But organizing UBI is hardly a small thing. The pricetag will be very high and the emperors of automation might not cotton to being taxed to support the millions of workers that they have disemployed. And wouldn’t free money being handed out be an even bigger magnet to illegal aliens than American jobs?
Of course, when millions of simple jobs are taken over from humans by robots, most immigration will become obsolete and should be ended as an economic adjustment to the automation economy.
Human workers are impossible to find on some factory floors.
Plus, even if all parties were agreeable to UBI (doubtful), the set-up time might be lengthy because lawyers and politicians will want to be involved. Surely such a major transition away from the economic system of millennia will be difficult.
Following is an article from the optimistic school of thought:
]]>What will life look like when most jobs are automated?, Inverse.com, November 18, 2019
There’s a chance that it might be pretty good.
Experts estimate about a quarter of American jobs could soon be automated. Looking further down the line, we may see a majority of jobs being done by robots. If 60 percent of jobs were to be eliminated, for example, a tremendous amount of people would be out of work, and we’d very likely have to adopt a program like Universal Basic Income (UBI). We don’t yet know how these changes will impact society, but a lot of people are trying to figure out just that.
Martin Ford, a futurist and author of “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future,” tells Inverse that a majority of jobs could be automated or mostly automated within 20 years or so.
“I think a very large number of jobs are going to be impacted — automated or deskilled. Eventually, it might be a majority,” Ford says.
Ford says just 20 percent of jobs disappearing would have a “staggering impact” on society and the economy. He says the jobs that will be safest, in terms of automation, will be the ones that require some level of creativity.
“The other areas are those things that require unique human qualities like empathy or building sophisticated human relationships with other people,” Fox says. That might include a job where you have relationships with clients, like in sales, or a job where you’re caring for others, he says.
Richard Baldwin, a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, tells Inverse that jobs that aren’t completely automated will still be affected by automation.
“Almost all occupations will still require some people to do the tasks that can’t be automated or offshored,” Baldwin says. He believes jobs that require human skills like empathy, motivating people, dealing with unexpected situations, curiosity, innovation, ethics will not be automated.
There are also simply jobs that won’t be automated for a long time because it will take so long for the technology to develop, Ford says. He thinks it would take a robot “like C-3PO” to replace an electrician, for example.
Once there are fewer jobs, and some kind of program like UBI that is keeping people financially stable, many believe we’ll simply have more time to do the things we want to do that don’t necessarily earn us much or any money. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang says on his campaign website that UBI will “enable all Americans to pay their bills, educate themselves, start businesses, be more creative, stay healthy, relocate for work, spend time with their children, take care of loved ones, and have a real stake in the future.” (Continues)
The book got my attention in particular about how insane it is to [...]]]>
The book got my attention in particular about how insane it is to continue immigrating millions of low-skilled foreigners when many of the jobs they take will be obsolete for human workers in just a few years.
The word is gradually getting out that the technology of robots, automation and AI needs attention for the threat it poses, although today’s booming economy makes that future easy to ignore.
Presidential candidate for 2020 Andrew Yang has been a lone politician warning the public that disruptive smart machines are coming whether we want them or not.
Sunday’s edition of The Hill contained an opinion piece by Martin Ford meant to be a reminder of the changes the world faces from this technology.
]]>AI and automation will disrupt our world — but only Andrew Yang is warning about it, The Hill, November 10, 2019
Disruption of the job market and the economy from automation and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the primary ideas animating Andrew Yang’s surprising campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Alone among the candidates, Yang is directly engaging with one of the central forces that will shape our futures.
Over the past ten years, I have written two books on the subject of artificial intelligence and its impact on the job market and the economy. I’ve spoken at dozens of events in more than 30 countries. The majority of my presentations were given to what you might call elite audiences — executives, technologists, Wall Street financiers, economists, government technocrats and so forth. I’ve found that, virtually without exception, these people take the specter of technological disruption seriously.
To be sure, not everyone buys into the possibility of widespread unemployment resulting from automation. But even the most skeptical generally recognize that the speed at which AI is advancing could create a stark divide, with a large and growing fraction of our workforce left struggling to maintain a foothold in the economy.
