automation « Limits to Growth

The Future of Farming Is Automated

Is it too early to suggest ending the H-2a agricultural visa? The increasingly affordable cost of agricultural robots is making them an attractive choice for farmers rather than hiring foreign workers who are now often more expensive than the machines. Some of the new farmbots are compact, rentable and therefore suitable for small-scale farmers.

Earlier this […]

Uber Begins Autonomous Car Testing in Pittsburgh while Millions of Drivers Face Eventual Job Loss

The big robot news over the last week has been the roll-out of self-driving cars onto the streets of Pittsburgh. Last Wednesday, the Uber ride-hailing company presented its self-driving cars to the public for a test program in the city. The autos all have human drivers at the wheel at this point, ready to step […]

China Lens Factory Is an Illustration of Robot Introduction to Replace Human Workers

Here’s an interesting case study of a factory in China that added robots because management needed to increase productivity and cut costs. It’s refreshingly honest because the boss doesn’t bother to lie with silly stories about how robots will “help” workers by doing the boring repetitive stuff — the company is doing it to save […]

Advances in Agricultural Robots Make Immigrant Farm Labor Obsolete

Robot technology is getting smarter, smaller and cheaper. While this evolution is a growing threat to American jobs in general, the applications for agriculture make immigration truly outdated in that employment category, which is a good thing for this nation.

We know the argument: without largely illegal immigrant workers to pick the crops, food would rot […]

Labor Day 2016: More Automation, More Foreign Workers, Fewer Jobs for Americans

Labor Day is becoming a time of dismal reflection as automation technology continues its incursion into new places in the jobs economy. For example, self-driving taxis were rolled out for public testing in Singapore and Pittsburgh in August. A robot security guard was sighted in a San Francisco parking lot earlier in the summer. In […]

Robot Security Guards May Replace Human Workers

Many news reports about robots and automation are stuck on the cool technology aspect, but the one below from la Times includes the likely disemployment effect near the end of the article.

The Knightscope company’s security guard robot is designed to prowl spaces like parking garages and suck up any loose data along with performing its […]

LoweBot Retail Robot Will Soon Be Deployed in San Francisco Bay Area

Attention, hardware shoppers! Any questions you may have about products in the Lowe’s store can now be answered by the spiffy new retail robot in multiple languages, because LoweBot is linguistically diverse!

Lowe’s likes how the machine can function for 24/7 with no lunch breaks or paychecks required. Plus, the LoweBot also performs inventory tracking as […]

Sacramento Legislator Beams as Her Farmworker Overtime Bill Goes to Governor

The photo below caught my eye during the morning peruse of newspaper front pages. The Sacramento Bee picture shows a Democrat Assembly member, Lorena Gonzalez, glowing with hispanic pride at farmworker fans in the gallery after the passage of her bill expanding overtime pay for agricultural labor. The photo illustrates the tribal nature of human […]

Google Self-Driving Cars Face Competition in Concept

The front page of Saturday’s San Jose Mercury News had a headline: “For Google, race is on with self-driving cars.”

The game has changed with so many players on the field, as various companies have made their intentions known to build a self-driving car. Google self-driving vehicles have been designed as being totally driver-free, as can […]

Singapore: World’s First Self-Driving Cabs Are Launched

It’s actually a little breathtaking how rapidly the self-driving car thing has taken off, once the important people and companies decided it was going to be a thing, and the smart money needed to get in and establish a beachhead.

The Singapore operation is starting out small, with half a dozen cabs in a limited area […]

New Warehouse Robot Is Introduced

When Amazon bought the Kiva company with its warehouse robots in 2012, CEO Jeff Bezos made the unusual decision to keep the machines in-house and not support Kiva’s existing customers. That decision created a market for similar machines, and engineers got to work on inventing comparable robots that could perform warehouse-type tasks of pulling items […]

Geekwire: Presidential Candidates Ignore Automation Job Challenge

Last winter I wrote an article for The Social Contract titled Presidential Candidates: Why Is Automation’s Job Destruction Not Being Debated? (PDF version here). That piece covered the whole primary field, which turned out to be easy because none of the various 20+ contenders discussed the looming economic and social threat of machines and software replacing […]

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Limits to Growth