Daily Archives: February 19, 2017

The prospect of automation taking away human jobs is both alarming and an opportunity to reorient our civilization to new objectives. The worrying part is that a sizable number of jobs, both blue and white collar, might be gone soon - a number that some estimates put as high as 47% during the next 25 years.

How will we adjust to this transformation? How will the people without jobs survive? Some ideas, floated by people like Elon Musk, see the necessity of instituting a universal basic income. Another approach was just proposed by Bill Gates, one of the original tech superstars and prognosticators, who also happens to be the worlds richest man. In an interview with Quartz, Bill Gates explained his view that as robots will be taking human jobs, a robot tax will be necessary on the companies that employ them.

Gates sees this as a positive development, because the tax would fund jobs that do not receive enough focus and talent currently, including elderly care and working with kids. These types of jobs that require empathy are better left to the humans. The government would run such programs. Gates thinks business cannot be left to manage this because growing inequity due to automation can only be addressed via the government.

Heres how Gates says that as a working human is taxed, so should the robot replacing the human -

Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, youd think that wed tax the robot at a similar level, explains Gates.

He thinks it an overall positive that automation will replace much of human labor, as it will free those people to do something else. What is necessary is training and education.

So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces, and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that person go off and do these other things, then youre net ahead. But you cant just give up that income tax, because thats part of how youve been funding that level of human workers, points out Gates.

Gates proposes that the time has come to start talking about these questions. Many jobs in retail, warehouse work, driving, service industry and others should be gone in the next 20 years. And, according to Gates, maybe we should also think about slowing down the pace of automation until we have a good plan going forward.

How would taxing automation work exactly? Gates sees it as a tax on profits from increased efficiency or a tax on robot companies.

Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I dont think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. Its OK, says Gates.

Overall, Gates stays enthusiastic about the future. But automation is a topic that demands immediate and continual attention. Not because we should be afraid of innovation, but because its a challenge we worked to create and need to meet.

People should be figuring it out. It is really bad if people overall have more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm. That means they wont shape it for the positive things it can do, continues Gates.

To him, taxation is a better approach to innovation that stifling it.

Watch the whole video here:

Cover photo:Bill Gates, founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, takes part in a discussion organised by British magazine The Economist about expected breakthroughs in the next 15 years in health, education, farming and banking on January, 22, 2015 in Brussels. (Photo credit: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images)

Read this article:

Bill Gates: the Robot Taking Your Job Should Pay Taxes - Big Think

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks at the opening ceremony of 'Make in India Week' in Mumbai on Feb. 13, 2016. PUNIT PARANJPE/AFP/Getty Images

Automation and the new U.S. administration were the big unknowns at the Indian tech sector's annual shindig this week, with machines threatening to take away thousands of jobs and concerns over possible visa rule changes in the key American market.

But senior executives from the $150 billion industry, which rose to prominence at the turn of the century by helping Western firms solve the "Y2K" bug, said companies with skilled English-speaking staff and low costs could not be written off yet.

The sector, led by Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro, is lobbying hard as the new U.S. administration under President Donald Trump considers putting in place visa restrictions.

The administration may also raise salaries paid to H1-B visa holders, a move that could significantly increase costs for IT companies that are already facing pressure on margins.

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The longer-term challenge and opportunity for the sector was automation, executives said, as global corporations from plane-makers to consumer firms bet on the use of machines to further cut costs and boost efficiency.

That threatens lower-end software services and outsourcing jobs in a sector which employs more than 3.5 million people.

Summing up the mood at the three-day NASSCOM leadership event in Mumbai ending on Friday, Malcolm Frank, Chief Strategy Officer at Cognizant which has most of its operations in India, spoke of "fear and optimism."

Even top IT executives were "fearing the machines," he said.

Some Indian executives, including Infosys' Chief Operating Officer Pravin Rao, said that greater automation was expected to help engineers and developers shed repetitive jobs for more creative roles.

"Some part of the work we'll be automating 100 percent, you don't require people to do that kind of work," Rao told Reuters. "But there are always newer things, where we will be able to re-purpose employees who are released from those areas."

