Category Archives: Automation

Robot food delivery in the neighborhood has been chatted up on the news as the cool new tech thing about to happen, being tested and now its here.

The robots are doing the deliveries, although human minders will accompany the machines for now.

The little robots scooting along the sidewalk look pleasantly futuristic, but the rapid entry of automation into non-manufacturing uses over the last little while makes the long-term future of some low-skilled jobs appear rather grim. Pizza delivery driver has been the sort of part-time job thats perfect for students, but that employment option looks to be on the way out.

Delivery person is not a huge employment category, but it is like other areas of small job losses from automation that add up, like hardware store helper, meatpacking worker, bricklayer, golf caddy, oil field roughneck, coffee barista, Amazon grocery store worker, fast food cashier, hotel bellhop, security guard, hotel phone operators and many other blue-collar jobs. (White-collar employment is threatened also.)

The Gartner consulting firm forecast that one-third of US jobs will be done by robots or computers by 2025 is looking more likely as the automating process speeds up with increasingly capable technology. 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. Furthermore, Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to tech replacement within 20 years. The pessimistic view comes from Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi, who warns of a dystopian future in 30 years when humans become largely obsolete and world joblessness stands at 50 percent.

Right now, its great that President Trump has convinced some companies to bring their businesses back to the United States, but the resulting number of jobs may be disappointing because of automation. Reshoring has been happening already anyway, because US labor costs dont matter that much when machines are doing most of the work. So well see how Trumps jobs plan goes.

For the long term though, the future is automated, and the political class needs to wake up and smell the software. At the least, Washington should reduce immigration radically, more than just the 50 percent cut proposed by Senator Cotton.

Automation, robots and computers make importing foreign labor obsolete, and the quaint practice of immigration should be shelved along with homesteading and stagecoaches.

Anyway, heres more about the DC delivery robots from a couple days ago.

Food Delivery Robots Officially Roll Out In DC Today, Washingtonian, March 9, 2017

The first fleet of delivery robots officially rolls out in DC today after two weeks of testing. Starship Technologies teamed up with San Francisco-based delivery company Postmates for the launch, the first in the US.

Initially a group of around 20 bots will make short deliveriesmostly under a milein the Georgetown and 14th Street corridor, with more neighborhoods to come in the near future. The autonomous coolers-on-wheels essentially act like any Postmates delivery service. An app user orders, say, items from a nearby convenience store. The vendor is notified, and a robot is dispatched from one of several hubs. Goods are placed in a temperature-controlled bag in the bots sealed compartment, which can only be unlocked with a code thats sent to the customer. The robot then makes its way to the destination, and voila, that $10 order of snacks and soda is that much more awesome.

Postmates makes over 2 million deliveries a month nationwide using a fleet of cars, bikes, scooters, and average humans on foot. The latter is what stands to be eventually replaced by robotsnext in Redwood City, California, and eventually in every city Postmates operates.

If youre ordering a convenience item from a couple of blocks away, its not worth paying a delivery fee, says Russell Cook, senior vice president of operations at Postmates. What we see with the robots in the future is being able to drive down the cost of those deliveries around 80 to 90 percent, and open a whole new class of commerce in the city.

The delivery robots, which run exclusively on sidewalks, also hold environmental promise since they run on clean energy.

Of course, there are also drawbacks to losing the human touch. The six-wheeled vehicles are equipped with nine cameras, elaborate GPS systems, and ultrasonic sensors on all sides that can track distance and obstacles (much like on a car). They can sense to slow down in crowds, or speed up to 4 miles per hour in the open. Still, Cook says the bots are known to occasionally get held up by tree roots, and are still mastering DCs many crosswalks that have no timed lights. Theyre also only able to hold one delivery at a time, and cant fit certain items, like an extra-large pizza.

Overall though, the roaming has been smoothincluding the special legislation needed to allow the new wheeled vehicles on sidewalks, which the District passed last year. Surprisingly, no one has stolen or tampered with the bots, though theyre heavier and harder to pick up than they look. If and when someone attempts to steal one, an alarm will sound and GPS tracking systems will help with swift recovery. But what about accidental run-ins with joggers and dogs?

If it sees people coming in close proximity, it stops, says Cook. It also has a flag on it, so even though its low, it cant sneak up behind you without you realizing it.

Currently theres no way to demand a bot, but if youre in the right neighborhood and too lazy to walk a few blocks for a sandwich, chances are a Postbot could be at your door.