A recent report from the consulting firm Deloitte found that, among more than a thousand surveyed American executives, 63 percent agreed with the statement that “to cut costs, my company wants to automate as many jobs as possible using AI,” and 36 percent already believe that job losses from AI-enabled automation should be viewed as an ethical issue. In other words, while media pundits dismiss worries about automation, executives at America’s largest companies are actively planning for it.
It may seem odd to worry about AI and automation at a time when the headline unemployment rate is below 4 percent. But it is important to remember that this metric only captures people who are actively seeking work. Consider that, in 1965, only 3 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 — old enough to have completed education but too young to retire — were neither working nor actively looking for employment. Today, that number is about 11 percent.
In other words, the percentage of working-age men completely disenfranchised from employment markets has nearly tripled. The economist and former Treasury secretary Laurence Summers has estimated that, by 2050, that number could more than double again to a quarter or even a third.
Would it be unreasonable to imagine that an economist in 1965 might have uttered the words “mass unemployment” if he or she had been told that the percentage of men detached from the workforce would soar in this way? To be sure, technology is not the only factor here — but it is almost certainly playing a central role.
Disruption from artificial intelligence will not be a straightforward narrative of robots stealing jobs. Instead, it will include job de-skilling, in which technology makes what was once well-paid work accessible to minimum-wage or gig-economy workers with little or no training. The story so far has largely been about the elimination of solid middle-class jobs requiring moderate skill levels and the emergence of lower-paying jobs in the service sector. Indeed, the economy’s propensity to create large numbers of low-wage service jobs has been one of the main factors that has led to the current low levels of unemployment.
However, it is very unlikely that these jobs will continue to be created at the current pace.
The robots that already play a vital role in Amazon warehouses will soon become more dexterous and able to perform many of the tasks that now require people. Automation will inevitably invade the fast-food industry, and traditional retailers will have little choice but to turn to labor-saving technology in order to remain viable in a sector increasingly dominated by Amazon.
Nor will more educated white-collar workers get a pass on the AI disruption. Jobs that involve relatively predictable manipulation of information — routine quantitative analysis, preparing periodic reports and so forth — will, in many cases, be easier to automate than lower-paid work that requires physical interaction.
All this is sure to unfold in an unpredictable, sporadic way. Rather than a robot or an algorithm directly replacing a worker, we are likely to see organizations completely restructure work environments and redefine job descriptions, as more and more of the tasks now performed by people are automated. The result, in most cases, will be fewer jobs — and, often, those jobs will be held by different workers with completely different skill sets and talents, and perhaps in different geographic locations.
The Democratic Party’s agenda increasingly is being shaped by the “Social Justice Left.” If you count yourself among this movement, you should know that AI-driven automation is not a fringe issue, nor can it be dismissed as a “tech bro” concern. Rather, it is poised to amplify the types of inequality that you care most about. A recent analysis from McKinsey, for example, found that automation will disproportionately impact African Americans, likely worsening the racial income and wealth gaps. The fact is that virtually everything Democrats care about — inequality, health care, poverty, the environment, education, the prosperity of the middle class — will be deeply influenced by relentless advances in artificial intelligence.
And yet, inexplicably, Andrew Yang is currently the only presidential candidate willing to speak honestly about the magnitude of the coming challenge and to propose solutions. (Continues)
He recently spoke in Armenia to discuss the topic as described below — but perhaps he should be [...]]]>
He recently spoke in Armenia to discuss the topic as described below — but perhaps he should be rattling some cages in America’s capitol city where awareness of coming technological job loss is near zero. One obvious point: it makes no sense to continue admitting thousands of unskilled illegal aliens from the south when there will be no jobs for them at all when automation hits hard in a few years.
Human workers have largely disappeared from some manufacturing floors after being replaced by robots.
Ford remarked in a recent tweet that the Star’s headline “is a bit over the top” but he did not deny that a severe economic disruption is likely.
]]>Robots to end manual labour and put half of world out of work in global crisis, Daily Star (UK), October 7, 2019
Artificial intelligence will soon be widespread in the workforce
Robots will make half of the world’s workforce redundant in the next 10 to 20 years in a global unemployment crisis, an AI expert has claimed.
Top US futurist Martin Ford said automaton will soon be widespread, with all low-skilled jobs replaced by robots.