Moving Up Food Chain

With rapidly changing technology, Indian IT firms are emphasizing the need for retraining their workforce, in many cases setting up experience centers and learning zones on their sprawling campuses.

Some companies are partnering with universities to design and fund education programs, while staff members spoke of employers laying on training and webinars to help develop skills in automation and cloud computing.

"The threat from automation killing jobs is more than Trump's anticipated visa rule changes," a general manager-level employee at a top Indian IT firm said.

NASSCOM chairman and Tech Mahindra CEO C.P. Gurnani said technology would create new roles where "man will manage machines," even if a fourth of Indian IT jobs were to be replaced by machines over the next four years.

Indias Coal Consumption Problem

Hiring patterns may also change, with unconventional, high-value graduates likely to be more attractive, to the possible detriment of hiring from India's engineering colleges.

Infosys, which traditionally recruited only engineering graduates, is considering hiring people educated in liberal arts to add creative skills to its workforce, COO Rao said.

In a first, NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies), the leading Indian IT lobby group, delayed its initial growth forecast for fiscal 2017/18, citing market uncertainty.

Indian IT Sector Warns Against U.S. Visa Bill

NASSCOM officials said it had deferred its predictions by three months to give it time to gauge policy announcements in the United States which could make immigration rules tougher.

The industry body aims to announce a firmer growth forecast after the quarter to March when IT companies report annual earnings and give guidance for the next fiscal year.

"A certain level of ... uncertainty will continue over the medium-term," said NASSCOM President R. Chandrashekhar. "And businesses therefore have to take essential decisions on new technology in the face of a certain degree of uncertainty."

Read more:

Both Trump and Automation Are Challenging India's IT Industry - Fortune

Hotel management has reacted positively toward the improved capabilities of robots suitable for their industry. A recent confab of the hospitality industry highlighted the new automation becoming available to perform more challenging tasks.

Robot bellhops are already in use in some Marriott hotels and elsewhere.

One of the machines in the pipeline is a robot maid, which would be very attractive technology for hotels because of their need for cleaning staff. A May 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics report on Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners found 926,240 persons employed in that category, many in hotels.

The Maidbot looks like an industrial strength Roomba in the following video, but advances are sure to be developed. In the meantime, a human maid can clean the bathroom counter and collect the towels while the robot vacuum does the floors, thereby speeding up the process. So fewer human maids will be needed.

Sadly, the government seems oblivious to the approaching automation juggernaut and how it will decimate Americas employment universe in the not so distant future. The only bright light in Washington has been the Senate bill limiting total immigration from Senators Cotton and Purdue.

However, the senators RAISE Act would merely cut legal immigration in half, which is not nearly enough, given tech experts projections for a jobless future. Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years. Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi warns of a dystopian future in 30 years when humans become largely obsolete and world joblessness stands at 50 percent. The Gartner tech advising company believes that one-third of jobs will be done by machines by 2025. Forrester Research Inc. has a more optimistic view, that there will be a net job loss of 7 percent by 2025 from automation but thats still a serious deficit when more jobs are needed as population increases.

Given a future of mass unemployment that would make the Great Depression look like a hiccup, immigration needs to be retired as an obsolete government policy, along with homesteading.

Robots the talk of tech innovations at hospitality summit , Travel Weekly, February 02, 2017

LOS ANGELES Hotel robots that perform tasks like delivering amenities to guests or cleaning rooms will be the norm within the next five years, panelists at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit (ALIS) held here last week predicted.

The anticipated growth in hotel robots was largely attributed to falling technology costs and guests becoming more accustomed to the concept.

Early hotel adopters say devices such as Saviokes Relay robot and Maidbot are gaining favor because they are efficient at both delivering items such as toiletries and bottled water to guests and cleaning rooms. They are also a novelty among family travelers.

Executives with both larger hotel owners like Host Hotels and smaller counterparts like Southern California-based Seaview Investors both expressed satisfaction on the ALIS panels with their early trials of the robots.

We feel that it pays for itself, more from a guest-satisfaction standpoint than from labor savings, said ALIS panelist moderator and Seaview Investors president Robert Alter. Seaview has used a Relay robot at his companys Residence Inn Los Angeles LAX for the past 18 months.

