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Automation, Robots and Unemployment
#11
The driverless 18-wheeler is coming, most technologists agree. Great news for shippers. Lousy news for truck drivers. About 3.5 million Americans earn their living driving a truck, and millions more drive taxis, Uber cars, delivery vans and buses. What will they do when technology eliminates the need for a human behind the wheel? That’s been the topic of more than one high-level discussion at this year’s Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles, the annual gathering of financiers, business leaders and other potentates. Most of the 1 percenters gathered here won’t be harmed at all when trucks drive themselves. But they worry about those who will be harmed, and what the blowback might be. “The Industrial Revolution produced Marxism,” warned Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, pointing out that moments of great progress also leave some people behind—and sometimes create tsunamis of populism that bring down elites.
Technology has been displacing American workers for at least two decades, and the disruptive churn finally produced a political shock in the election of Donald Trump as president. So the fate of truck drivers 10 or 20 years from now is something already familiar to millions of factory workers and others whose jobs are now done by algorithms, robots or other machines. But this trend doesn’t seem to have crested yet, and could intensify rather than ebb. “We are seeing the decline of good-paying jobs that support middle-class lives,” Slaughter, who is president of the think tank New America, told Yahoo Finance. “We need to tell people to prepare for a different future.”

Why elites worry about the future of truck drivers [Video]

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#12
That's because innovations will make the world better and more efficient, freeing people up to pursue more creative, interesting things. "Some jobs are displaced, but equally new jobs are also created each time a new technology comes along," Dave Silver, a lead programmer of a powerful Google computer, AlphaGo, told CNBC. "There will be big change … but it's something I'm optimistic will actually lead to more opportunities, rather than less." Google has made a big push with artificial intelligence, with its machine, AlphaGo, as the most visible success thus far. The computer has already beat twice this week Ke Jie, a 19 year old and the world's best player of Go, an ancient Chinese board game. Teaching computers to master the game has long been considered a holy grail for scientists given the complexity – there are more possible configurations of the board than atoms in the universe.

Rise of machines will ‘lead to more opportunities, rather than less'

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#13
Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, joined Alphachat to talk about his report, “The Coming Productivity Boom”, co-authored by Bret Swanson of Entropy Economics. Mandel argues that the decades-long productivity stagnation will end once companies in the “physical” industries — transportation, construction, manufacturing, healthcare, wholesale and retail trade — start investing in information technology the way that companies in the digital industries have.

Michael Mandel on the case for productivity optimism | FT Alphaville

Thirteen years ago, two prominent U.S. economists wrote that driverless cars couldn’t execute a left turn against oncoming traffic because too many factors were involved. Six years later, Google proved it could make fully autonomous cars, threatening the livelihoods of millions of truck and taxi drivers. Throughout much of the developed world, gainful employment is seen as almost a fundamental right. But what if, in the not-too-distant future, there won’t be enough jobs to go around? That’s what some economists think will happen as robots and artificial intelligence increasingly become capable of performing human tasks. Of course, past technological upheavals created more jobs than they destroyed. But some labor experts argue that this time could be different: Technology is replacing human brains as well as brawn.

Is Your Job About To Disappear?

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#14
In the past 12 months, Japan has started to produce a lot of robots. Its production index for industrial robots stood at 25 in 2009, achieved 175 last year and rocketed to 225 in June this year. Three-quarters of the units made were exported, helping Japan boost its total exports by 11% in the past year. In turn, the industrial surge of robots has stimulated a surge in semiconductor production in Japan and South Korea. This is big and real.

Brexit won’t help Britain survive the rise of the robots | Paul Mason | Opinion | The Guardian

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#15
Most technology and employment experts, however, are quick to note that mechanization can have a tremendous positive impact on productivity that produces more creative, higher paying jobs. Another crucial distinction is that manufacturing work is particularly susceptible to automation, while many service industry jobs face less aggressive shifts from technology.  A new report from the Brookings Institution finds robots "are congregating densely in some places but are hardly found in others." The chart below suggests "industrial robots are by no means everywhere, they are clustered heavily in a short list of Midwestern and Southern manufacturing states, especially the upper Midwest."

Robots concentrated in auto heavy manufacturing spots, Midwest, South - Business Insider

Donald Trump is fixated on a vision of masculine, blue-collar employment. But the retail sector has long had a far greater impact on American employment – and checkout-line technology is putting it at risk... A recent analysis by Cornerstone Capital Group suggests that 7.5m retail jobs – the most common type of job in the country – are at “high risk of computerization”, with the 3.5m cashiers likely to be particularly hard hit. Another report, by McKinsey, suggests that a new generation of high-tech grocery stores that automatically charge customers for the goods they take – no check-out required – and use robots for inventory and stocking could reduce the number of labor hours needed by nearly two-thirds. It all translates into millions of Americans’ jobs under threat.

