smart machines « Limits to Growth

Mississippi Factories Illustrate the New Manufacturing

Sunday’s Sixty Minutes episode had an interesting segment about the growth of manufacturing in the United States. The show focused on the economic developer Joe Max Higgins, who is both colorful in the southern style and business smart. Nevertheless, the piece provides a window on modern manufacturing, where robots do the repetitious tasks and human […]

Wal-Mart’s Dallas Optical Lab Replaces 91 Jobs with Machines

You don’t see many news reports like this one where a relative few human jobs are lost when smart machines are brought in.

I suspect there are many more instances of a few dozen job cuts here and there that never make it to the newspapers or internet. It’s just the company upgrading equipment to […]

Trump’s Employment Agenda May Bring Automation into a National Spotlight

It will be interesting to see how effective President Trump can be in bringing jobs back to America through reducing regulation, renegotiating bad trade deals, lowering corporate taxes and creating a more business-friendly environment. The process will be a good measure of how much automation has undermined employment for American workers.

Some reshoring has already occurred […]

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 […]

Automation Is Seen as an Alternative to Outsourcing

This is something of a good news story, because when smart machines are chosen over shipping US jobs overseas wholesale, there are likely a few human workers required to assist the robots. At least for the time being.

Below, Generac Power Systems brought back its manufacturing from China, but the plant went from 400 workers in […]

Former Restaurant Executive Declares a Robot Arm Is Cheaper Than $15/hour Humans

A one-time CEO of McDonald’s, Ed Rensi, recently appeared on a Fox Business show and explained the financial facts about automation in the fast-food industry: “If the $15 minimum wage goes across the country, you’re going to see job loss like you can’t believe. I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you […]

Influential People Agree: Automation Threatens Jobs

Over at the exclusive Milken Institute confab this week, wealthy and important people were warning about the coming robot jobs apocalypse that endangers employment across the skills spectrum.

As an example of the increasing insertion of automation into society, here is a BBC report about the four-day conference read by a robot:

It didn’t sound very human-like […]

Germany: Robots Will Take Human Jobs

This DW report presents the common pretend-balance of saying automation may take jobs or it may create new ones. But why would companies invest many millions of dollars (or euros) to install smart machines in manufacturing if they weren’t far cheaper in the long run? There will be some new tech jobs coming out of the technology […]

Robots and Automation Are Coming for Human Jobs — Martin Ford Interview

I’ve posted earlier discussions with the author of Rise of the Robots before (Australia ABC radio, Sept 2015 and NPR, May 2015) but the latest has a timely dialogue about jobs and the incursion of smart machines.

The automated workplace is a huge and basic threat to the economy when the social contract of payment to workers […]

Research on Robot Garbage Collectors Has Proved the Concept Works

I reported last summer about efforts to replace human garbage collectors with robotic ones.

Things are moving along expeditiously in Sweden. As is often the case, the spin is designed to distract from eventual job destruction. The garbage project is touted as a “fun thought experiment” about the future of automation rather than a long-term scheme […]

Obama Plans to Spend $4 Billion to Speed Development of Self-Driving Vehicles

The tech industry has been successfully moving forward at deliberate speed to create self-driving cars, trucks and buses, but the administration thinks it can help by dumping in a major infusion of taxpayer cash. On Thursday, the Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx announced a plan increase government meddling in driverless vehicles to expedite the process:

FOXX: “We […]

Add Sewing Robot to the Advanced Machines Being Developed for Human Worker Replacement

One of the toughest skills for automation engineers to crack is the amazing human hand with its unique dexterity — but it’s not for lack of trying.

Amazon’s highly automated warehouses have thousands of Kiva robots moving racks of merchandise around to human box packers — for now. The company is working to develop a machine […]

Fair Use: This site contains copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues related to culture and mass immigration. We believe this constitutes a "fair use" of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information, see: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000107----000-.html. In order to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond "fair use", you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Limits to Growth