automation / robot
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see AI, algorithm
is this more about physical jobs?
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an 12 25
*Newsweek*reportsthat blue collar jobs are collapsing under President Donald Trump as the labor market in 2025 "takes a decidedly white-collar tone" driven by artificial intelligence.
"AI has already been cited in many of the mass reductions announced by Amazon and other corporations in recent weeks," writes Hugh Cameron.
"But for all the hand-wringing over the potentially ill-fated employees of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, a quieter crisis appears to be unfolding for the U.S.'s blue-collar employees, despite the pledges and efforts of the current administration to foster a renaissance in marquee industries such as construction and manufacturing," he adds.
The delayed September jobs report corroborates this, showing "an encouraging uptick in overall hiring but no pause in blue-collar employment's long-term decline," Cameron writes.
Of the five areas of employment considered blue collar — manufacturing, mining and logging, transportation and warehousing, utilities, and construction — only construction saw an increase in employment, he notes.
That said, construction's 19,000-job gain was also "insufficient to offset the monthly loss of 25,300 jobs in transportation or manufacturing shedding a further 6,000," he writes.
"Year-over-year changes show that annual payroll declines have accelerated since January — albeit continuing a long-term trend—and have pushed blue-collar job growth into negative territory for the first time since the pandemic," Cameron explains.
Heidi Shierholz, chief economist for the Department of Labor during President Barack Obama's tenure, tells Newsweek there is "undeniably a deterioration in employment conditions for the U.S.'s blue-collar workers."
"Between April and September, goods-producing industries (manufacturing, construction, logging, mining), lost 72,000 jobs, with most of those losses (58,000) in manufacturing," she says.
Shierholz also says that "the services sector — which falls partially under the blue-collar umbrella — is 'limping along' thanks solely to gains in health care."
David Dorn, a labor market expert at the University of Zurich, says construction is particularly vulnerable to negative growth despite that slight uptick in employment.
"This sector is highly sensitive to broader economic deceleration, and increasingly restrictive immigration policies under the current U.S. administration are likely constraining labor supply," he says.
And while Dorn says it's hard to "isolate" the direct effects of Trump's tariffs on employment, he says he doubts "whether these had 'generated any sustained gains' in jobs."
Dean Baker, a co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, goes further and says "tariffs have been largely to blame for the uncertainty and 'overall weakness in demand' that has driven cautious hiring across blue-collar sectors," Newsweek reports.
"Companies are reluctant to invest in a context where they have no idea whattariffs will be in placesix months from now, much less three to five years from now," he says.
Baker also says that while manufacturing's gradual decline as a share of total employment has "been the case for more than 50 years," as labor demand shifted toward health care, education and other roles within the more service-focused economy, the president isn't trying to fix it either.
"Trump is doing nothing to address these issues," Baker says.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/liberal-journalism-faces-an-uphill-visibility-battle-as-gop-backs-more-propaganda-outlets/
A new report highlights the decline in liberal journalism outlets over the last 15 years with more than 25% of America's newspaper publications and news communities slowly becoming "news deserts" amid the rise of right-wing publications.
A report titled, "The Expanding News Desert," released by the University of North Carolina's Hussman School of Journalism and Media which revealed statistics about the decline in publications and the disappearance of nearly half of the journalists in the United States. According to the report, thousands of communities are now being described as "news deserts" as paid politically-charged journalism attempts to take centerstage.
Another issue that contributes to the war on journalism is the fast-paced production of algorithmically generated content. In 2019, the Lansing State Journal became aware of a website called, The Lansing Sun. At first glance, the website looked like a typical news outlet, but a closer look revealed that the site was, in fact, part of a network of sites baring only the appearance of an actual community news outlet.
Additional reports expounded on Columbia University's Tow Center's reporting of "at least 450 websites in a network of local and business news organizations, each distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories."
By August of 2019, the network of pseudo news outlets had expanded to more than 1,200 websites. In fact, The New York Times recently revealed a former journalist by the name of Brian Timpone was behind the rise of the "pay-for-play" network which fuels the spread of right-wing propaganda.
"Employees at the Illinois Opportunity Project, a conservative advocacy group, requested dozens of articles about specific Republican politicians in Illinois. The group has paid $441,000 to Mr. Timpone's companies, according to the nonprofit's tax records." - The New York Times
According to one report, the ongoing scheme further perpetuates the war on "the entire concept of media literacy."
"The scheme takes advantage of how profit-chasing has blown up the entire concept of 'media literacy.' When your local paper's website is as larded up with spammy-looking ad crud as an illegal Monday Night Football stream, these spare sites cannot possibly look any less 'real.' And as newspapers die and people get more and more of their news from social media, fewer people recognize which news 'brands' are supposed to be 'trustworthy.'
As these types of platforms continue to rise, American journalism is at stake.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/when-robots-wage-our-wars-for-us/
When robots wage our wars for us
An MQ-9 Reaper, armed with GBU-12 Paveway II laser guided munitions and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, piloted by Col. Lex Turner flies a combat mission over southern Afghanistan. (U.S. Air Force Photo / Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt)
Written by Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch August 25, 2020
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/some-companies-are-using-bailout-funds-to-make-jobs-permanently-disappear-and-those-human-workers-are-not-coming-back-historian/
HNN singer
The federal Coronavirus bailout contains no restrictions on corporate investment in automation. That may be the most serious long term consequence of the pandemic.
It is widely reported how weak the federal guidelines are for use of Corona virus bailout funds. Most of the restrictions that require businesses to use taxpayer provided bailout dollars to retain their workforces were placed on small and medium sized operations. Enforcement mechanisms are weak, if non-existent. Businesses self-certify they made a good faith effort. Essentially, they expected to operate based on the honor system.