Ford, who focuses on the impact of AI and robotics on the job market, warned we need to be ready for widespread global unemployment.
He acknowledges the “long record of false alarms,” but argues that this time is different.
The pace of automation, he says, is no longer linear, but exponential, like the growth in computing capacity predicted by Moore’s Law.
The economy, Ford says, will not have time to create new professions to absorb the tens of millions of workers displaced by automation.
“My primary concern is that as AI and machine learning and robotics advance, a huge fraction of the jobs and tasks currently performed in the economy are going to be susceptible to automation,” he told the World Congress on Information Technology in Armenia today.
“Primarily it’s going to be those types of roles that are fundamentally routine, repetitive and, to some extent, predictable.
“That could be jobs in factories, but it could also be white collar jobs, the kind of job where you’re sitting in front of the computer doing something relatively routine – perhaps producing the same report again and again.”
White-collar jobs are also at risk for the first time, Ford says. On Wall Street, the number of financial workers has already plunged by 50,000 since 2000, as computers can process 100,000 transactions in a tenth of a second. (Continues)
However, Africa’s industrial boomlet may be cut short by [...]]]>
However, Africa’s industrial boomlet may be cut short by cheaper automation in the United States:
US robots could increase migration of unemployed Africans, experts say, Yahoo Finance, January 25, 2019
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.
Potentially, the mass migrations of Africans to Europe in recent years might be dwarfed by future relocations if job opportunities dramatically shrink because of smart machines. Plus, a United Nations projection says the African population will reach 2.5 billion by 2050, one-quarter of humans on earth.
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.
Author Martin Ford had a similar warning:
]]>Why Developing Countries Will Be Left Behind By Automation, By Martin Ford, ThriveGlobal.com, January 23, 2019
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.
I delved deeply into the global impact on work in my 2015 book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the threat of a Jobless Future. I also discussed it in my new book, Architects of Intelligence, especially in the conversation with James Manyika, who is the chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute, which conducts important research in this area.
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.
In 2015, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future was published and got a lot of attention for its dire forecast that was specific and well argued. Now, author Martin Ford is back with the next chapter of advanced machines, namely artificial intelligence (AI), with the book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building It.
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:
Martin Ford: One-on-One with the Architects of Intelligence, By John K. Waters, PureAI.com, November 26, 2018
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.
]]>It has been forecast by various tech experts that a big chunk of jobs will be transferred to smart machines over the coming years, one being the 2013 prediction of Oxford University researchers that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years.
So paying attention to the coming automation revolution makes sense for our national plans about the future. For example, America won’t need to be importing a million immigrant workers a year when machines will soon be doing the jobs.
Automation will revolutionize retail for shoppers and workers; for example, the machine shown below replaces a greeter and clerk in Lowe’s hardware stores.
Martin Ford was recently interviewed by Retail Touch Points, a business website, about certain automation applications and an update about the technology.
]]>Exclusive Q&A: Which Retail Jobs Are Safe From A Robot Takeover?, Retail Touch Points, September 5, 2018
In an exclusive interview with Retail TouchPoints, Ford identifies the advances in robotics and AI that are accelerating the fastest. He also identifies a selection of job categories that are safe from the march of automation — at least for now.
Retail TouchPoints (RTP): You write in Rise Of The Robots that warehouse work and fast food are two places where we’re already seeing the impact of robotics on employment. Has that trend continued since the book came out in 2015?
Martin Ford: There have been advances in both areas, but the progress has had the most practical applications in warehouse work. You can find videos on YouTube showing robots moving boxes around. Nearly all the main distribution warehouses are automated to some extent, for example by bringing shelves to workers who then reach in and grab the items they need. I really think Amazon’s warehouses will get more efficient and less labor-intensive, which directly impacts Walmart.
In order to respond, traditional retailers with stores also will have to become more efficient. Walmart and others have been testing robots for taking store inventory by counting the things that are on the store shelves. Part of the nature of robotics is that it’s easier to make one designed just to observe something, versus building a robot that physically does something like pick up a box. Eventually, however, robots will be unloading trucks or putting items on shelves, particularly in areas where the products are standardized. That’s probably inevitable.