Host Hotels managing director Michael Lentz, said, Were testing Maidbots for cleaning rooms. You have to think in years ahead that there are opportunities to reduce our operating costs.

Front and center at the conference was Saviokes Relay robotic butler, which debuted as Botlr at select properties under then-Starwood Hotels Aloft brand in 2014.

Panelist and Savioke chief robot whisperer Tessa Lau said hotels typically lease a Relay for about $2,000 a month (the company does not sell the robots) and the device, on average, performs a front-desk-to-room delivery of smaller products like toothpaste or bottled water in less than four minutes. Lau, too, alluded to the novelty factor, noting that many families with kids take robot selfies.

Robotics was among the most topical subjects at the conference, where much of the on-stage discussions focused on technology and the concept of the hotel of the future. With amenities such as free WiFi having long been made essential and services such as keyless entry via mobile device expected to accelerate across the industry during the next few years, service robots, along with amenities like virtual reality tours of hotel properties, were discussed as the next wave of hospitality technology.

Meanwhile, Marriott International used the conference to illustrate how it has taken the torch from acknowledged technology innovator Starwood Hotels (which Marriott acquired last September) by building its Innovation Lab at the conference to show off the latest developments under its Aloft and Element select-service brands.

The use of such technology is considered more and more essential for effectively serving guests. This week, software giant Oracle will release a study undertaken by Phocuswright (a sister company to Travel Weekly) outlining how guests want hotel operators to deploy technology. Of the 2,700 U.S. and European travelers polled, almost half said hotels should use technology to perform services such as enabling guests to select a specific room location or providing in-destination activity choices. About a third said technology should be used to facilitate service requests for in-room items such as coffee, pillows or toiletries. Still, just where the line falls between effective and invasive or even creepy remains to be seen.

We feel like people are suffering from digital overload, said Niki Leondakis, CEO of hotels and resorts for Two Roads Hospitality, which oversees Destination Hotels and the Thompson Hotels and Joie de Vivre groups.

We want to get back to hospitality, back to the human touch.

We wouldnt necessarily see robots replacing team members, because were in the business of hospitality, added panelist and Hilton Worldwides chief marketing officer, Geraldine Calpin.

Still, while even a technology-oriented person such as Lau acknowledged that the cornerstone of hotel service will continue to be based on human interaction, she added that hotels risk obsolescence by ignoring advances in areas such as robotics, data tracking and communications.

I would love to talk to a person when it matters, Lau said. But a lot of the hospitality service parts are more amenable to automation.

More here:

Hospitality Industry Welcomes Helpful Automation - VDARE.com

President Trump has made a huge deal of his attempts to bring back blue-collar manufacturing jobs that have gone overseas and to shame companies into building plants here rather than in other countries. Both of which I think are fine.

But Trump would probably get greater value for working-class Americans and for American consumers by spending some of his time leaning on companies to preserve a huge, threatened class of blue-collar jobs: cashiers. Yes, cashiers.

Speaking up for cashiers, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics says is the second-largest occupation in the country, wouldnt be as glamorous or tweet-able as berating Ford or General Motors or Carrier for the loss of American jobs.

[Why bodyslamming big companies is good for America]

But it would be a great way for him to get back to playing offense and showing he cares about the working class. Supporting the nations 3.5 million cashiers could help preserve the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of low-paid people who are in entry-level jobs or rehabilitating-themselves jobs or trying-to-feed-their-family jobs.

Whats more, theres even an example, not far from Trump Tower in New York, of how preserving cashier-type jobs could be done, at minimal (or perhaps no) cost to consumers. Its in my home state of New Jersey, which has saved thousands of such jobs those of gas station attendants.

Its the unintended but welcome outgrowth of the states 1949 ban on the self-pumping of gasoline, which many out-of-staters ridicule. Even so, it is so popular that Jersey residents have resisted repeated attempts to end it.

Now, lets step back a bit.

The number of cashier jobs No. 2 only to retail sales clerks, according to the BLS was almost exactly the same in 2015 (the most recent year for which statistics are available) as in 2005, even though total U.S. employment was up by 7.6 million.

Still, its obvious that these jobs are threatened as never before.

