But now a start-up company called Dishcraft is developing an automated machine that could make human dishwashers obsolete before long.

Below, the Dishcraft robot cleans noodles off a plate.

CNBC reports that the company has amassed $25 million in funding, which is another sign that investors believe the future will be automated. Too bad Washington isn’t paying attention to what’s happening in automation technology and how it will radically change the economy.

One aspect is that in a few years, there won’t be jobs for the thousands of illegal aliens now streaming across our open border because smart machines will be doing the unskilled, repetitive jobs more cheaply.

New robotic dishwasher for restaurants is taking the dirty work out of the kitchen, CNBC, June 18, 2019

More than half a million people work as dishwashers in the United States today, according to the most recent data from the Department of Labor. But that’s not nearly enough hands to keep cookware clean in the 660,755 establishments counted by the 2018 NPD Group Restaurant Consensus.

Enter Dishcraft, a start-up building a robotic dishwasher for commercial kitchens.

CEO and founder Linda Pouliot said that to figure out what tech could really do to help, she and CTO Paul Birkmeyer went to restaurants of every kind, volunteering to wash their dishes. Restaurateurs and managers were more than welcoming.

The co-founders discovered that work in the dish room is the same as it has been for decades — repetitive, frantic and physically punishing.

In a typical setup, it’s easy for a dishwasher to break a dish, get burned or slip and fall on the wet floor, Birkmeyer noticed. And at work it’s tempting for dishwashers to just put a rubber band on the overhead sprayers to keep hot water running all day, so they won’t have to keep reaching and grasping. Those conditions drive attrition.

“We found the problem is universal. It didn’t matter if you were the French Laundry, a hospital cafeteria or Chili’s; everyone is having a hard time hiring dishwashers,” Pouliot said.

Some restaurants turn to disposables or just deal with the expense of constant recruiting. But Dishcraft wants to give them a more sustainable, less costly option.

Dishcraft’s system uses four main elements: a dish drop, robotic dishwasher, rolling racks and the restaurant’s already-installed sanitizing machine.

At the dish drop, diners or bussers place dirty bowls and plates into a container that stacks and keeps track of them. When a rack is full, a light calls for a dish-room worker to roll it over to the robotic dishwasher, which loads them up automatically.

The washer picks up the plates and bowls with a magnet, cleans them with a rubber scraping wheel and rinses them with gray water (recycled water safe for cleaning purposes). Dishcraft’s robotic washer uses cameras, sensors and “dirt identification algorithms” to find and clean every last spot of food, even those that would be invisible to the naked eye.

Once they are washed, the machine stacks the plates and bowls into racks. A worker then places those racks in a sanitizer, standard equipment already used in commercial kitchens today. The sanitizer heats up the dishes, killing any remaining germs.

Restaurants love the system because “Robots do not call off, robots don’t take breaks, and robots do not take vacation,” Pouliot said. (Continues)

The Age of Robot Farmers, The New Yorker, April 15, 2019

Picking strawberries takes speed, stamina, and skill. Can a robot do it?

[. . .] At the beginning of the twentieth century, about a third of the U.S. population lived on farms; today, less than one per cent does. Mechanization brought tractors and combine harvesters, which were initially used for grains, such as wheat, rye, oats, and barley. They automated the manual labor formerly done by small armies of threshers and bundlers. Mechanical harvesters made industrial farming possible, and led to the consolidation of small family acreages into the megafarms that dominate U.S. agriculture today.

The author opines that the hundreds of thousands of new illegal aliens from Central America won’t be interested in doing farm work because they have better things in mind. Good luck with that:

Migrants coming more recently from Central America, many of them also looking for better jobs and opportunities for their families, and often fleeing violence in their home countries, haven’t traditionally entered the crop-farm workforce in enough numbers to compensate for the loss of those Mexican workers—they’ve instead found jobs at meatpacking plants and in the service industries.

However, this article examines automation, and the farmers want smart machines that will reliably do the jobs so they needn’t worry about finding foreign workers when crops need picking. In fact, the strawberry grower featured, Gary Wishnatzki, helped raise investment money to develop the machines that will free him from depending on humans, and other growers have joined him. The technology people are happy to oblige — it’s a win-win for both.

