smart machines « Limits to Growth

Japan May Provide a Snapshot of the Automated Future

Does Japan offer a preview of the near future of more robots? Perhaps, since the nation has an aging population, and it has rejected immigration as a source of labor, choosing automation to pick up the slack.

The Atlantic magazine takes a look in a new article that visits a robot restaurant in a robot […]

Amazon Robots Propel Online Shopping but Repress Retail

Stores are certainly suffering since Amazon brought its robot battalions onto the retail field. The Kiva robots are an integral and necessary part of the millions of products that Jeff Bezos sells online and quickly ships to customers. Amazon purchased the Kiva robots in 2012 for $775 million; before that, human workers pushed carts around […]

Automation Makes Amazon’s Revolutionary Success Possible

Amazon owner Jeff Bezos was recently recognized to be the world’s richest man, with a net worth of more than $100 billion. An optimistic economy has helped push his riches to stratospheric heights.

Plus, automation has played a big part in Amazon’s success. The online shopping behemoth couldn’t process the millions of products without computerized […]

Self-Driving Trucks Will Be a Part of Unprecedented Social Change

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. […]

Look for Smart Machines to Change Work Substantially within Five Years

Recent reports give a near-term picture of how experts believe the automation revolution will roll out. Continuing education to adapt to technology will become more necessary as some careers will “cease to exist.”

There is a minor industry of reassurance — writers who spread the message that the automation revolution is over-hyped and will not […]

Taiwan Tests Its First Self-Driving Bus

The race is on among tech and automative companies building self-driving vehicles to get their creations on the road. In Asia, a boxy little bus unit has been successfully transporting people around on the National Taiwan University campus since May.

The bus putters along at six miles per hour with a dozen passengers, which […]

Washington Post Notes Rise of Smart Machines (Incompletely)

The Washington Post included a front-page story about automation on Sunday, and it admitted “the surrender of the industrial age to the age of automation continues at a record pace.”

But the cause was mostly laid at the feet of the workers themselves rather than complex forces of globalization that have been accumulating for […]

Retail Robot Does Inventory — So Long, Stock Boys!

In St. Louis, a midwestern grocery chain is making news with its test run of an inventory-taking robot, called Tally by its manufacturer. The machine is not unrelated to the LoweBot-type machine that guides customers to desired items in the store which the robot has filed in its database of what and where. The Tally […]

Farm Robot Is Touted as Kinder to Workers

Down on the farm in Salinas California, a new robot harvester uses “water knives” — actually high-powered water jets — to pick lettuce. To hear the industry flacks describe it, the machines end unhealthy stoop labor in lettuce fields. But details in the story suggest that President Trump’s border enforcement is having an effect when […]

Automation: Basic Income Is Discussed as a Possible Solution to Jobless Future

It’s a rare thing for the automation threat to employment come up on TV, so any discussion has to be scored as a plus. In addition, the video segment was shown on the evening Fox News show Special Report a few days ago.

But universal income is a hard sell, with so many ways it […]

Left Media Admits Automation May Affect Need for Immigrant Farm Workers

It’s nearly summer and that means the time has come for media boilerplate articles about a shortage of immigrant workers down on the farm — so couldn’t Washington kindly arrange for a few hundred thousand to be sent to California?? Right on schedule, a Google News search (which covers the last 30 days of listings) […]

Silicon Valley Newspaper Floats Free Money Idea to Remedy Robot Job Loss

Sunday’s San Jose Mercury had a front-page article (graphic shown) about the possibility of instituting a universal basic income to remedy the huge job loss predicted from automation. As usual, nobody promoting the idea has any suggestion of how the government would finance the trillions of dollars annually required. Perhaps a start would be to […]

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Limits to Growth