Large corporations are not even required to abide by these considerations. The bailout law is supposed to prevent corporate stock buybacks and excessive dividend payouts, and set limits on executive compensation, but the Secretary of the Treasury can waive these restrictions to protect the national interest, and Donald Trump has announced he has no intention of reporting to Congressional oversight committees. No employee protections are specified in the law and there are no restrictions on corporations using the money to invest in technology that replaces workers.
The almost half a trillion federal dollars targeted to bail out large corporations will be administered by Federal Reserve banks. But Fed officials are backing off from requiring these companies to protect their workers. In addition, direct Federal Reserve loans, which add billions to the corporate honeypot, come with no strings attached at all on how money will be used.
If you think corporations will act honorably to protect workers, you don’t understand American capitalism. Following the 2008 Wall Street and banking collapse, companies used federal bailout dollars to give corporate executives over one and a half billion dollars in salaries, bonuses, stock options, and benefits. Goldman Sachs, which received $10 billion from the federal government, then paid its President and CEO nearly $54 million.
Historically, war-profiteering has always been a particularly lucrative opportunity for corporations to enrich themselves at public expense. During the American Civil War, corporate America sold defective weapons and shoddy uniforms and shoes to the Union Army. During the Spanish-American War it sold spoiled or “embalmed beef” to feed the troops. Cost-plus contracts were introduced during World War I and continued during World War II. United States Major General Smedley Butler estimated that during the first World War, the United States government spent $16,000,000,000 on equipment and supplies that had “no relevant use in the war effort.” During World War II, a Special Senate committeeinvestigating the National Defense Program headed by future President Harry Truman reported that companies with the largest volume of war business increased their profits tenfold. Truman labeled some of the war profiteering as “treason.”
More recently, Pentagon auditors challenged more than a billion dollars in excessive spending and improper billing by Halliburton, which received non-competitive Defense Department contracts during the outsourced war in Iraq.A Congressional oversight committee estimated between $30 and $60 billion in contract fraud during the Afghan and Iraq wars.
In this crisis, stock market analysts celebrate the seeming paradox of stock price recovery while unemployment soars. They expect record unemployment will place pressure on the federal government to provide corporations with even more financial giveaways and low-cost loans.
Wartime corporate profits have frequently been used to mechanize production, increasing corporate wealth at the expense of workers. This happened in bituminous coal mining, my area of study, after both World War I and World War II. While the long-term impact of new technologies on overall employment may be positive, it is definitely negative for displaced workers and their families like 18th century British weavers, 19th century blacksmiths and carriage-makers, and post-World War II longshoreman and typographers, who live, eat, and have to pay rent or mortgages in the short term. Automation today projects as much worse than in past eras, not just threatening specific industries, but the nature of human work itself.
Currently, 15.6 million retail workers and 5.2 million warehouse workers, who together made up almost 15% of the American workforce before the Corona virus pandemic, are at the greatest risk of replacement by robots by corporations using unregulated federal bailout dollars.
Before the Corona virus pandemic, companies were increasingly using robots to replace human workers at call centers, warehouses and grocery stores. The corporate goal: cut labor costs and improve profit. Using the excuse that they are protecting humans from infection, companies are expanding automation. According to one tech company, retailers are now using “autonomous floor care robots” to replace humans doing 8,000 hours of daily work, a 13% increase from two months ago. Once an investment is made in purchasing these machines, human workers are not coming back.
The Giant Eagle supermarket chain, one of the largest privately held corporations in the United States with 32,000 employees, is using robots to keep track of inventory, supposedly freeing its employees to disinfect and sanitize store surfaces and process deliveries. But once the pandemic subsides, shelves won’t need to be disinfected, pressure for deliveries will decline, and the robots will still be there managing inventory.
Walmart employs 1.5 million workers, making it the United States’ largest private employer. It is partnering with Bossa Nova Robotics and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to design a shelf-scanning robot to use in its stores and warehouses. One prototype operates 365 days a year without lunch breaks, vacations, or sick days, and takes only short time-outs to recharge its batteries. It scans shelves with a high-resolution camera and reports out-of-stock items for reordering.
Amazon employs more than 1.1 million Americans. In 2012, Amazon purchased a robotics company that developed mobile robots that read barcodes and collect and transport products in its huge warehouses. It also sponsors an international contest where robotics teams compete to create the fastest and most efficient robots. InDecember 2019, Amazon had more than 200,000 mobile robots in operation. Human workers are expected to keep pace with the robots if they want to keep their jobs. Injuries have increased along with productivity, but they may decline soon as Amazon introduces a new generation of robots that can pack items for shipping and replace more workers.
A major force in efforts push to replace humans with machines is the McKinsey consulting firm. McKinsey claims grocers could enhance their profits by reducing “the pool of labor hours” by as much as 65% using currently available automation technology. If McKinsey recommends something, it cannot be good for American workers.
According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, retail will not be the only work area dramatically impacted by automation: “currently demonstrated technologies could automate 45 percent of the activities people are paid to perform and.. about 60 percent of all occupations could see 30 percent or more of their constituent activities automated.” This was written before federal Coronavirus funding started to pour billions of dollars into technological research and the corporate acquisition of automated machinery.