The tech keeps improving, as suggested by a look at the new gadgets coming online. The upshot is that low-skilled workers will be replaced by robots when the machines become cheaper to use than humans. So it is crazy for Washington to continue admitting a hundred thousand menial laborers per month from Central America — the United States is not the welfare office for the Third World; it is the home of citizens.

And anyway, the US needs skilled workers, not backward rustics.

Continuing with a slice of the article:

All these prototypes rely on a handful of converging technologies—artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, G.P.S., machine vision, drones, and material science—that have been slowly finding their way onto the farm. Many row-crop farmers in the U.S. employ G.P.S.-guided tractors to lay out their fields. John Deere has been offering G.P.S. for its tractors since 1997. At first, satellite-assisted steering was simply a way for a farmer to keeps his rows straight, rather than rely on a tractor driver’s dead-reckoning skills. But for forward-thinking farmers G.P.S. offers much more than straight lines. A G.P.S.-planted farm provides a foundation on which to build a whole new class of automated farm tools that can use artificial intelligence to solve the hard problems that twentieth-century agricultural automation could not.

Berry 5.1’s Pitzer wheel features “obtainers,” which can cup and pick berries.

To get an idea of what might be possible, I arranged to visit Professor David Slaughter in his office at the University of California at Davis. Slaughter leads the university’s Smart Farm Initiative, which explores how future farmers might employ emerging technologies. Drones, for example, can automate the inspection of fields for pest or weed outbreaks, and can use high-resolution cameras and algorithmic processing of the images to pick up incipient problems before a farmer or a hired hand might spot them. Another possible application is plant breeding. Breeders currently rely on humans to evaluate seedlings produced by new combinations of already existing varieties. At a large operation, such as the University of Florida’s strawberry-breeding program, which is run by Vance Whitaker, people must manually inspect thousands of seedlings each year to see if any carries the desirable traits that the breeder is looking for. A robot, equipped with machine vision and enough artificial intelligence to recognize the traits the breeder is seeking, could automate the laborious process.

Slaughter showed me a prototype of a robotic weeding machine in the engineering department’s lab. His students built it and trained it to weed a field of tomato plants, each of which has its own G.P.S. coördinates. Because the robot knows exactly where the tomato plants are and has the machine vision and intelligence to know the difference between a tomato plant and a weed, it can navigate around the tomatoes and kill the weeds either with a miniature hoe or with a micro-jet of herbicide, which Slaughter described as “an inkjet printer for agriculture.” The farmer saves the cost of weeding the field by hand, and spares it a coating of herbicide that many of the tomato plants might not need. It was the nearest thing I saw in what venture capitalists call “digital agriculture” to a Roomba, the indoor robotic vacuum cleaner—a Farmba, maybe?

Summarizing the potential, Slaughter said, “For the first time, farmers can know what’s going on in their fields on the level of the individual plant. The idea is that you can run a farm with the same intimate care you would use on a back-yard garden, where you know each plant individually.” Farmers could irrigate and fertilize only those plants that needed it, and not waste resources on the current one-size-fits-all approach. Agriculture accounts for seventy per cent of fresh-water consumption worldwide, and, in the U.S. alone, farms use more than a billion pounds of pesticide each year; strawberry farms are especially heavy users. “Precision agriculture,” the name given to this slowly unfolding revolution, could dramatically reduce such wasteful and chemical-dependent practices.

Selective-harvesting machines are another application of smart-farm technology. But as a practical matter a farmer would need a different harvesting machine for each crop. As Slaughter’s colleague Stavros Vougioukas, an associate professor with the department of biological and agricultural engineering at U.C. Davis, pointed out, “building a machine to harvest watermelons is totally different from building a machine to harvest apples.” This is not the case with commodity-crop combines: the same machine can be adapted to harvest different crops. The capital investment required to develop the machine also has to make sense economically, and only a few specialty crops have a high enough value to justify a large outlay of funds. (For example, the harvest of peaches, a small-market crop that requires delicate handling, is unlikely to be automated anytime soon, if ever.) Vougioukas ticked them off: “Apples, citrus, strawberries, leafy greens, grapes”—those are the five big enough to justify automation.