[How to save good jobs]

Go into any large, reasonably modern supermarket, drug store or retail store, and you see more and more self-checkout lines and fewer and fewer manned cashier lines.

McDonalds is using self-checkout in some locations. Even Costco a big company that seems to care about employing people is experimenting with it.

And heres the crowning blow. Amazon, which has upended Americas retail business (and whose chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post), is building physical stores that have no cashiers. If Amazons initiative succeeds, can cashier-less days at mainstream operations be far behind?

Look, Im not proposing that the United States turn into a modern-day version of old-style Russia, where it took half a dozen people to check you out of a store. And Im not proposing to return to pre-bar code days, when checkout lines were slower and there was more work for cashiers.

But I just look at the gas stations in New Jersey and compare them with the large, modern retail outlets in Atlantas northern suburbs, where my wife and I recently spent considerable time.

Georgia customers using the self-checkout line got no savings whatever in return for doing the stores work. Late at night, at least some big stores had so few cashiers on duty that self-checkout became the norm.

By contrast, at New Jersey gas stations, someone pumps my gas. Thats a boon to those of us, like me, who have arthritic wrists that dont react well to pumping my own gas, which I did in Georgia. And the Jersey gas lines moved more quickly.

[What to expect at work in 2017]

Sal Risalvato, executive director of the New Jersey trade group that represents gas stations and convenience stores, estimates there are about 9,000 gas-pumping jobs in the state. (The BLS once tracked Jersey gas-pumping jobs but no longer does.) Risalvato, who wants the self-pumping ban repealed, estimates that having attendants increases the price of gas by about 10 cents a gallon. To put that in context: The state increased gas taxes by 23 cents a gallon in November, and the recent average cost of gas ranged from $2.32 a gallon for regular to $2.79 for premium, according to GasBuddy.

Robert Scott III, a professor at New Jerseys Monmouth University who in 2007 published a scholarly article about the self-pumping ban, thinks it adds little or nothing to gas prices. A major reason, he says, is that insurance costs for Jersey gas stations are lower than they would be if customers pumped their own gas.

To be sure, you dont see the plight of cashiers portrayed nightly on cable news, and theres no big public fuss made when cashier jobs quietly slip away. But if Trump can dig out of his current problems and get back to playing offense, he could do a lot of good for cashiers and himself by publicly leaning on retail chains to preserve those jobs or even add to them.

And who can say? Just as we Jerseyites appreciate having gas pumped for us, store customers across the country would probably come to appreciate cashier-based checkout. Wed keep cashiers working instead of having to live in poverty or go on welfare or file for disability. Wed all win. And so would Trump.

Read more:

Trumps awful boast about paying no taxes

The whopping $1.2 trillion omission in Trumps tax reform plan

Why I cant (and wont) stop writing about Social Security

Originally posted here:

The working-class job that Trump could save from automation - Washington Post

Manufacturing jobs have been in decline since 2000. President Donald Trump claims the North American Free Trade Agreement and the entrance of China into the World Trade Organization have jointly sucked those jobs out of our country and deposited them in other countries.

A recent study by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, however, indicates that he is probably wrong in indicting NAFTA and China for those job losses. The report found that 85 percent of those manufacturing job losses did not vanish because of either trade deficits or international trade imbalances but to machines that automated most of those jobs.

Manufacturing's adoption of advanced technologies has increased real output as well as productivity almost across the entire industrial spectrum. These advances have made many manufacturing workers redundant.

Happily, for their owners, these companies produce more with fewer employees.

Bringing manufacturing back from wherever it currently is will most probably lead to more automation and not more jobs. Technology improves at an increasingly fast pace.

In fact, Oxford University reported in 2013 that of 702 occupations,about 47 percent of total U.S. employment is (would be) at risk to computerization/automation by 2023.

Viewed from this perspective, tariffs on imports, or trade wars to force businesses to bring jobs back to the U.S., makes very little sense as those jobs most likely will be automated.

While it is tempting to blame trade deals for job losses, the real culprits are businesses that have machines doing twice the work with one-third the workers.

Read the original here:

Blame automation for loss of manufacturing jobs - LancasterOnline