Public attention therefore cannot just be about hunkering down and surviving the Corona virus. Democratic Party attempts to extend unemployment insurance during the pandemic, while vitally important, do not address what will happen when companies use bailout funds to make jobs permanently disappear. It is time to get very serious about planning for the post-pandemic world of work.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/why-the-robots-of-the-future-wont-look-anything-like-we-assumed/
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The Top 7 digital transformation trends shaping 2020 report by MuleSoft(a Salesforce company) is quite comprehensive, with numerous customer use cases and technology adoption forecasts for 2020 and beyond. The findings in this report strongly suggests that in order to deliver a connected customer experience, companies must focus on cultivating a data-driven culture and use game-changing and disruptive technologies like machine learning and AI, in multi-cloud environments, to accelerate and amplify co-creation of value within their ecosystems by strongly partnering with IT to better leverage the awesome power of applications networks.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/if-robots-take-our-jobs-what-will-it-mean-for-climate-change/
meh
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:{Worker-protection:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;white-space:nowrap"):}: laws aren’t ready for an automated future
Jeffrey Hirsch, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
If your job doesn't currently involve automation or artificial intelligence in some way, it likely will soon. Computer-based worker surveillance and performance analysis will come, too.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/campaign-demands-ban-on-killer-robots-and-calls-out-us-obstruction/
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not bots
Truckers are numerous, conservative, and hurting. And despite their widespread…
no lnx
Truckers are facing a ‘bloodbath’ in their industry — and it’s turning many in the pro-Trump group against him: report
[pix President Donald Trump sits in the driver’s seat of a semi-truck as he welcomes truckers and CEO’s to the White House, Thursday, March 23, 2017, to discuss healthcare. (Official White House Photo by Benjamin Applebaum)]
Written by Cody Fenwick August 20, 2019
Truckers are numerous, conservative, and hurting. And despite their widespread support for Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016, a new report from Business Insider suggests the pain in the industry might be turning these workers away from the president.
The political trends in trucking are not insignificant. According to the American Trucking Associations, there were an estimated 3.5 million truck drivers in 2018. RTS Financial has found that there are 7.4 million jobs total “tied to the trucking industry.” And Business Insider reported that nearly 90 percent of truckers are registered voters, higher than the general population.
Compare those figures to the number of coal miners — a little over 50,000 — an occupation that has received vastly disproportionate attention in American politics given its size.
And as the manufacturing sector in the United States falters and economists warn that the risks of a recession are increasing, the trucking industry is taking a hit.
Barron’s reported last week:
“The freight industry is currently experiencing a recession, which began in October 2018,” writes Aaron Terrazas, Convoy director of economic research, in a report published Thursday. (Convoy is a new digital marketplace trying to make the traditional truck brokerage industry more efficient, especially when roughly a third of all miles truckers drive are empty, Terrazas says.) Freight volumes have been falling since last fall, he adds.
Morris Coffman, a trucker for 35 years, told Business Insider that the industry is in the midst of a “bloodbath.”
“I have witnessed many ups and downs in the industry but nothing like this,” Coffman said. “Many, many owner-operators and drivers have either lost equipment or lost a job in the last year.”
It’s not just the industry’s struggles alone causing the problems; it’s also the Republican Party’s 2017 tax bill. While overall the bill should have reduced most American’s taxes — even the change wasn’t noticeable — some of the changes fell especially hard on truckers:
Trump’s tax reworking in 2017 led to many truck drivers having to pay hundreds in taxes this year, thanks to a change in per-diem laws. Dennis Bridges, an accountant who specializes in doing taxes for truckers, told Mother Jones in April that 75% of his clients saw an unusually large tax payment, and about 20% had to fork over more than $5,000.
Business Insider noted that while the trucking industry is one of the most conservative jobs in the country, these trends appear to be turning off many from the president’s policies.
“[Trump] is absolutely a moron,” Coffman said. “His idiotic ideas will tank the economy even further.”
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https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/18/18677437/darpa-squad-x-project-marines-drones-robots-ai-fog-of-war-caci-lockheed-martin-video-watch
https://www.c-span.org/video/?459891-1/the-robots-coming
MAY 2, 2019
The Robots Are Coming!
Andres Oppenheimertalked about the future of automation and the jobs that will eventually be taken over by robots.
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https://theconversation.com/artificial-intelligence-enhanced-journalism-offers-a-glimpse-of-the-future-of-the-knowledge-economy-117728
Much as robots have transformed entire swaths of the manufacturing economy, artificial intelligence and automation are now changing information work, letting humans offload cognitive labor to computers. In journalism, for instance, data mining systems alert reporters to potential news stories, while newsbots offer new ways for audiences to explore information. Automated writing systems generate financial, sports and elections coverage.
A common question as these intelligent technologies infiltrate various industries is how work and labor will be affected. In this case, who – or what – will do journalism in this AI-enhanced and automated world, and how will they do it?
The evidence I’ve assembled in my new book “Automating the New: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media” suggests that the future of AI-enabled journalism will still have plenty of people around. However, the jobs, roles and tasks of those people will evolve and look a bit different. Human work will be hybridized – blended together with algorithms – to suit AI’s capabilities and accommodate its limitations.
Augmenting, not substituting
Some estimates suggest that current levels of AI technology could automate only about 15% of a reporter’s job and 9% of an editor’s job. Humans still have an edge over non-Hollywood AI in several key areas that are essential to journalism, including complex communication, expert thinking, adaptability and creativity.
Reporting, listening, responding and pushing back, negotiating with sources, and then having the creativity to put it together – AI can do none of these indispensable journalistic tasks. It can often augment human work, though, to help people work faster or with improved quality. And it can create new opportunities for deepening news coverage and making it more personalized for an individual reader or viewer.
Newsroom work has always adapted to waves of new technology, including photography, telephones, computers – or even just the copy machine. Journalists will adapt to work with AI, too. As a technology, it is already and will continue to change newswork, often complementing but rarely substituting for a trained journalist.
New work
I’ve found that more often than not, AI technologies appear to actually be creating new types of work in journalism.
Take for instance the Associated Press, which in 2017 introduced the use of computer vision AI techniques to label the thousands of news photos it handles every day. The system can tag photos with information about what or who is in an image, its photographic style, and whether an image is depicting graphic violence.
