is about votes. So I think it is fair to have that concern and that fear.
Companies usually deny that they incorporate automation to take the place of humans, saying instead that the machines are there to “help” workers or something similarly misleading. But obviously, businesses don’t invest millions of dollars without an eye to saving money in the long run. And Amazon is a top example of how smart machines can fundamentally change how a company performs its functions and become amazingly profitable.
Without owner Jeff Bezos’ decision of buy the Kiva robot system in 2012 to automate Amazon, he wouldn’t now be the world’s wealthiest man with a net worth of $150 billion as of this year.
Below, Kiva robots bring ordered items from the warehouse to human workers who pack customers’ articles for shipment.
There’s not a lot that can be done about the approaching automated future, although it makes no sense to continue low-skilled immigration when those jobs will be mostly done by machines in the near future.
Recent news shows that Amazon is continuing to utilize automation to save money by eliminating human workers.
Amazon is staffing up for the holiday rush with around 100,000 additional hires. As big as that number sounds, it’s actually fewer people than the e-commerce giant added in either the 2016 or 2017 holiday seasons, when it brought in 120,000 additional workers.
Citi analyst Mark May says he thinks the reduction in seasonal hiring is strong evidence that Amazon is succeeding with plans to automate operations in its warehouses.
“We’ve seen an acceleration in the use of robots within their fulfillment centers, and that has corresponded with fewer and fewer workers that they’re hiring around the holidays,” May told CNBC on Nov. 2. He added that 2018 is the “first time on record” Amazon plans to hire fewer holiday workers than it did the previous year.
“Since the last holiday season, we’ve focused on more ongoing full-time hiring in our fulfillment centers and other facilities,” Amazon spokesperson Ashley Robinson said in an email, adding that the company has “created over 130,000 jobs” in the last year. “We are proud to have created over 130,000 new jobs in the last year alone.”
Amazon bought robotics company Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012, and began using its orange robots in warehouses in late 2014. By mid-2016, it had become clear just how big a difference those robots were making. The little orange guys could handle in 15 minutes the sorting, picking, packing, and shipping that used to take human workers an hour or more to complete. In June 2016, Deutsche Bank predicted Kiva automation could save Amazon nearly $2.5 billion (those savings dropped to $880 million after accounting for the costs of installing robots in every warehouse).
Robinson said Amazon has added 300,000 full-time jobs since 2012. ”It’s a myth that automation replaces jobs and destroys net job growth,” she said by email. “Our teams work alongside more than 100,000 robots at over 26 fulfillment centers worldwide and we are excited to continue increasing the technology we use at our sites while growing our global workforce.” (Continues)
China says it has the world’s first totally robotic warehouse although the machines are made in Japan. What’s noticeable about the ‘bots is how much the little floor scooters look like knockoffs from Amazon’s Kiva machines. Often when a large company purchases a smaller one (Amazon buying Kiva for $775 million in 2012), it then leases out that property, but the Bezos company has held its robots close, so there has been scramble for similar machines to be produced. And technology companies have responded with various machines to meet the perceived need.
The warehouse robots of JD.com in Red China look similar to Amazon machines.
Warehouse jobs used to be a possibility for low-skilled persons, but that occupation is one of many that are being disappeared by automation. That trend bodes poorly for the future of human employment.
And given that most immigrants and aliens coming to the US are low-skilled, we shouldn’t continue to admit them like they’re going to be employable in a decade or so. They won’t.
• Mujin, a start-up spun out of Tokyo University, has developed robot controllers that can fully automate warehouses and fulfillment centers.
• Its customer, JD.com, has what it calls the world’s first fully automated e-commerce warehouse in China equipped with Mujin robots.
• The Japanese start-up wants to help automate warehouses in the United States.
At a recent technology show in Tokyo, a large robot arm reached into a full-sized mockup of a shipping container and began unloading boxes from it. Set on a platform that moved back and forth, the robot was doing a job usually carried out by warehouse workers and forklift operators. The goal of the company that’s developing it, Mujin, is total automation.
The system, still a prototype, doesn’t work perfectly — it accidentally damaged a box during the demo — but it’s going to be trialed in warehouses in Japan this year.
“Lifting heavy boxes is probably the most backbreaking task in warehouse logistics,” said Mujin’s American co-founder and CTO, Rosen Diankov. “A lot of companies are looking for truck unloading systems, and I believe we’re the closest to commercialization.”
The Tokyo-based start-up is aiming to be a leader in automating logistics processes. To do that, it’s building robot controllers and camera systems and integrating them with existing industrial robot arms. The key product here is the controllers — each about the size of a briefcase, one for motion planning and one for vision — that act as an operating system that can control the hardware from any robot manufacturer. If a goal such as grasping an object is input, the controllers automatically can generate motions for robots, eliminating the traditional need to “teach” robots manually. The result, according to the company, is higher productivity for users.
Simply put, the technology — based on motion planning and computer vision — makes industrial robots capable of autonomous and intelligent action.
Mujin turned heads when it showed off its transformation of a warehouse operated by Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com. The 40,000-sq-m facility in Shanghai began full operations in June. It was equipped with 20 industrial robots that pick, transfer and pack packages using crates on conveyor belts, as well as camera systems and Mujin robot controllers. Other robots carted merchandise around to loading docks and trucks.
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It’s unusual to hear a national leader pointing out the approaching danger to workers and the economy posed by smart machines — in fact, I can’t recall another example. Perhaps top politicians of smaller countries feel more free because unusual remarks won’t upset the international order.
It’s refreshing to hear a tech-wise Silicon Valley guy speak up about the threat in a political sense. In a February article in the New York Times (
In 2015, 