So far, Berry 5.1 has cost nearly ten million dollars to develop; Wishnatzki raised most of the money from investors, many of whom were other strawberry growers, including the industry giant Driscoll. “My closest competitors realize we’re all in the same boat,” he told me. . .

It was reported in 2015 that the Argus Record went from 310 employees to 140 because of technology added in editing, layout and marketing.

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.

Many experts concur that the world of work is about to change fundamentally: Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years. Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi believes that in 30 years humans will become largely obsolete, and world joblessness will reach 50 percent. The Gartner tech advising company believes that one-third of jobs will be done by machines by 2025. The consultancy firm PwC published a report last year that forecast robots could take 38 percent of US jobs by 2030. In November 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute reported that automation “could displace up to 800 million workers — 30 percent of the global workforce — by 2030.” Forrester Research estimates that robots and artificial intelligence could eliminate nearly 25 million jobs in the United States over the next decade, but it should create nearly 15 million positions, resulting in a loss of 10 million US jobs. Kai-Fu Lee, the venture capitalist and author of AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, forecast on CBS’ Sixty Minutes about automation and artificial intelligence: “in 15 years, that’s going to displace about 40 percent of the jobs in the world.” A February 2018 paper from Bain & Company, Labor 2030, predicted, “By the end of the 2020s, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs.”

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.

It was therefore disappointing to hear President Trump endorse increased immigration during his State of the Union speech.

The original New York Times story was the basis for an unduly optimistic RT news segment, below:

The Times story was reprinted on another website, linked below, so click away if you are not a subscriber.

The Rise of the Robot Reporter, by Wilson Jacob, New York Times, February 5, 2019

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)

The RAISE legislation as submitted begins:

A BILL — To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to establish a skills-based immigration points system, to focus family sponsored immigration on spouses and minor children, to eliminate the Diversity Visa Program, to set a limit on the number of refugees admitted annually to the United States, and for other purposes.

I am impressed that the senators included the vile Diversity Visa for the dumpster along with the bigger stuff. The program is often overlooked but shouldn’t be, because choosing immigrants from a random drawing based on diversity is double bad. A visa to increase diversity is simply insane at this point.

The most appealing aspect of the bill is of course the reduction of legal immigration by half. A larger decrease would be better because of the automated future workplace, but half is a good start.

Below, Bloomberg reported in May that the number of foreign-born workers in the U.S. rose to nearly 27 million in 2016, up about 700,000 from the previous year and a new high (America’s Labor Force Is Made Up of More Immigrants Than Ever).

The senators appeared with President Trump on Wednesday in the White House to present the bill to the public (transcript here).

Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue discussed the legislation with Tucker Carlson later in the day:

SPARE AUDIO:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The RAISE Act ends chain migration and replaces our low-skilled system with a new points-based system for receiving a green card. This competitive application process will favor applicants who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families and demonstrate skills that will contribute to our economy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Senators Cotton and Perdue join us now; thanks to you both. Senator Purdue to you first. When you hear that, the precepts, the principles behind it sound non-controversial; they sound pretty basic. You guys work in politics. I know you’ve polled this. What’s the public opinion of those ideas?

SENATOR DAVID PERDUE: Well this is the the big learning here in Washington; the people out there and the rest of the country get this. Seventy-two percent believe it should be the primary worker plus their nuclear family or less. Eighteen percent, it ought to be just the the worker. So people out there in the real world get this: it’s pro-worker, it’s pro-growth, and it’s been proven to work in Canada and Australia.

CARLSON: What’s interesting, Senator Cotton, when you say this this bill is pro-worker — our current arrangement seems anti-worker. If you look at the effect on wages, working-class people in the country when the Kennedy Act became law, they’ve gone down and remained stagnant. Do you think there’s a direct connection between mass immigration and low wages?