The system gives photo editors more time to think about what they should publish and frees them from spending lots of time just labeling what they have. But developing it took a ton of work, both editorial and technical: Editors had to figure out what to tag and whether the algorithms were up to the task, then develop new test data sets to evaluate performance. When all that was done, they still had to supervise the system, manually approving the suggested tags for each image to ensure high accuracy.
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Retailers like Walmart are embracing robots: Here’s how workers can tell if they’ll be replaced
Walmart recently said it plans to deploy robots to scan shelves, scrub floors and perform other tasks.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/pioneer-in-field-warns-dangers-posed-by-artificial-intelligence-are-very-real/
A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence warned that “dangers of abuse” of AI “are very real.”
The warning from Canadian computer science professor and leading AI researcher Yoshua Bengio came in a Q&A with the journal *Nature* published Thursday.
The interview was conducted back in January, before Bengio was named along with two others the latest recipients of the Turing Award, a prize dubbed the “Nobel Prize of Computing.”
Bengio told Nature that “we have to raise flags before bad things happen” in terms of irresponsible use of AI.
Unfortunately, “what is most concerning is not happening in broad daylight” but “in military labs, in security organizations, in private companies providing services to governments or the police,” he said.
In particular, Bengio said, he isconcerned with so-called killer drones—lethal autonomous weapons—and surveillance, which can be abused by authoritarian governments.
AI “can be used by those in power to keep that power, and to increase it,” said Bengio, and be used “to worsen gender or racial discrimination.”
Some sort of government or international regulatory framework needs to be in place to put a check on AI, added Bengio: “Self-regulation is not going to work.”
It’s not the first time Bengio expressed concerns about possible abuse of AI. This week he joined over two dozen other AI researchers in calling on Amazon to stop selling its facial-recognition software Rekognition to police departments.
The group of “concerned researchers” wrote in a post on Medium that “legislation and safeguards to prevent misuse are not in place.”
Bengio also served on the steering committee for the recently-unveiled Montréal Declaration for Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence. Among the declaration’s 10 principles are that the “development and use of [artificial intelligence systems] AIS must contribute to the creation of a just and equitable society.”
“Generally speaking,” he wrote at The Conversation highlighting the need for the declaration, “scientists tend to avoid getting too involved in politics. But when there are issues that concern them and that will have a major impact on society, they must assume their responsibility and become part of the debate.”
“And in this debate, I have come to realize that society has given me a voice—that governments and the media were interested in what I had to say on these topics because of my role as a pioneer in the scientific development of AI.”
“So, for me, it is now more than a responsibility,” he said. “It is my duty. I have no choice".
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From kitchen tables worldwide, you can hear a chorus of parents chastising their children with the same refrain: “Stop playing with your food.”
Children aside, this rebuke needs to be loudly directed at the food fabricators of industrial agriculture. Corporate interests keep toying with the very nature of food — not to benefit consumers, family farmers, workers or the environment, but to fatten the profits of Silicon Valley tech giants, food monopolists and Wall Street financiers.
Meet Recombinetics, a high-tech gene manipulation corporation with bioengineers in its labs remaking farm animals — pigs, for example. Recombinetics wants to mess with the very DNA of Mother Nature’s oinkers to make them produce bigger litters to supply the pork factories of brand-name marketers. It is also genetically altering milk cows to withstand hotter weather so that climate change won’t reduce the output of huge dairy corporations.
This re-engineering of nature to build industrial Frankenanimals is being supported by such land-grant colleges as the University of California, Davis — your tax dollars at work! Of course, this corporate-government collusion faces a high hurdle in the marketplace, for consumers have demonstrated again and again that they don’t want the food they put on their tables tampered with by profiteering geneticists. The tamperers, though, have a solution to that problem: secrecy. The industry is lobbying lawmakers and regulators to outlaw any requirement that milk and meat produced by genetically altered animals be labeled as such. Better to keep consumers in the dark because… well, if given a free choice, people might reject Recombinetics in favor of natural food.
Rather than remake animals and remake the marketplace to benefit corporations that play with our food, let’s remake the corporate system that is trying to industrialize dinner. Corporate manipulators are not out to make food better or more affordable for us, but strictly to make it more profitable for them.
How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen … Angus?
Not Angus the breed of cattle, and not the time-honored given name of many farm boys, but Angus the 1,000-pound “farmer of the future.” He’s actually not a he, but an it: a robot, toiling away on a hydroponic “farm” that is indoors, soilless and, yes, soulless. Angus is owned and programmed by a multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley startup named Iron Ox, and its homestead is hardly bucolic. It’s in an 8,000-square-foot concrete warehouse in a suburb south of San Francisco.
This farm bot is more of a heavy lifter than a heavy thinker. Basically, Angus wheels around the warehouse to lift, move and hand off large pallets of basil, bok choy and other produce to another robot that, so far, hasn’t earned a name. The human overseers of this robotic animal farm don’t wear John Deere “gimme caps,” but clean-room hairnets, apparently to prevent anything organic from contaminating the edibles or the robot.
Started by a Google engineer, Iron Ox hopes to install duplicates of its faux farm in metropolitan areas across the country. The obvious question is, Why? Well, for the greater good, claims the Googlite owner. “If we can feed people using robots, what could be more impactful than that?” Well, reconnecting our food system to nature, a democratic economy and human beings. The roboticists brag that local warehouses can provide fresher lettuce than what megafarms ship from thousands of miles away. But wait! Local farmers markets do that, do it even fresher and keep the consumer dollars in the community rather than siphoned off to Iron Ox and the Wall Street financiers of Angus robots.
In fact, the robotic indoor farm hucksters quietly concede that their real business plan depends on “sidestepping” the cost of human labor and local farm owners. Instead of spreading wealth to people and communities, their scheme concentrates food profits in a handful of absentee syndicators, rich investors and technology giants.