End of the checkout line: the looming crisis for American cashiers | Technology | The Guardian

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#16
If your main worry over automation is losing your job, history suggests you’ll probably be just fine. After all, even a century of unprecedented technological advancement in transportation, production and communication hasn’t caused labor’s share of national income to significantly budge. Economists David Autor and Anna Salomons reckon that’s because the primary driver of employment has actually been population growth, despite all the emphasis placed in academic circles on how machines augment human labor as well as why they will ultimately replace us anyway.
The bigger concern, they say, is how technological advances will affect earnings distribution. Essentially, the argument that the duo puts forth is that as long as there have been humans, there have been jobs – a topic Autor, who works at the MIT Department of Economics, previously explored in a Ted Talk. They suggest that labor supply and final demand for goods and services are what actually determine the level of employment, as consuming workers have more and more needs.
“Although the raw count of jobs available in industrialized countries is roughly keeping pace with population growth,” the economists write, “many of the new jobs generated by an increasingly automated economy do not offer a stable, sustainable standard of living.” “Simultaneously, many highly-paid occupations that are strongly complemented by advancing automation are out of reach to workers without a college education.”

Rising Inequality May Be the Real Risk of Automation - Bloomberg

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#17
Japan's aging and shrinking population has been partly blamed for the on-again, off-again nature of growth and deflation the past three decades. Lately, it's been driving a different and just as powerful idea: In the absence of large-scale immigration, the only viable solution for many domestic industries is to plow money into robots and information technology more generally. Humans will still be needed, of course, and that's behind a separate by-product of Japan's demographic challenges that I wrote about during a visit there last month. With unemployment down to 2.8 percent, companies are increasingly realizing they need to pay up to attract and keep qualified personnel. The other option -- increased immigration -- is politically difficult. Japanese tech innovation in yesteryear was about gadgets and games designed to give pleasure. Think Sony's iconic Walkman and Nintendo games. Now the demand in Japan comes from an older demographic. A nursing home may well be the place to look for the next wave. As my colleagues Henry Hoenig and Keiko Ujikane wrote this week, an owner of nursing homes in the Tokyo area plans to spend 300 million yen ($2.7 million) on software to make life easier for employees and residents.

Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration - Bloomberg

China is installing more robots than any other nation, and that may affect every other nation. Shipments jumped 27 percent to about 90,000 units last year, a single-country record and almost a third of the global total, and will nearly double to 160,000 in 2019, the International Federation of Robotics estimates.

China’s Robot Revolution May Affect the Global Economy - Bloomberg

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#18
Perhaps no company embodies the anxieties and hopes around automation better than Amazon. Many people, including President Trump, blame the company for destroying traditional retail jobs by enticing people to shop online. At the same time, the company’s eye-popping growth has turned it into a hiring machine, with an unquenchable need for entry-level warehouse workers to satisfy customer orders. Continue reading the main story Amazon’s global work force is three times larger than Microsoft’s and 18 times larger than Facebook’s, and last week, Amazon said it would open a second headquarters in North America with up to 50,000 new jobs.
Complicating the equation even more, Amazon is also on the forefront of automation, finding new ways of getting robots to do the work once handled by employees. In 2014, the company began rolling out robots to its warehouses using machines originally developed by Kiva Systems, a company Amazon bought for $775 million two years earlier and renamed Amazon Robotics. Amazon now has more than 100,000 robots in action around the world, and it has plans to add many more to the mix.

As Amazon Pushes Forward With Robots, Workers Find New Roles - The New York Times

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#19
A few years ago, Amazon.com Inc. triggered a robot arms race when it purchased a company called Kiva Systems, maker of automated warehouse robots. Now its would-be rivals are landing bigger and bigger cash injections to try to compete with the e-commerce giant. Locus Robotics, a spinoff of a warehouse company that decided to build its own robots after the Amazon deal in 2012, raised another $25 million in venture capital, bringing its total funding to more than $33 million, the company announced last week.  The new cash for Locus followed a $15 million injection in July for 6 River Systems Inc., a robotics company founded by ex-Kiva executives. In March, China warehouse robotics startup Geek+, which boasts Alibaba as a client, raised $22 million. Competitor RightHand added $8 million in venture funding this year as well.

Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon - Bloomberg

RRobots are undeniably decimating jobs in certain industries—but the news isn’t necessarily all bad. new report by Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work lays out 21 new kinds of jobs that will be created in the next 10 years, employing large swaths of people impacted by automation. All the jobs fall under three main areas: coaching people to expand their skills, caring for others to improve their health, and connecting human and machine. Some job titles sound like terms pulled from a science fiction novel—positions like “genetic portfolio manager,” “personal memory curator,” “digital tailor,” and “AI-assisted health-care technician,” for example..

Automation May Take Your Job Away, But It Might Just Create a New One for You, Too - MIT Technology Review

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