In the fast food area, there are at least three startups in terms of actually preparing food. Momentum Machines, now called Creator, has a robot that shapes burgers from freshly ground meat and grills them to order, and it can produce 360 burgers per hour. They just opened a storefront in San Francisco in order to test the technology. There’s also a company called Zume that is using robots to make pizzas. Their business model is to put the uncooked pizzas in a van equipped with an oven and have it cooked while it’s on the way to the delivery destination, so that it’s virtually right out of the oven when you get it.
RTP: You also write about the impact of cloud robotics, which migrates the intelligence needed to animate mobile robots to a centralized hub, as a technology that’s likely to affect jobs. Why is this technology important?
Ford: Some people say ‘Well, I might lose my job doing such-and-such, but I can get a job fixing the robots.’ It’s true that repair and maintenance will create some jobs, but certainly not as many as will be lost. Take the Redbox video boxes, which can sense when there’s a mechanical or software issue with one of them and send an alert about that. All of these types of systems will be built in a way that’s very modular and easy to maintain, probably remotely and in some cases autonomously. That’s a part of the business model.
RTP: Are there jobs where we might be surprised to see robots, AI or other technologies replacing humans?
Ford: People have been biased toward the idea of robots taking away blue-collar jobs, like warehouse workers, or truck drivers with self-driving vehicles. There’s not enough focus on the person that sits in a cubicle, whose job is a lot easier to automate in many ways. For one thing, as opposed to a self-driving car, if the machine makes a mistake, nobody gets injured or killed. People who are analysts cranking out reports, or putting data into an understandable format, in areas like accounting, finance and banking — all of these jobs will be increasingly susceptible to becoming automated.
We’re already seeing it in customer service. When you call a company for technical support, it’s increasingly likely that you will be talking to a machine, and it’s not clear whether that will be disclosed to the consumer. These solutions could get good enough so that people wouldn’t be able to tell, especially when the conversations are limited in terms of the topic areas.
RTP: Are there retail jobs that might be considered “safe” from automation?
Ford: Jobs involving creative and strategic thinking are one area. Another is jobs involving interacting with people, particularly if you need to build a sophisticated relationship, as in high-end retail. Another area is jobs where there’s a lot of mobility and dexterity involved. Outside of retail that would be electricians and plumbers, but even something like stocking shelves — particularly in a smaller store that has a lot of different products and different-sized shelves — will still need people. Also, the person that goes into the fitting room to restock shelves with clothes that are all in a jumble — pretty much anything that requires flexibility and dexterity in unpredictable environments is fairly safe.
RTP: What are some of the likely effects of a jobless future?
Ford: Workers are consumers, and the main way we get money into the hands of these consumers is their jobs. As these jobs go away or as wages fall, things become increasingly unequal. We’re already seeing the impact of inequality — I’ve seen surveys saying that the average person would not be able to come up with $500 in case they needed to fix a car or had medical expenses. If people have no discretionary income, they’re not driving the economy, because these people are really only buying essentials. (Continues)
The Times put the story on its front page December 28, including a photo of a modern miner using a remote control to run a loading machine.
Socialism looks like a good fit with the automated future if governments adopt the program of a guaranteed basic income, as recommended by Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. The lefty countries are already set up to distribute free stuff, so the transition to a robot economy with cash for all would be no big deal. Certainly the Swedish miner Persson was agreeable and comfortable with the change. Still, the Times reporter seems to have become a little beguiled by Swedish socialism.
Curiously, the story had only one bland mention of the violent muslims who have made parts of Swedish cities no-go zones and transformed the once safe nation into the world rape capital:
Yet as Sweden absorbs large numbers of immigrants from conflict-torn nations, that support may wane. Many lack education and may be difficult to employ. If large numbers wind up depending on government largesse, a backlash could result.
“There’s a risk that the social contract could crack,” said Marten Blix, an economist at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm.
That’s one way to describe the civil war that’s brewing.
The Times story was reprinted in the Anchorage Daily News:
]]>The robots are coming, and Sweden is fine, Anchorage Daily News, By Peter S. Goodman, The New York Times, December 28, 2017
GARPENBERG, Sweden — From inside the control room carved into the rock more than half a mile underground, Mika Persson can see the robots on the march, supposedly coming for his job here at the New Boliden mine.