SENATOR TOM COTTON: No doubt, Tucker. I mean the law of supply and demand applies to labor market just like it does to every other market hasn’t been repealed, even though some Republicans feel like it doesn’t apply there. Look, over the last 40 years, my lifetime, you’ve seen a quadrupling of the number of foreign-born residents in our country. The vast majority of those — 14 out of 15 — today come here not based on their skills or their education or their English language ability on some other category. They’re by definition unskilled and low-skilled.

In that 40-year window, if you have high school degree or less, your wages have fallen. If you have more than that, so if you’re not competing with those very same immigrants, your wages have increased. So there’s a direct correlation between the mass unskilled low-skilled migration we’ve seen over the last few decades and stagnant wages and standards of living for working Americans.

CARLSON: Wouldn’t it be clarifying to import — I don’t know — lobbyists for example from abroad who would work for less than our lobbyists? Maybe that. Or United States senators? I think that might change some ideas.  [EDITOR: Or how about journalists? Why is there no journalist work visa?]

COTTON: Lobbyists, lawyers — there’s no end of this, that you could import people to compete directly against people in Washington DC and then they sing a different tune.

But there’s just simply no doubt that people who come here who are unskilled and low-skilled have a direct impact on the wages of Americans, whether their ancestors came over on the Mayflower or whether they just took the oath of citizenship, who are competing for those very same jobs.

CARLSON: So Senator Perdue, about 60 million Americans speak a language other than English at home. That’s a dramatic increase over the past 50 years, and it’s getting bigger every year. And it’s bad obviously, it divides the country. Do you think your bill would do something to change that?

PERDUE: First of all, there are several categories that we use in a merit-based system. This is what the president talked about in this campaign: it’s one of the reasons quite frankly I think he got elected, and I gave him high marks for making this a priority in this new administration. But when you look at the categories in here, somebody could come in here and be a PhD with no English skills and still qualify potentially. So this is not about English speaking only, this is about a diverse group of people to come in and help grow our economy.

CARLSON: So what are the criteria?

PERDUE: Well first you’ve got education, you’ve got job, if you’ve been contributory in terms of accomplishment, if you want to start a business or something like that. English is one and then compensation.

CARLSON: So if you want to invest a lot of money, you’re here. So who are the forces arrayed against this?

COTTON: A of people, once they learn about the bill, are actually pretty pleased with it. Again this only focuses on green cards, the million green card recipients every year. It doesn’t focus on temporary visas which can be controversial or anything else. And I would say that it’s better to make a citizen out of someone who comes here rather than just use them as a temporary laborer.

CARLSON: Where’s the Chamber of Commerce on this?

COTTON: I think a lot of them are going to be very supportive of it. Again, if you’re sitting in Silicon Valley and you depend on H1-b visas, wouldn’t you rather have someone who’s going to be a citizen of the United States and be here forever?

CARLSON: Are you all going to make this case publicly? Are you going to force the opponents of this bill to explain why they are against it?

PERDUE: We saw it today, we started a debate today, and we’re going to continue that. I can’t understand why anybody who wants a pro-growth effort in America to oppose this. I mean today, the system is so broken that only one out of every 15 who come in America come in with a skill. This is a broken system and it penalizes people who are who’ve been here and who just got here

CARLSON: Senator Cotton, can you give us the timeline for this?

COTTON: Well immigration’s obviously a complicated and controversial topic, but David and I are committed for the long haul to making this bill a reality. Again, the president campaigned on immigration as a single distinctive issue that separated him not just from Hillary Clinton, but from 16 other Republicans, and the American people expect him to deliver on that. This is one piece of the immigration puzzle. I think as more senators and congressmen learn about it, as they see what it would do for our working citizens and across the country what it would do for economic growth as a whole, I’m hopeful that we can get consensus. Even if there’s still a lot of other things that divide us on the immigration issue.

CARLSON: I think that’s right. You always are welcome here to explain how it’s going because we’re interested, our viewers are.