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Automation: DC Residents Now Share Sidewalks with Food Delivery Robots - VDARE.com

Automation and Employment in the 21st Century - CIO Journal. - WSJ Wall Street Journal (subscription) (blog) Artificial intelligence and automation will have a major impact on jobs and the very nature of work, but it's less clear what that impact will be, Columnist Irving ... and more »

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Automation and Employment in the 21st Century - CIO Journal. - WSJ - Wall Street Journal (subscription) (blog)

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Robotic Process Automation Market - Global Forecast to 2022" report to their offering.

The robotic process automation market is estimated to reach USD 2,467.0 million by 2022, at a CAGR of 30.14% between 2017 and 2022.

The major factors that have propelled market growth are ease in business processes offered by robotic process automation, and convergence of robotic process automation with traditional business process industries. The major restraints of the robotic process automation market are risk of data security, which hinders the implementation of robotic process automation in the financial domain, and the reduced potential of robotic process automation for knowledge-based business processes.

The BFSI domain held the largest share of the robotic process automation market among all the industries in 2016. In the BFSI space, multiple systems are linked to each other by interfaces to enable the flow of transaction-related data. Robotic process automation controls and monitors these interfaces to ensure seamless execution of transactions and fill data gaps. Robotic process automation improves the accuracy and efficiency of different processes in the BFSI industry. These solutions also help in regulatory reporting and balance sheet reconciliation by collating data from multiple systems and conducting a host of validation checks to prepare information for a detailed analysis.

Companies Mentioned:

Key Topics Covered:

1 Introduction

2 Research Methodology

3 Executive Summary

4 Premium Insights - Robotic Process Automation Market

5 Market Overview

6 Industry Trends

7 Market Analysis, By Process

8 Market Analysis, By Operation

9 Market, By Type

10 Market, By Industry

11 Geographic Analysis

12 Competitive Landscape

13 Company Profiles

14 Appendix

For more information about this report visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/7bfjx6/robotic_process

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170310005593/en/

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Robotic Process Automation Market - Global Forecast to 2022 - By Process & Operation - Research and Markets - Yahoo Finance

Complete Automation in a foodservice operation is relatively rare at the moment. San Francisco fast food chain, Eatsa, and Hong Kong restaurant, Genki Sushi, are currently the pioneers in this movement that largely removes the human element from the dining experience.

In Eatsas case, customers place their orders via a self-service terminal and then retrieve their food from a glass cubby. At Genki Sushi, customers order using a tableside tablet, receive their food via a miniature train that runs around the restaurant. They wrap up the auto-experience by paying at a self-service kiosk prior to leaving.

To say that these are cases of total automation and a human-less experience is a bit inaccurate. The automation really only occurs in the front of the house, and theres almost always a concierge or other restaurant representative standing by in case of any issues. Likewise, of course, there are people working behind the scenes preparing the food.

Nevertheless, this is about as close as weve gotten to fully automating the dining process and its an interesting prospect, to say the least. After all, it's got the leader of Hardee's and Carls Jr.s Andy Puzder thinking about it,though it probably did not do him many favors with the nation's workforce or in the overall fight for the Labor Secretary nomination.

Robotics

Weve heard about threats of machines taking over and/or replacing organic life forms for quite some time now. Often referred to as the "technological singularity" when machines replace man, the subject has run central in science fiction works, including everything from the 1957 Harlan Ellison short story, Soldier from Tomorrow, to the wildly popular Matrix movies series from the Wachowskis, where humans are literally "farmed" by robots to fuel real world domination.

For all these one-time works of fiction, the day has arrived when the fantastical nature of the subject has become reality. Just in the last year, for instance, some signs that this new age is dawning, include:

When we talk about robotic automation in the context of a restaurant, the current focus is on shifting mundane, repetitive tasks away from human employees and over to robots. According to some though, we may get much more in return down the road with robotics that offer betterconsistency in food preparation, less food waste, improved safety and perhaps even lower menu prices.

Only time will tell with this one, but for now here are the leading players in foodservice robotics.

Starship Technologies Zume Pizza Momentum Machines

Smart Sensors Chipotle's devastating problems and consequential financial problems have made it plain that food safety is in need of a lot of help in the restaurant industry. That's why kitchen sensors, video monitoring, temperature regulation, and other smart automations are fast-becoming a must for every restaurant kitchen.