He’s fine with it.
Sweden’s famously generous social welfare system makes this a place not prone to fretting about automation — or much else, for that matter.
Persson, 35, sits in front of four computer screens, one displaying the loader he steers as it lifts freshly blasted rock containing silver, zinc and lead. If he were down in the mine shaft operating the loader manually, he would be inhaling dust and exhaust fumes. Instead, he reclines in an office chair while using a joystick to control the machine.
He is cognizant that robots are evolving by the day. Boliden is testing self-driving vehicles to replace truck drivers. But Persson assumes people will always be needed to keep the machines running. He has faith in the Swedish economic model and its protections against the torment of joblessness.
“I’m not really worried,” he says. “There are so many jobs in this mine that even if this job disappears, they will have another one. The company will take care of us.”
In much of the world, people whose livelihoods depend on paychecks are increasingly anxious about a potential wave of unemployment threatened by automation. As the frightening tale goes, globalization forced people in wealthier lands like North America and Europe to compete directly with cheaper laborers in Asia and Latin America, sowing joblessness. Now, the robots are coming to finish off the humans.
But such talk has little currency in Sweden or its Scandinavian neighbors, where unions are powerful, government support is abundant, and trust between employers and employees runs deep. Here, robots are just another way to make companies more efficient. As employers prosper, workers have consistently gained a proportionate slice of the spoils — a stark contrast to the United States and Britain, where wages have stagnated even while corporate profits have soared.
“In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, ‘Are you afraid of new technology?’ they will answer, ‘No, I’m afraid of old technology,'” says the Swedish minister for employment and integration, Ylva Johansson. “The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers.”
(Continues)
A lot of reporting over the last few years has had too much fan-boy wonderment at the rapid growth of admittedly amazing technology. [...]]]>
It was nice to see the Los Angeles Times recognize the negative effect of self-driving cars and trucks which will cause severe job loss, as shown by a front-page story on Wednesday.
A lot of reporting over the last few years has had too much fan-boy wonderment at the rapid growth of admittedly amazing technology. But the automation gizmos are being designed to replace millions of workers: tech designers and business owners win, and workers lose.
The self-driving sector is now engaged in something of a gold rush. There is huge money involved on who prevails in the marketplace, and the big players in the automotive and tech companies don’t want to be left behind.
As a result of the haste, safety may not be given proper attention by Washington because nobody in Congress wants to see China or any other competitor overshadow American technology. The Times article refers vaguely to a hearing which must be the September investigation which I reported: Senate Hearing Paves Way for Self-Driving Trucks. The Teamster representative Ken Hall was the only one who discussed safety much, noting:
For instance, I have yet to hear a serious discussion about how we will make sure an 80,000 pound automated truck will be able to maneuver around a warehouse or drop yard and not injure the countless workers also occupying that same space. Or how we would make sure that the rules governing a driver’s training requirements would be updated the moment one of these new vehicles is put on the road. And we haven’t gotten to the largest issue of them all, the potential impact on the livelihoods and wages of millions of your constituents.
Read Hall’s full testimony here
My optimistic self hopes that 80,000-pound self-driving trucks will not be loosed on the public highways any time soon — a software malfunction could be catastrophic. A reasonable (and hopefully long-term) introductory step would be the “platooning” strategy where a human driver pilots one truck with a small number of other vehicles hooked up electronically to the leader.
Furthermore, as the article points out, the political blowback will likely be severe when the public begins to see society transformed in a way nobody asked for, and the driving environment looks to be just an early harbinger of change. Many jobs are liable to face a die-off or at least be affected by the automation revolution. The Oxford study that got everyone’s attention in 2013 predicted that nearly half of occupations in the US were likely to be automated within the next 20 years. Yet Washington remains asleep to the danger, as demonstrated by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s clueless remark last spring that big automation was 50 or 100 years away.
There’s not a lot that can done to stop the harmful effects, because capitalism and invention go hand in hand. But ending immigration would be a prudent step, since it makes no sense for America to continue importing workers when machines will be doing many of the jobs in a few years, because:
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
This is one of the better articles from a mainstream newspaper about the difficult automated future:
]]>The driverless revolution may exact a political price, Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2017
A driverless truck is seen at a garage in San Francisco in May 2016. Such autonomous big rigs already are being tested on the roads. The Teamsters warn millions that of truck-driving and related jobs are threatened. Economists see a political backlash brewing.