Deep in his digital brain, even Angus must know this is stupid.
Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.
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https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-december-17-2018/
Andrew Keen, one of the world’s best-known and controversial commentators on the digital revolution, proposes his solutions to reforming the digital age with his book “How To Fix The Future.
https://www.alternet.org/rise-robots-how-trump-and-republicans-betrayed-their-base-voters
Trump’s formula for his unfortunate electoral victory in 2016 relied almost exclusively on persuading rural American voters in the so-called “heartland” that their economic decline was due not to any fault of corporate, late-stage capitalism but to fact that their jobs were being “stolen” by people with darker skin than themselves. By scapegoating Latinos and Hispanics in particular, and by employing familiar Republican stereotypes against African-Americans, Trump succeeded in eking out the election against a polarizing female Democratic candidate by mobilizing rural “working class’” Americans, mostly white and male, to vote for him out of a sense of race-based grievance.
In an articlefor the New York Times, Thomas Edsall shows how Trump and the Republicans almost immediately betrayed that rural voting base with their massive tax giveaway to corporations in 2016, creating a tax incentive bonanza that encouraged and accelerated the pace of automation and the implementation of robots, now displacing thousands of relatively low-skilled workers in largely Trump-voting areas of the country. Another articleby Eduardo Porter (also written this week for the Times) highlights the root causes behind the seemingly intractable problem of rural poverty in this country, and offers some clues on how we as Democrats might reclaim many of those rural voters without compromising Democratic values on issues of racial inclusion and equality.
If for nothing else, last month’s elections were remarkable for the fact that virtually no Republicans highlighted their singular achievement, a massive tax giveaway to corporate America. One obvious reason for that is that few Americans making less than mid-six figure incomes saw any benefit to themselves from this tax cut. But the other reason was even more damning, if less noticeable: buried in this gargantuan payoff to reward the CEO donors in boardrooms who supported their campaigns, Republicans deliberately provided a huge incentive for corporations to eliminate the very jobs that their rural voters needed to survive.
Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut has increased incentives to replace workers with robots, contradicting his campaign promise to restore well-paying manufacturing jobs in the nation’s heartland.
The Trump tax bill permits “U.S. corporations to expense their capital investment, through 2022. So, if a U.S. corporation buys a robot for $100 thousand, it can deduct the $100 thousand immediately to calculate its U.S. taxable income, rather than recover the $100 thousand over the life of the robot, as under prior law,” Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a specialist in tax policy, wrote me by email.
The sheer appeal to corporations of taking advantage of an immediate tax deduction by investing in automation cannot be understated. The biggest liability corporations face is the high cost of paying their workers. Robots do not need health benefits and “sick time”—they need only to be programmed and oiled on occasion. They do not require wage “increases” because they do not require any wages to begin with. So a tax incentive to automate was immediately hailed by corporate America as a win-win. And the impact has for the most part fallen in those industries that typically employ the same type of non-college educated—usually male--workers (semi-skilled assemblers, machinists, material handlers, welders) who voted in droves for Donald Trump.
Edsall quotes Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of Economics at Columbia:
The demographic group most hindered by the rise of automation, Sachs wrote, “has been the proverbial white male with less than a college degree and living in rural and semirural areas.”
Sachs believes that
[T]he next wave of job losses will be in basic business services (wholesale and retail trade, warehousing and transport) which will mean another hit for workers with relatively lower educational attainment.
Edsall also cites and quotes extensively from a recent study out of MIT that shows the Trump-voting swaths of the South and Midwest have a far higher concentration of robot-dependent industries than other areas of the country.
But the Trump tax cut did more than just encourage automated replacement of workers in Trump country—it encouraged industries to move out of the country altogether:
The 2017 Trump tax cut not only boosted incentives for corporations to replace workers with robots, it has also created incentives for American companies to move production overseas, even as it directed resources toward “opportunity zones” in what the Trump administration defines as “neglected and underserved communities” — incidentally providing a bounty of lucrative grants, guarantees and breaks for real estate developers.
Many in the Democratic Party frankly feel like these voters in Trump country are getting exactly what they deserve for supporting Trump and his cast on enabling charlatans in the GOP. And there is undoubtedly some appeal in schadenfreude,that sense of pleasure that people derive from others’ misfortune, particularly if it is viewed as deserved. But the racism that drove Trump voters to the polls didn’t arise in a vacuum. It was packaged, stoked and fed to them as an easy opportunity to assign blame to what they felt as a real problem, the plain fact that American business industries are not offering livable jobs in rural areas any more.
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https://www.alternet.org/heres-what-luddites-were-right-about
Here's what the Luddites were right about
If we continue on our current path environmental Armageddon isn’t just possible but likely, where neoliberal economic policy threatens to render all of us unnecessary, and where unfettered technology isn’t used as a liberatory tool but rather as a system of surveillance and propaganda.
Sometime in 1779, in the midst of that era of trans-Atlantic revolutions that marked the Age of Reason, an apocryphal weaver named Ned Ludd supposedly took a hammer to two stocking frames in a textile factory near Leicester, smashing to bits that simple machinery which threatened his livelihood with the promise of expedient and profitable mechanization. Ludd wasn’t real, yet the popularity of the character demonstrated something about the inequities that defined the lives of English workers, and the threat that technology posed to them.
Though Ludd wasn’t an actual person, the movement that took its name from him very much was. Some three decades after his imagined act of iconoclastic fury, the Luddites threatened the interests of capital in both English town and country, destroying the machines of the Industrial Revolution which were designed to replace them.
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During the Luddite Crisis of 1811-1816, a popular song was heard in the countryside: “Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, /His feat I but little admire. /I will sing the achievements of General Ludd, /Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire.”