Customers need to be kept safe when it comes to the foods they eat while dining out, and that means kitchens need to be more closely regulated and monitored. Five Guys is just one of those brands which hasinvested in this type of automation in their current use of a temperature tracking solution to keep tabs on their restaurants adherence to food safety protocols.

But, beyond the use of sensors and employment of hyper-vigilant practices around food safety, restaurant also need to strongly consider employing some system to provide real-time data, as well astracking to connect all these sensors and devices together. Here are some of the leadingtechnologies: Monnit ComplianceMate TempAlert

Operations Management Software As you can see, each of the above automation solutions has a direct impact on the guest experience. But automation isnt just about that new piece of equipment that speeds up the ordering process. Its also very much about streamlining operations.

With digital operations management software, restaurant operators can automate: Training, including gamified teaching modules, consistent education and mobile access. Employee scheduling, including templatized shift planning, budget control and legal compliance. Human resources, including automated tracking systems, application screening and even interview templates. Operations oversight, including round-the-clock access to data, real-time notifications and messaging. Inventory management, including digital checklists and stricter safety compliance.

In the above areas, some of the leading technologies come from: QSRonline HotSchedules PeachWorks

Wrapping Up Automation is the future of the restaurant industry in some degree. No, that doesnt mean all restaurants will soon have robots running the show, but it does mean every restaurant operator needs to seriously consider how they can best use these types of technology to achieve their business goals.

Of course, the upfront investment in new technologies will bring some disruption to restaurants which will experience an uptick in costs at the start. But the fact is, the restaurant game is changing to a much more automated business and those who don't do their homework now and begin the adaptation process will very likely be left as mere memories.

For more information on improving the customer experience, visit The Interactive Customer Experience Association. Its mission is to help brands apply technology to the goal of creating transcendent customer experiences. The ICX Association is a vital hub that connects users and suppliers in collaborative forums, be they virtual or physical, to understand how seemingly unrelated technologies can be integrated to create experiences so meaningful that customers cant imagine doing business elsewhere. (The Association's website, icxa.org, is a sister site to this one.)

Photo: iStock

Topics: Business Strategy and Profitability

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Automation: The possibilities of robo-resauranting - Part 3 of 3 ... - Pizza Marketplace

March 10, 2017 Updated 3/10/2017

Roger Renstrom Robert Schwenker of Saint-Gobain Performance Materials Corp.

Corona, Calif. Requirements for medical molders are changing, with suppliers taking on more responsibility.

At the same time, new technology and automation are changing what is possible to do on the shop floor in multiple industries.

To provide an overview of outsourcing, consolidation and market complexities, Engel Holding GmbH hosted a U.S. regional symposium at its recently-upgraded Corona technical center. Engel is based in Schwertberg, Austria, with U.S. operations based in York, Pa.

The first day of the March 8-9 event focused on the medical market, with packaging in the spotlight on the second day.

Robert Schwenker of Saint-Gobain Performance Materials Corp. talked about how medical device companies pursue strategies to outsource their quality and regulatory risks to suppliers.

The new ISO 13485:2016 standard explicitly requires an organization to comply with all regulations by 2019, said Schwenker, business manager for medical components in Austin, Texas, with the corporations fluid systems business.

He discussed increase in warning letters and unscheduled inspections by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Schwenker tracked the increased regulatory oversight from 2002s first-article inspections to 2017s validation programs for equipment, facilities and defined projects.

Schwenker said: Saint-Gobain wants to anticipate what regulatory systems are saying as evolving requirements impact more medical device subcontractors and components providers.

In October, Saint-Gobain completed extensive renovation of a Gaithersburg, Md., facility to design, develop and make disposable single-use systems for the cell therapy market.

The performance plastics business is a unit of Paris-area-based Saint-Gobain SA.

Mergers and acquisitions executive Perry De Fazio reviewed recent health care industry consolidations that he said create a highly advantageous environment for contract manufacturers.

De Fazio is vice president of private equity firm Covington Associates LLC in Boston and previously spent 15 years as an engineer in medical device research and development.

Market drivers are bringing more value to Tier 1 and Tier 2 contract manufacturers, borrowing terms more commonly used in the automotive industrys supply chain. In many cases, De Fazio noted, the change is beginning to confine traditional health care OEMs to the sales and distribution functions for their products.

An Italian maker of automation equipment and turnkey solutions perceives a demand for high flexibility in the European market and faster redesign of products.

