Brigadoon Weekend
Emerging issues shaping commerce and culture.
October 3, 2020
Automation Only.
AUTOMATION DEEP DIVE SIX
Automation can help humans enjoy happy, productive working lives: The truth is that robots are coming — but that is not to say we lack all agency.
Naomi Climer
The trick is to work alongside robots rather than try to compete: There are two big worries about the economy in public debate. Two big, and contradictory worries. One is that we had better get used to flat-lining productivity, that the 2 percent a year labor productivity growth of the entire post-war period will turn out to have been an aberration. The other is that robots are going to take all the jobs, from driving vehicles to reading legal documents, within the next 20 years.
Diane Coyle
How Amazon automated work and put its people to better use: For the past decade, Amazon has been pushing to automate office work under a program now known as Hands off the Wheel. The purpose was not to eliminate jobs but to automate tasks so that the company could reassign people to build new products — to do more with the people on staff, rather than doing the same with fewer people. The strategy appears to have paid off: At a time when it’s possible to start new businesses faster and cheaper than ever before, Hands off the Wheel has kept Amazon operating nimbly, propelled it ahead of its competitors, and shown that automating in order to fire can mean missing big opportunities.
Alex Kantrowitz
What robots can do for retail: The real benefit of retail robots is the opportunity to capture more granular data about the products on the shelves and customer buying patterns, which can increase efficiency and accuracy in inventory management. The key is using retail robots as data-collectors within an internet-of-things (IoT), which is best thought of as a complex network of connected devices, objects, and sensors gathering voluminous data that is analyzed in the cloud or with edge computing, which uses nearby servers to lower latency.
Ben Forgan
Now calling balls and strikes: Robot umpires: Baseball’s future has arrived in the Atlantic League with the introduction of an automated strike zone. If the experiment goes well, the days of players imploring umps to schedule an eye exam could soon come to an end.
Wall Street Journal
One San Francisco politician is exploring a tax on robots: Taxing companies that use robots to help pay for the workers they’ve displaced has been floated as a theoretical solution to a post-automation world. Now San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim is looking into whether it’s what the tech capital needs.
Wired
AUTOMATION DATA POINTS
Fully autonomous farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means machines will be able to completely take over a multitude of tasks. Tractors will drive with no farmer in the cab, and specialized equipment will be able to spray, plant, plow, and weed cropland.
In an analysis of North American and European manufacturing jobs, it was found that roughly 48% of hours primarily relied on the use of manual or physical labor. By the year 2030, it’s estimated that only 35% of the time will be spent on such routine work, according to Raconteur.
Industrial robot sales are sky high, mainly the result of falling industry costs. This trend is expected to continue, with the cost of robots falling by 65% between 2015 and 2025. By 2025, for example, it’s projected that 10-15% of jobs in three sectors (manufacturing, transportation and storage, and wholesale and retail trade) will have a high potential for automation, according to Raconteur.
To put the increase in robotics in perspective, the US had 0.49 robots per 1,000 workers in 1995. That number rose to 1.79 robots per 1,000 workers in 2017, according to McKinsey.
The FCC estimates that Americans get 2.4 billion unwanted, automated calls every month.
Out with the old: The Twin Threats of Aging and Automation report, a collaboration between Marsh & McLennan’s Global Risk Centre, Mercer, and Oliver Wyman on the relationship between aging and automation, states in 15 countries, Asian workers are most at risk of losing their jobs to robots.
Getting older means getting more robots: By 2050, the UN estimates that more than a third of the world’s population will be over 50, up from less than 16% in 1950. As a proportion of the working-age population, those aged between 50 and 64 already make up more than 30% of the workforce in Canada, Germany, Italy, and Japan.
TWEET
The "economic consequences of automation" in 1957 echo what we're hearing in 2016. Yet we survived those 60 years. http://nyti.ms/2g7iIan
@amywebb
Amy Lynn Webb is an American futurist, author, and founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute. She is an adjunct assistant professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council, and was a 2014–15 Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
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