That the term “Luddite” is so completely preserved as a designation of opprobrium speaks to the ultimate victory of their opponents. For contemporary readers, a Luddite is a technophobe who spurns innovation, an archaic throwback who can’t admit to industrial progress, an eccentric who avoids the thrill of the digital in favor of the comforts of the analog. Such connotations do a disservice to a radical movement with a coherent economic perspective, and that more importantly critiqued the ways in which nascent capitalism threatened the question of human meaning. Such connotations for the term are convenient for a power structure that takes the principles of the Industrial Revolution to their nihilistic conclusions.
By contrast, Marxist historian E.P. Thompson in his classic 1963 The Making of the English Working Class wrote that he in part wished to “rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ handloom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan… from the enormous condescension of posterity.” If such a task was desirable when Thompson published his study, than it’s existentially critical in our current era. Today, the Luddite critique of technology in service of capital is necessary to tackle the political crisis of meaning that has been engendered by neo-liberalism.
We currently face a crisis of meaning brought on by technology that would make poor Ned Ludd’s threatening stocking frames seem rustically charming by comparison. We’ve all become intimately aware of how at the individual level a type of epistemological anarchism has taken hold as social media has called basic facts into question for massive swaths of the population, and on the global level it’s become clear how industrialization threatens us with complete ecological collapse in the form of climate change. What’s not remarked on enough is the threat posed to workers by mechanization, the exact same threat that the weavers of the Luddite Rebellion fought against.
Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur and a dark horse presidential candidate for the 2020 Democratic primary, has made the centerpiece of his campaign a condemnation of the threat that modern technology poses to the American worker. Kevin Roose in an article for the New York Times explains that Yang’s long-shot candidacy is being waged more to highlight an issue that has been almost entirely overlooked, writing that the candidate believes “automation and advanced artificial intelligence will soon make millions of jobs obsolete – yours, mine, those of our accountants and radiologists and grocery store cashiers.” Yang says that “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society…. [W]e’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work who are 94 percent male, with an average level of education of high school or one year of college.” He opines that just that one development “will be enough to createriots in the street. And we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, fast-food workers, insurance companies, accounting firms.”
Yang’s longshot candidacy arguably exists more to promote his theories than it does as a legitimate campaign for the White House, and yet the theories he’s promoting deserve attention. The former tech executive’s potential solution includes auniversal basic income, a so-called “Freedom Dividend,” which would ensure all Americans a regular source of money from the government. An unconventional solution to many no doubt, and yet Yang is convincing that such measures should be considered as technology increasingly makes entire categories of workers superfluous.
While the Freedom Dividend is a start in thinking about a crisis which is only a decade away, it doesn’t address an even deeper issue. Universal basic income may meet collective material needs that an increasingly efficient but anti-worker capitalism won’t, yet the crisis of meaning will only be exacerbated in a nation where we’re all taught that self-worth is defined through work; work that for many of us will no longer be needed. When meaning dissipates, the ideologies that will be victorious will be those that offer some new value to our lives, and unless the left offers a cognoscente solution to what’s an existential crisis, they will be crushed by dark impulses that offer ersatz meaning at the ballot box and increasingly in the street.
Partisans on the right would rather convince workers that the threat is a caravan of destitute women and children slowly walking toward America’s southern border to seek asylum as refugees, but immigrants haven’t been taking jobs – robots have. That the wealthy donors to the current administration have a vested interest in demonizing immigrants and minorities to obscure the manner in which they are exploiting the working class of all races is easy enough to understand. Much of our current politics of fear and hate is bolstered by an increasing absence of meaning. I speak not of church; this is not a bromide about the decline of traditional religion, for meaning can just as easily be found outside of a pew as in it (and increasingly the former is the case).
Rather it’s to observe that as humans are fundamentally meaning-making creatures, it’s imperative that the left have a coherent vision that speaks to value beyond economic necessity. Yang’s proposal is serious, but to truly tackle the question of how individuals draw meaning from society we’ll need to consider radical possibilities that transcend the assumption that capitalism is the normal and eternal state of things, and that traditional work is the only means of self-definition.
The political crisis of meaning constitutes the very medium in which we exist, paradoxically making it difficult to always perceive. Our alienation is so complete that we’ve been inured against realizing just how much a sense of meaninglessness permeates American lives. We see it in the fever-swamp hell-scape that is the relativist rage of social media, where empathy is increasingly eliminated in favor of a frequently nonsensical and irrational snarl. We see it in the opioid epidemic (still disturbingly overlooked by many media outlets), where rates of addiction have increased 300 percent since 1999, calling to mind Carl Jung’s observation that addiction is a material solution to a spiritual problem. And we especially see it in the horrifying growth of neo-fascism, especially as represented by the man who occupies the White House. Garret Keizer, in a recent and brilliant article in the New Republic, provides a crucial diagnosis of that which Donald Trump is merely a symptom, explaining that “American nihilism is an oozing sore, but like an oozing sore it is evidence both of a malady and of a body’s desperate attempt to heal itself.”
Currently the right offers a “solution” of meaning to the very problems that they created;theirs is a faux-meaning that glitters like fool’s gold, and their empty moralism is pure nihilism. What the popularity of a Trump evidences is in part a thirst for meaning, except it’s a dark meaning that defines itself through the domination of others. The sick genius of “Make America Great Again” was that it bolstered those who felt they lacked meaning in a way that “America is Already Great” spectacularly and tone-deafly couldn’t.