The solutions are becoming more complex, said Marco Marconi, sales area manager with Campetella Robotic Center srl in Montecassiano, Italy. The time-to-market factor is really important.

Marconi stressed the importance of bringing all functions together at the start of a project. Players include the injection molding machine manufacturer, mold maker, label producer, in-mold-label processor and packaging machinery firm.

Marconi said Campetella will get a new factory of about 91,000 square feet. The business employs 94 and, during 2016, installed 350 robots with 20 percent of the deliveries in Italy and the remainder elsewhere.

Roger Renstrom De Fazio

Engels Joachim Kragl outlined the values of the firms iQ weight control processing software in pushing the boundaries of machine intelligence. Kragl is Engel North Americas director of advanced molding systems and processing.

With iQ weight monitoring, corrections are done in real time in the same cycle resulting in consistency in parts through the utmost repeatability through constant change, Kragl said.

Engels Jeff Hershey discussed the values of single purpose cells, closed-loop toggle lubrication and encapsulating conveyors with high-efficiency-particulate-air filters to meet clean room requirements. Hershey is medical business unit manager for Engel North America.

Annually, Engel makes about 1,800 robots in its E-pic B sprue picker servo, E-pic Z linear robot pick-and-place, Viper linear robot and Easix articulated robot product lines in Austria and, in the Czech Republic, produces about 1,500 conveyor belts for use with injection molding machines or in free-standing formats.

For faster North American press deliveries to customers, Engel has embarked on what it calls a fast-lane program to pre-position compact all-electric E-mac machines of 55-190 tons and tie-barless Victory Hy-Spex presses of 55-340 tons, Hershey said.

As built, Engel equipment is compliant with Class 7 clean room requirements, Hershey said.

Michael Traxler said Engels Inject 4.0 solutions for the smart factory places the company in positions as a user-transforming machine production to order-and a provider-developing solutions for customers. Traxler is packaging business unit manager for Engel North America.

Engels E-factory package can help a user monitor, analyze, plan and maintain control.

Energy recovery is viable for larger machines with clamping forces of more than 331 tons, he said.

For energy efficiency, just using electric is not good enough, Traxler said. You must put a strong focus on what is needed for longer term sustainability.

Traxler noted that the focus of press sizes for most packaging applications is in the range of 176-551 tons.

Engel is highly integrated, but, for ball screw spindles, two unidentified Japanese suppliers make the product to a proprietary Engel design for use on injection molding machines for packaging applications.

The U.S. unit of plastic packaging maker Alpla Werke Alwin Lehner GmbH & Co. KG of Hard, Austria, is embarking on a development project to backstop its 14 domestic plants through a mission control concept in McDonough, Ga.

We want to make sure the plant people have everything they need to do the work, said Philipp Lehner, general manager for North America with the Alpla Inc. unit in Georgia.

Alpla began developing the concept in 2013 and, as of September 2016, started monitoring process-relevant data for the U.S. production sites with the intention of minimizing downtime and production outages. The U.S. locations employ about 1,200 and have annual sales of about $400 million.

Alpla product lines include packaging systems, bottles, caps and preforms. Production equipment includes injection molding, extrusion and stretch blow molding machines.

Jordan Robertson discussed the value of stack molds. He is general manager for business development and marketing at StackTech Systems Ltd. in Brampton, Ontario.

Stack molds increase productivity up to 300 percent, Robertson noted. Flexible mold technology reduces changeover times by 90 percent.

He said in-mold labeling technologies increase a packages value, a trend particularly embraced in the Americas.

With stack mold designs, you can have whatever you want, Robertson said.

StackTeck manufactures multi-cavity, high-volume production molds suitable for thin-wall packaging, closure, personal care and medical product applications.

Jan Nietsch, a California-based business development manager for Elexis Groups Hekuma GmbH of Eching, Germany, discussed the value of automation for manufacturers.

To illustrate his point, Nietsch ran a portion of the 1936 Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times showing humans fumbling and flailing on an assembly line.

Nietsch used examples of the Hekuma dual server robot and/or the expandable modular Hekuflex automation system to show how technology can help in manufacturing contact lenses, pipette tips and interdental brushes.

Roger Renstrom Marconi

Beginning in December, Engel West in Corona invested about $150,000 to double the size of its training room, remodel the technical centers entryway and install glass more doors for interior transparency.