Machines that make the food require more advanced moving parts, but those are coming along also, such as the Flippy burger cooking robot, shown below:

Below, the Flippy robot cooks the meat while a human worker assembles the burgers.

It’s always interesting when a top CEO in an industry makes a prediction of when automation will come on big. The CNBC article below mentions a recent interview with Greg Creed, the CEO of Yum Brands, saying robots would replace most fast-food workers by the mid-2020s, and here it is:

Restaurant work is a popular occupation for unskilled immigrants and illegal aliens because most of the basic tasks can be easily learned. A Pew Research report from earlier this year found that 22 percent of food preparation and service workers were legal and illegal immigrants. A Census survey from 2015 shows that restaurants employ nearly 2.3 million foreign-born workers, a number used in the CNBC article.

So the government’s persistence with old-style levels of immigration to fill these jobs is a fool’s errand, considering the forecast that most restaurant work will be done by machines in a decade from now. For that reason:

Automation makes immigration obsolete.

Why isn’t Washington paying attention to the rapidly changing workplace?

Robots are coming to a burger joint near you, CNBC, July 4, 2017

● A burger-flipping robot called Flippy will be at work in CaliBurger restaurants by early 2018.

● Miso Robotics, the inventor of Flippy, has raised $3.1 million in Series A venture funding.

● Patent services firm Acacia Research, CaliBurger and Match Robotics VC are investors.

Grilling burgers may be fun on the Fourth of July, but less so if hot grease is your daily grind.

Enter Miso Robotics. The southern California start-up has built a robotic “kitchen assistant” called Flippy to do the hot, greasy and repetitive work of a fry cook. Flippy employs machine learning and computer vision to identify patties on a grill, track them as they cook, flip and then place them on a bun when they’re done.

Miso is part of a budding kitchen automation industry. Its peers include Zume Pizza, Cafe X, Makr Shakr, Frobot and Sally, which are developing robots to help commercial kitchens churn out pizzas, lattes, cocktails, frozen yogurt, and salads.

In a recent CNBC interview, Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed predicted robots would replace fast food workers by the mid-2020s. It’s not as if workers love those jobs.

Employee turnover in the restaurants and accommodations sector was 73 percent in 2016, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Fry cooks, the people who flip burgers (or fillets) all day at a hot grill, move on from the job faster than others in the field.

Rather than build a robot from the ground up, Miso integrates the best of available components on the market, including robotic arms, sensors and cameras. It develops proprietary control software to enable the robots to work as cooking assistants in complex environments right alongside humans, said CEO David Zito.

“We take into account all of our customers’ needs for everything from food safety to maximum uptime,” he said. “Today our software allows robots to work at a grill, doing some of the nasty and dangerous work that people don’t want to do all day. But these systems can be adapted so that robots can work, say, standing in front of a fryer or chopping onions. These are all areas of high turnover, especially for quick service restaurants.”

Miso Robotics recently raised $3.1 million in a funding round led by patent services firm Acacia Research, a relatively new fund called Match Robotics VC, and earlier investors including the restaurant chain CaliBurger.

The company will use the capital to produce its first commercial Flippy units. It expects to roll Flippy out, starting at the Los Angeles CaliBurger, in the first quarter of 2018, Zito said. Along with its investment, Acacia will provide the start-up with patent and intellectual property-related services, helping Miso Robotics prepare for global expansion.

“I see robotics in the kitchen as kind of an extension of going from the open flame to the oven,” said Rob Stewart, Acacia’s president, in an interview. “It’s next-level efficiency,”

What does this mean for the industry’s 2.3 million cooks?

“Like the electronic spreadsheet did for accountants, this will cause the jobs to go elsewhere,” Stewart said. “But there will be new hospitality and culinary jobs we have yet to imagine. And those will be jobs where people will get paid a higher wage, and where they’ll want to stay long-term.”

Okay, we can agree that diverse cabbies are bad news, but isn’t truck driving an all-American occupation, celebrated in films and music?