We see right-wing ersatz meaning everywhere, from the empty pronouncements of self-help guru Jordan Peterson, whose very popularity speaks to the need to find meaning in a world that is offering little of it, but who instead serves his audience a nonsensical mishmash of rhetoric about lobster serotonin and transphobia, to the explicitly fascistic politics of “Identitarians” who trumpet white supremacy as an ethos through which the disaffected can define themselves. Something pathetic in that ideology, as it offers the empty calories of fake meaning defined entirely through the individual members valorizing themselves because they superficially look like somebody whom they think did something important long ago. A meaning based in blood lines and phenotype is no meaning at all, it’s worshiping an imagined family tree as a god. The “meaning” offered by such groups is cheap; it’s nothing more than the meaning of a snarl, punch, slap, and kick. Such formalized bigotry is idiotic, but those myths also organize people, and we must be wary of them.
I speak not as Senator Bernie Sanders, who recently evidenced far too much sympathy for those voters who because of their own personal racism couldn’t bring themselves to vote for black candidates. A politics of meaning need not necessarily exist to attract back those who are disaffected and drawn to pernicious ideologies. If a coherent left politics of meaning does ultimately attract such people, then good. But what I speak of is a need of providing for ourselves a coherent vision that speaks to the soul as well as to the body, which addresses Rose Schneiderman’s socialist anthem that sings of how we must have bread, but roses too.
In One-Dimensional Man the philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote that the “judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can and ought to be made worth living … underlies all intellectual effort.” An answer to that question has to be the focus of left politics. The optimism of the Obama campaign spoke to a sense of meaning through American civil religion, pluralism, and greatness through diversity, but his administration’s failure to address growing economic disparity was a botched opportunity at speaking to material condition necessary to let spiritual conditions thrive. It would overstate the case to claim that this alone is the origin of our current malaise (it isn’t), but future left politics must offer the “hopey, changey stuff” in conjunction with actual changes to the economic order.
Room for hope in the election of so-many first-time candidates to the House of Representatives who are beginning to offer radical policy suggestions from voices that are too often marginalized. Representatives elected in the midterm elections like Ayanna Presley from Massachusetts, Sharice Davids from Kansas, Debra Haaland from New Mexico, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York are all signs that the Democratic Party – which like it or not remains the only effective means of enacting a progressive agenda nationally – can draw strength from its left flank. All four women, and others elected for the first-time, offer not only just the possibility of checking Trumpism, but of enacting their own positive politics of meaning.
But what must be fully considered in the long run is that we face a future where if we continue on our current path environmental Armageddon isn’t just possible but likely, where neoliberal economic policy threatens to render all of us unnecessary, and where unfettered technology isn’t used as a liberatory tool but rather as a system of surveillance and propaganda. As all that is solid melts into air; what is required is a new language of meaning. On a wall in Paris during the student protests of 1968 some radical spray-painted “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” A half century later that advice still holds. Now we have work to do.
Ed Simon is the editor-at-large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. A frequent contributor at several sites, his collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post Religion will be released by Zero Books in November 2018. Follow him on Twitter @WithEdSimon.
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disruptive, unstable, constant growth vs limit of planet
Imagining Life After Capitalism
What can Star Trek tell us about life after capitalism? Peter Frase discusses four possible futures in a world where workers are increasingly being replaced by machines — ranging from communist and socialist societies to ones in which workers are literally disposable. (Encore presentation.) Resources: Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism Verso, 2014
https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-august-27-2018/
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https://www.alternet.org/labor/robots-taking-over-jobs
jim h
automatons have been on the march for years, devouring the middle-class job opportunities of factory workers. But this time is different.
If you think your family's future is safe because you don't rely on factory work, think again. Rapid advances in AI have already turned yesterday's science fiction into today's brave new "creative destruction"—the constant churn of economic and cultural innovations that destroy existing ways of doing things. A network of inventors and investors, hundreds of university engineering and math departments, thousands of government-funded research projects, countless freelance innovators and the entire corporate establishment are "re-inventing" practically every workplace by displacing humans with "more efficient" AI robots.
This mass-scale deployment of robots has already ushered in a whole new world of work. It's a CEO's capitalist paradise, where the workforce doesn't call in sick or take vacations, can't file lawsuits, doesn't organize unions, and is cheap.
As a result, robots are rapidly climbing the pay ladder into white-collar and professional positions that millions of college-educated, middle-class employees have wrongly considered safe, including:
Doctoring
Robots have long served as surgical assistants, but today's robotic sawbones can be the primary slicer-dicers, operating with more precision than humans. Robots are now performing millions of surgeries every year. Moreover, advanced doc-bots increasingly diagnose and choose treatments based on their ability to digest thousands of scientific articles, medical reports, patient records, etc. In 2012, Vinod Khosla, billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems, noted: "Much of what physicians do ... can be done better by sensors, passive and active data collections, and analytics." His stunning conclusion was that computers will eventually replace 80 percent of what doctors now do.
Delivering the goods
While online retail giants have already eliminated hundreds of thousands of sales clerks by radically restructuring how consumers make purchases, AI systems are poised to gobble up the jobs transporting those products. The first big targets are America's truckers, who number 1.8 million and have some of the few remaining, decent-paying jobs not requiring college degrees. Engineers at Google, Uber, et al. are rolling out prototypes for driver-less trucks that can crisscross the country without rest breaks, sleep, or days off.
Amazon
This corporate behemoth's focus on workplace "efficiency" has made it the poster-child job disrupter in the retail economy, maximizing robots to displace as many humans as possible, as soon as possible. Their massive warehouses are already buzzing hives of robots plucking millions of products from miles of shelves to fill online orders. More are coming. While Amazon staged a PR show in August around its nationwide "Job Day" event to hire 50,000 human workers, it has been expanding its current swarm of full-time robots. In 2012, it bought an artificial intelligence developer, now named Amazon Robotics, to breed its own line of androids, and by August had added another 55,000 of these creatures to its 100,000-strong warehouse workbot-force. Amazon is also pushing regulators to let it replace delivery workers with drones and is testing a chain of "Amazon Go" convenience stores "staffed" almost entirely by AI systems. And it just swallowed Whole Foods grocery chain, loudly promising lower prices but whispering the method: replacing clerks, stockers, et al. with robots.