The training space now occupies about 320 square feet of the 7,200-square-foot structure that Engel acquired and initially occupied in 2009, said Markus Lettau, west region director of sales for Engel North America.

Engel Wests direct sales staff includes Tony Avaloz, Eric Fuertes and Michael Valentino. Adams Engineers and Equipment Inc. of Tyler, Texas, represents Engel West in Texas and Oklahoma. Adams also represents other regions of Engel North America in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Engel showed a variety of new technologies.

For production of a small PET container, Engel collaborated with mold maker Foboha of Haslach, Germany, and packaging specialist Alpla Werke. Integrated time-savings processes are based on cube technology. Four stages involve molding a preform, heating the material, injection blow molding the bottle and ejecting the product. Cycle time is 7.5 seconds on a 242-ton Engel E-motion press. Foboha reports within the molding solutions business unit of publicly traded Barnes Group Inc.s industrial segment.

For a storage box with a living hinge, Engel applied its iQ software products for analyzing critical process parameters including vibration control. M.R. Mold & Engineering Co. of Brea, Calif., made the one-cavity prototype mold with assistance from Progressive Components of Wauconda, Ill.; Craftsman Tool & Mold Co. of Aurora, Ill.; and Mastip Technology Ltd. of Auckland, New Zealand. The mold ran on a 110-ton Engel E-mac with a fully integrated Engel Viper 12 robot.

Engel molded and packaged 500-bristle Scrub-brand interdental brushes in a follow-up to a similar demonstration of the technology from Pheneo GmbH of Bremen, Germany, at the K 2016 show in Dsseldorf, Germany. A specially developed compound of polypropylene and thermoplastic elastomer ran on a 120-ton Engel E-motion press in 4.5-second cycles. Mold maker Hack Formenbau GmbH of Kirchheim unter Teck, Germany, and automation specialist Hekuma collaborated with Engel.

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Medical, packaging and automation in the spotlight at Engel event - Plastics News (blog)

Forbes

New Reality For Talent Recruitment: Personalization, Relevance And Automation Forbes Applying for a job can be an arduous process. In most cases, the candidate's resume either disappears into a bureaucratic black hole or gets lost in a corporate filing cabinet never to be found again. In fact, company recruiting methods often use ...

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New Reality For Talent Recruitment: Personalization, Relevance And Automation - Forbes

A robot will replace one in two of your colleagues within 20 years.

In the past five years, almost half a million jobs have vanished due to automation in Sweden, says Stefan Flster, head of the libertarian think thank Reforminstitutet.

The pace is accelerating faster than many economists could expect.

According to a report, carried out by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Science, this would imply that more than half, or around 2,5 million jobs, will vanish form the labour market in Sweden - arguably a representative picture of any given developing nation. No wonder then, that robot taxes are already a hot topic (and a bad idea according to Flster, as it would in effect be a tax on exports).

It seems like todays professionals are underestimating the approaching revolution. A post, published on the Bank of Englands staff blog, cited by Bloomberg, concludes that the risks associated with the fourth industrial revolution likely are being dismissed too lightly.

Its a common perception that machines are likely to keep on replacing jobs in manufacturing, warehouses and agriculture. But what's become clear through recent years' technological advancements, is that robots will be replacing a lot of human traits.

Also Read:With the rise of automation, women in tech is no longer a nice-to-have but a need-to-have

Jobs within health care and retail are especially endangered; hundreds of thousands of them are to vanish in Sweden in the next two decades. A close second is accounting assistants, whereas high-skilled jobs like economists and lawyers may see up to 46 percent of their jobs computerized. People working within fields that requires originality, artistic qualities, social skills, negotiating, persuasion, and emotional intelligence are the least likely to find themselves replaced by machines.

The risk for being replaced by a digital technology in the next 20 years: - Photo Model: 98 percent - Accountancy assistant: 97 percent - Engineer: 56 percent - Economist/Businessman: 46 percent

Don't Miss:Heres how to keep your job from being stolen by a robot

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Swedish economist says half of all jobs will be gone to automation in two decades - and 98 percent of photo models - Business Insider Nordic

Machines, you may have heard, are coming for all the jobs.

Robots flip burgers and work warehouses. Artificial intelligence handles insurance claims and basic bookkeeping, manages investment portfolios, does legal research, and performs basic HR tasks. Human labor doesnt stand a chance against themafter the automation apocalypse, only those with spectacular abilities and the owners of the robots will thrive.