Not so much any more, as it turns out. Industry and government regulations have whittled away at the wages and freedom of the occupation, such that a “growing number” of truckers are immigrants, according to leftist globalist news site PRI: America’s trucking industry faces a shortage. Meet the immigrants helping fill the gap. April 21, 2016:

Yes, truck driving is now diverse! Americans cannot be allowed to remain the majority of workers in any job that still pays somewhat decently: that wouldn’t be fair to the swarms of immigrants and illegals, eager to work for less than citizens.

Below, Harsharan Singh, a trucker based in Los Angeles, is originally from India.

Meanwhile, at the same time that the government is increasing the number of immigrants, Washington is also actively promoting the rapid transition to a self-driving universe — recently unveiling its guidelines, in fact, thereby speeding the loss of millions of jobs.

La Times noted the purposeful destruction of millions of middle-class blue-collar jobs: once again, the brilliant captains of industry grasp the short-term cost savings of automation while ignoring business’ concurrent elimination of the consumer via unemployment.

Self-driving trucks threaten one of America’s top blue-collar jobs, Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2016

Trucking paid for Scott Spindola to take a road trip down the coast of Spain, climb halfway up Machu Picchu, and sample a Costa Rican beach for two weeks. The 44-year-old from Covina now makes up to $70,000 per year, with overtime, hauling goods from the port of Long Beach. He has full medical coverage and plans to drive until he retires.

But in a decade, his big rig may not have any need for him.

Carmaking giants and ride-sharing upstarts racing to put autonomous vehicles on the road are dead set on replacing drivers, and that includes truckers. Trucks without human hands at the wheel could be on American roads within a decade, say analysts and industry executives.

At risk is one of the most common jobs in many states, and one of the last remaining careers that offer middle-class pay to those without a college degree. There are 1.7 million truckers in America, and another 1.7 million drivers of taxis, buses and delivery vehicles. That compares with 4.1 million construction workers.

While factory jobs have gushed out of the country over the last decade, trucking has grown and pay has risen. Truckers make $42,500 per year on average, putting them firmly in the middle class.

On Sept. 20, the Obama administration put its weight behind automated driving, for the first time releasing federal guidelines for the systems. About a dozen states already created laws that allow for the testing of self-driving vehicles. But the federal government, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will ultimately have to set rules to safely accommodate 80,000-pound autonomous trucks on U.S. highways.

In doing so, the feds have placed a bet that driverless cars and trucks will save lives. But autonomous big rigs, taxis and Ubers also promise to lower the cost of travel and transporting goods.

It would also be the first time that machines take direct aim at an entire class of blue-collar work in America. Other workers who do things you may think cannot be done by robots — like gardeners, home builders and trash collectors — may be next.

“We are going to see a wave and an acceleration in automation, and it will affect job markets,” said Jerry Kaplan, a Stanford lecturer and the author of “Humans Need Not Apply” and “Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know,” two books that chronicle the effect of robotics on labor.

“Long-haul truck driving is a great example, where there isn’t much judgment involved and it’s a fairly controlled environment,” Kaplan said.

Robots’ march into vehicles, factories, stores, and offices could also profoundly deepen inequality. Research has shown that artificial intelligence helps erase jobs that require basic skills and creates more roles for highly educated people.

“Automation tends to replace low-wage jobs with high-wage jobs,” said James Bessen, a lecturer at the Boston University School of Law who researches the effect of innovation on labor.

“The people whose skills become obsolete are low-wage workers, and to the extent that it’s difficult for them to acquire new skills, it affects inequality.”

Trucking will likely be the first type of driving to be fully automated – meaning there’s no one at the wheel. One reason is that long-haul big rigs spend most of their time on highways, which are the easiest roads to navigate without human intervention.

But there’s also a sweeter financial incentive for automating trucks. Trucking is a $700-billion industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers.

“If you can get rid of the drivers, those people are out of jobs, but the cost of moving all those goods goes down significantly,” Kaplan said.

The companies pioneering these new technologies have tried to sell cost savings as something that will be good for trucking employers and workers.

Otto, a self-driving truck company started by former Google engineers and executives, pitches its system as a source of new income for drivers who will be able to spend more time in vehicles that can drive solo as they rest.