We already have human-less branch banks; restaurants with Chef Rob Robot in the kitchen; financial firms with online robo-advisors picking stocks; hotels with cute robotic bellhops; driverless farm equipment with computerized sensors dictating when to plow, plant, spray and harvest; automated lawyer replacements for everything from contracts to divorces; computer-generated AI algorithms replacing human football coaches in deciding whether to run, pass, or punt; news reports without reporters, written instead by computers; and on and on. The Washington Post reported that the "automation bomb" could destroy 45 percent of U.S. work activities, causing $2 trillion in lost annual wages.
CEOs and other top dogs in our economic hierarchy are, of course, the primary "winners" in the race to roboticize work. They are gleaning ever-higher profits and extravagant annual bonuses for themselves by pushing multitudes of living/breathing workers off the corporate payroll. But, surprise! Maybe even these fortunate few are not immune from harm.They might take note of a 2014 move by Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong financial corporation: It chose a robot to serve on its board of directors. Citing its superior ability to analyze and predict market trends, DKV's human directors elected the algorithm, named "VITAL," as an "equal member" of the board, with a full a vote on investments.How soon, then, before we have a bot-plot, with a cabal of rogue robots conspiring to overthrow an unsuspecting CEO and seize control of a corporation?
Foxconn, the biggest assembler of Apple devices, is in preliminary discussions to make an investment that would expand the company's U.S. operations. From a report on Bloomberg:The disclosure came hours after an announcement by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and SoftBank Group's Masayoshi Son to invest $50 billion in the U.S. and create 50,000 jobs. The money will come from SoftBank's $100 billion technology fund, which was announced in October, a person familiar with the matter said. A document that Son held up after the meeting in Trump Tower also included the words "Foxconn," "$7 billion" and "50,000 new jobs" in addition to SoftBank's numbers. "While the scope of the potential investment has not been determined, we will announce the details of any plans following the completion of direct discussions between our leadership and the relevant U.S. officials," Foxconn said in a statement. "Those plans would be made based on mutually-agreed terms."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/softbank-shares-soar-trump-boasts-50-bn-deal-045249239--finance.html
Taipei (AFP) - Taiwan's tech giant Foxconn confirmed Wednesday it is in talks over a new US investment, while SoftBank shares soared after President-elect Donald Trump unveiled a $50 billion deal with the two firms.
Trump announced the agreement -- which he said would bring 50,000 jobs -- in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, alongside SoftBank's flamboyant chief executive Masayoshi Son.
Son brandished a document featuring the names of his firm and Foxconn which read: "Commit to invest $50bn + $7bn in US, generate 50k + 50k new jobs in US in next four years."
Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple, confirmed in a statement it is "in preliminary discussions regarding a potential investment" that would expand its current US operations, but would give no further details.
"We will announce the details of any plans following the completion of direct discussions between our leadership and the relevant US officials," the statement said.
The firm is the world's largest contract electronics maker and is best-known for assembling products for international brands such as Apple and Sony.
But as Apple diversifies its supply chain, Foxconn has branched out into robotics, e-commerce, telecoms and biotech.
Analysts said the potential deal reflected pressure on Apple to refocus on the US.
Trump campaigned on a platform of bringing jobs back to the US which he said were being taken away, particularly by China.
"Trump is pressuring Apple to return to the United States and Foxconn as an Apple supplier is going there to be near its client to strengthen its ties with Apple," said Arthur Liao, an analyst at Fubon Securities.
Liao said he expected the new investment to focus on automation, design, and research and development, rather than manufacturing due to high labour costs in the country.
Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai, employs around a million workers at its factories across China and has operations in more than 10 countries including Vietnam, Brazil and Mexico.
In the US, it has a plant in Virginia for packaging and engineering which employes over 400 people. It has also announced a $40 million investment in a facility in Pennsylvania to build precision tools and develop a robotics programme.
Foxconn founder Terry Gou and SoftBank's Son are reported to be good friends-- Foxconn recently contract manufactured Softbank's talking humanoid "Pepper" robots, which have been introduced into workplaces around the world including in Taiwan.
Shares in Foxconn ended 0.97 percent higher at Tw$83.1 in Taipei on Wednesday.
- 'Trump will take action' -
Shares in Tokyo-listed SoftBank also closed up 6.19 percent after Trump's announcement, which he made while wrapping an arm around Son.
"This is Masa of SoftBank from Japan and he's just agreed to invest $50 billion in the United States and 50,000 jobs," Trump told reporters.
SoftBank declined to comment on details, but the funds will likely go towards acquisitions and investments in tech companies including start-ups, Japanese media said.
Son has led the firm in a string of acquisitions including early investment in Alibaba, China's equivalent to eBay.
He pointed to Trump's business experience as a plus.
"I expect there will be various forms of deregulation," under Trump, Son told Japanese journalists in New York.
"He has a lot of experience as a businessman. Unlike many politicians who do a lot of talking, but only talking, I feel like he will take action," he said.
SoftBank reaped huge profits from a partial sale of its stake in Alibaba, while in June it sold Finnish game-maker Supercell Oy, creator of "Clash of Clans", to Chinese internet giant Tencent for $8.6 billion.
But its US mobile unit Sprint, which it bought in 2013 for $22 billion, is still unprofitable.
Son initially set his sights on a merger with US-based T-Mobile but the plan was abandoned owing to likely opposition from US regulators.
Some analysts have also questioned SoftBank's most recent high-profile deal -- the $32-billion purchase of British iPhone chip designer ARM Holdings.
There have been growing concerns about its balance sheet with SoftBank carrying more than $100 billion in debt.
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