Or at least, thats one plausible and completely valid theory. But before you start campaigning for a universal basic income and set up a bunker, you might want to also familiarize yourself with the competing theory: In the long run, were going to be just fine.

Our modern fear that robots will steal all the jobs fits a classic script. Nearly 500 years ago, Queen Elizabeth I cited the same fear when she denied an English inventor named William Lee a patent for an automated knitting contraption. I have too much regard for the poor women and unprotected young maidens who obtain their daily bread by knitting to forward an invention which, by depriving them of employment, would reduce them to starvation, she told Lee, according to one account of the incident. The lack of patent didnt ultimately stop factories from adopting the machine.

Two hundred years later, Lees invention, still being vilified as a jobs killer, was among the machines destroyed by protestors during the Luddite movement in Britain. More than 100 hundred years after that, though computers had replaced knitting machines as the latest threat to jobs, the fear of technologys impact on employment was the same. A group of high-profile economists warned President Lyndon Johnson of a cybernation revolution that would result in massive unemployment. Johnsons labor secretary had recently commented that new machines had skills equivalent to a high school diploma (though then, and now, machines have trouble doing simple things like recognizing objects in photos or packing a box), and the economists were worried that machines would soon take over service industry jobs. Their recommendation: a universal basic income, in which the government pays everyone a low salary to put a floor on poverty.

Todays version of this scenario isnt much different. This time, were warned of the Rise of Robots and the End of Work. Thought leaders such as Elon Musk have once again turned to a universal basic income as a possible response.

But widespread unemployment due to technology has never materialized before. Why, argue the optimists, should this time be any different?

Though Queen Elizabeth I had feared for jobs when she denied Lees patent, weaving technology ended up creating more jobs for weavers. By the end of the 19th century, there were four times as many factory weavers as there had been in 1830, according James Bessen, the author of Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth.

Each human could make more than 20 times the amount of cloth that she could have 100 years earlier. So how could more textile workers be needed?

According to the optimists viewpoint, a factory that saves money on labor through automation will either:

Amazon offers a more modern example of this phenomena. The company has over the last three years increased the number of robots working in its warehouses from 1,400 to 45,000. Over the same period, the rate at which it hires workers hasnt changed.

The optimists take on this trend is that robots help Amazon keep prices low, which means people buy more stuff, which means the company needs more people to man its warehouses even though it needs fewer human hours of labor per package. Bruce Welty, the founder of a fulfillment company that ships more than $1 billion of ecommerce orders each year and another company called Locus Robotics that sells warehouse robots, says he thinks the threat to jobs from the latter is overblownespecially as the rise of ecommerce creates more demand for warehouse workers. His fulfillment company has 200 job openings at its warehouse.

A handful of modern studies have noted that theres often a positive relationship between new technology and increasing employmentin manufacturing firms, across all sectors, and specifically in firms that adopted computers.

How automation impacts wages is a separate question. Warehouse jobs, for instance, have a reputation as grueling and low-paying. Will automation make them better or worse? In the case of the loom workers, wages went up when parts of their jobs became automated. According to Bessen, by the end of the 19th century, weavers at the famous Lowell factory earned more than twice what they earned per hour in 1830. Thats because a labor market had built up around the new skill (working the machines) and employers competed for skilled labor.

That, of course, is not the only option, but it is an outcome embraced by the optimist crowd. Similarly positive results of automation: If companies can make more money with the same number of workers, they can theoretically pay those workers better. If the price of goods drops, those workers can buy more without a raise.

As the Industrial Revolution ended, about half of American workers were still employed in agriculture jobs, and almost all of those jobs were about to be lost to machines.

If nothing else had changed, the decrease in agriculture jobs could have led to a largely unemployed society. But thats not what happened. Instead, as agricultural employment dwindled to less than 2% of American workers, jobs in other sectors grew during the same period. They involved working in factories, yes, but also working with computers, flying airplanes, and driving cargo across the countryoccupations that werent feasible in 1900.

Todays optimists believe that the latest automation technologies will create new jobs as well.

What kind of jobs, they really cant say (this is where the optimism comes in handy). About a third of new jobs created in the United States over the past 25 years didnt exist (or just barely existed) at the beginning of that period, and predicting what jobs might be created in the next 25 years is just guessing. In a report on artificial intelligence and the economy, the Obama White House suggested that automation might create jobs in supervising AI, repairing and maintaining new systems, and in reshaping infrastructure for developments like self-driving cars. But, the reports authors note, Predicting future job growth is extremely difficult, as it depends on technologies that do not exist today.