Uber bought the San Francisco-based company in August.

The start-up retrofits trucks with kits allowing them to navigate freeways without a driver actually holding the wheel. For the last several months, at least one Volvo truck equipped with the software has been test driving, with a person at the wheel, on Interstate 280 or on the 101 Freeway in California.

The system works by installing a set of motion sensors; cameras; lidar, which uses laser light; and computer software to make driving decisions.

Lior Ron, the company’s co-founder, says that as the system gathers data on tens of thousands of miles of U.S. highways, having the driver asleep in the back could become a possibility within the next few years. That would instantly double the amount of time a truck spends on the road per day, allowing freight companies to charge more for shorter delivery times, Ron said. “The truck can now move 24/7.”

Ron says that the question of whether to pay drivers for hours spent sleeping in a truck while it drives for them has “been an ongoing debate in the trucking industry.”

Otto says its system may eventually allow some big rigs to traverse highways without a driver at all. In that scenario, a truck driver would drive the big rigs to and from “pick up and drop off locations,” playing a role “similar to a tug boat,” but trucks could drive without any human present during the longest stretches of the journey, says Ron, the co-founder.

Several states are already laying the groundwork for a future with fewer truckers. In September, the Michigan state Senate approved a law allowing trucks to drive autonomously in “platoons,” where two or more big rigs drive together and synchronize their movements. That bill follows laws passed in California, Florida and Utah that set regulations for testing truck platoons.

Wirelessly connected trucks made their European debut in April, when trucks from six major carmakers successfully drove in platoons through Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Josh Switkes, 36, says those convoys will be on American roads within a year. Switkes is the chief executive of Peloton, a Mountain View-based company whose software links two semi-trailer trucks. Peloton’s investors include UPS and Volvo Group. The company has begun taking reservations for its system from freight fleets, and it plans to start delivering them “in volume” within a year.

The system works by transmitting very specific data from the first truck to the second truck so they operate in tandem, almost as if they were a train on the open road. When the lead truck brakes, the following vehicle receives a signal telling it how much to apply its brake.

That close communication can make it safe for the trucks to drive as close as 30 feet from one another, the company says. If a car cuts in between the two, the rear truck can automatically slow down, assume a safe following distance, and then return to its previous arrangement with the leader after the car changes lanes, Switkes said.

Reduced drag on the first and second vehicles can produce massive fuel savings. For the time being, drivers are installed in both trucks, with their feet off the brakes and accelerators, and their hands on the wheel.

Peloton says its technology reduces fuel expenses by 7% and could save companies even more on salaries.

“As we move to higher levels of automation, we can save them massive amounts in labor [costs],” said Switkes. He said that Peloton could make the rear truck in the convoy fully machine-driven, without any humans present, within a decade.

Even before that happens, though, platooning could segregate drivers into different pay classes depending on whether they’re driving the first or second rig.

“Maybe you pay the front driver more because they have a more important job,” said Switkes. Eventually, as the system makes trucks more efficient, “you may be paying fewer drivers overall,” he added.

Like most companies trying to turn trucks into robots, Peloton sees itself being useful mainly on highways, which are more predictable and less people-filled than city streets. Still, the company announced in July that it will develop and help deploy technology to power a fleet of heavy-duty trucks to serve the San Diego port.

Truck driver Spindola, perched atop a creaky seat as his big rig sat inside the Long Beach port waiting to be OKd for a departure to a nearby storage yard, said he isn’t convinced that a machine could ever do his job.

“You need a human being to deal with some of the problems we have out on the road,” Spindola said. There are too many delicate maneuvers involved, he maintained, too many tricks and turns and unforeseen circumstances to hand the wheel over to a robot.

He had just spent about 20 minutes weaving in and out of corridors of 40-foot shipping containers at the port to attach a chassis to his rig and drive it toward a large forklift. There the lift operator slowly slotted a container onto the bay of his truck.

“This is a good job as far as pay, one of the last good jobs,” Spindola said. “Maybe I just don’t want to accept that the future is here.”