In its race to embrace driverless vehicles, Washington has cleared away regulatory hurdles for auto companies and brushed aside consumer warnings about the risk of crashes and hacking.
But at a recent hearing, lawmakers absorbed an economic argument that illustrated how the driverless revolution they are encouraging could backfire politically, particularly in Trump country.
It was the tale of a successful, long-distance beer run.
A robotic truck coasted driverless 120 miles down Interstate 25 in Colorado on its way to deliver 51,744 cans of Budweiser. Not everyone at the hearing was impressed by the milestone, particularly the secretary-treasurer of the Teamsters, whose nearly 600,000 unionized drivers played no small role in President Trump’s victory last year.
Driverless vehicles threaten to dramatically reduce America’s 1.7-million trucking jobs. It is the front end of a wave of automation that technologists and economists have been warning for years will come crashing down on America’s political order. Some predict it could rival the impact of the economic globalization and the resulting off-shoring of jobs that propelled Trump’s victory in the presidential election.
“This is one of the biggest policy changes of our generation,” said Sam Loesche, head of government affairs for the Teamsters. “This is not just about looking after the health and welfare of America’s workers, but also their livelihoods.”
Washington isn’t ready for it. The Trump White House already has indicated it sees it as some future administration’s problem. Silicon Valley remains in shock over Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin’s remark in the spring that economic fallout from this type of automation is 50 to 100 years off and “not even on my radar screen.”
“I don’t think anybody there is thinking about this seriously,” said Martin Ford, author of “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.” “They are still looking at this as futuristic and not having an impact and not politically toxic. … Once people start seeing the vehicles on the roads and jobs disappearing because of them, things will quickly become very different.”
The arrival of that reckoning is getting accelerated by Washington’s bipartisan excitement for self-driving technology, one of the few policy issues advancing. New Trump administration regulations don’t require industry to submit certain safety assessments, leaving it voluntary. And legislation — already approved in the House and expected to pass in the Senate — strips authority from states to set many of their own safety guidelines.
Objections raised by the National Governor’s Assn. and the National Council of State Legislatures don’t seem to be slowing things down. Consumer groups are dismayed.
(Continues)
After writing dozens of blogs for LimitsToGrowth.org about rapidly advancing automation, robots and computer [...]]]>
A few months ago, I worked with The Social Contract quarterly to produce an issue with a section discussing the topic of how automation affects America’s need for immigration. The result was the Fall 2016 issue, subtitled “When Robots Replace Humans.”
After writing dozens of blogs for LimitsToGrowth.org about rapidly advancing automation, robots and computer software, my aim was to produce a series of basic articles that would introduce the subject as a whole to readers who might not have realized the effect of technology on today’s workplace. Many people understand that automation is a growing element of manufacturing that has reduced the need for factory workers, but don’t realize the extent to which the new technology is showing up in every corner of the work universe. The Associated Press reported in 2013 that numerous businesses responded to the Great Recession by implementing machines to replace millions of workers worldwide. It therefore seems clear that the slow pace of employment recovery is at least partially due to automation, although the Obama administration’s numerous regulations have had a discouraging effect on hiring as well.
The facts are basic: when robotics experts say that a substantial percentage of the current workforce will be replaced by machines or software within a decade or two, then America does not need to import immigrant workers to perform jobs that soon will no longer exist. Plus, automation follows decades of offshoring entire industries to Asia for cheap labor, and social dysfunction like drugs and crime have worsened throughout the Rust Belt and other areas of the nation that once produced things.
Editor Wayne Lutton’s introductory remarks:
As Automation Transforms the American Workforce… What need is there for further immigration?
Following are the automation articles by Brenda Walker:
Automation Is Coming for American Jobs
Automation Everywhere: From Manufacturing to Intelligent Software, Technological Change Is upon Us
Amazon Robotics – A case study of how smart machines transformed an Internet store
Finally, Dwight Murphey reviewed Martin Ford’s important book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future:
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