In 2013, researchers at Oxford sparked fear of the robot revolution when they estimated that almost half of US occupations were likely to be automated. But three years later, McKinsey arrived at a very different number. After analyzing 830 occupations, it concluded that just 5% of them could be completely automated.

The two studies obviously counted differently. The Oxford researchers assessed the probability that occupations would be fully automated within a decade or two. But automation is more likely to replace part of a job than an entire job. When Amazon installs warehouse robots, they currently dont replace full workers, but rather, the part of the job that involves fetching products from different shelves. Similarly, when my colleague used artificial intelligence to transcribe an interview, we didnt fire him; he just worked on the other parts of his job. McKinseys researchers model didnt attempt to sort jobs into replaceable and not replaceable, but rather to place them on a spectrum of automation potential.

Almost every occupation that McKinsey looked at had some aspect that could be automated. Even 25% of tasks inside of a CEO job, the analysis found, could be automated. But very few jobs could be entirely automated.

McKinseys conclusion was not that machines will take all of these jobs, but rather, more occupations will change than will be automated away. Our CEO, for example, wont spend time analyzing reports if artificial intelligence can draw conclusions more efficiently, so he can spend more time coaching his team.

This part of the optimists theory argues that if humans arent bogged down by routine tasks, they will find something better to do. The weavers will learn the new job of operating the machines. My coworker will write more articles because hes not transcribing interviews. The warehouse workers will each pack more boxes because theyre not running between shelves collecting each item to be packed.

Any time in history weve seen automation occur, people dont all of the sudden stop being creative and wanting to do interesting new things, says Aaron Levie, the CEO of enterprise software company Box and an automation optimist. We just dont do a lot of the redundant, obsolete work. He points to potential examples like automatically scheduled calendar appointments or automated research services. Why wont we make up that time with doing the next set of activities that we would have been doing? he says. What I think it does is make the world move faster.

What might that look like? Sodexos CEO of corporate services, Sylvia Metayer, offers one example. She says the outsourcing companys building maintenance crew has started using drones to survey roofs for maintenance needs in three locations. Before the drones arrived, a human climbed onto the roof to check things out. Now, that human stays on the ground, which is safer. The service hasnt changed, the clients still need someone to help maintain the roof, she says. If we do it with drones, the people who would have been going up on the roof have more value, talking with clients about what needs to be done.

Examples also exist in back office automation. From what weve actually seen on the ground, in real business operations, weve seen almost zero job loss, says Alastair Bathgate, CEO of Blue Prism, a software company that helps automate tasks within customer service, accounting, and other jobs. One of his clients, a bank, trained the automation software to react when a customer overdrew an account by checking to see if there were a balance in another account that could be transferred to cover it. This was a process that had never been done by humans, because it would be too tedious and expensive. Another bank used the software to allow customer service representatives to direct customers who had a credit card stolen to an automated system that would input their information and close the account. What do they do now? It allows them to take another call, Bathgate says. On-hold time, not head count, went down.

As the birthrate in many countries declines, the share of the working age population will shrink. To maintain todays GDP, those workers will each need to be more productive than workers today, and theyll need to improve at a faster rate than they have in the past. Even if productivity continued to improve at the same rate that it has throughout the last 50 yearswithin which the computer and the internet both became mainstream toolsit wouldnt be enough of an improvement to sustain GDP. Automation technology could be the answer. According to a McKinsey analysis, it could raise global productivity by as much as 0.8% to 1.4% annuallybut only if humans keep working, as well.

The Industrial Revolution eventually led to an unprecedented high standard of living for ordinary workers.

But this prosperity didnt immediately materialize. There was a period in which life inside of factories was miserable for the laboring class. It included paltry wages, terrible working conditions, and child labor.

Today, during what the World Economic Forum has dubbed the fourth industrial revolution, even optimists expect short-term labor displacement, wage depression, and, for some workers, pain. To take just one sector, the Obama White House estimated that nearly 3.1 million people could lose their job to the autonomous car. New jobs in other sectors could be created as these jobs disappear, but the people who are losing driving jobs wont necessarily have the skills to fill the new ones. This is a big deal.

What separates the optimists from the pessimists is that they tend to believe that the economy as a whole will recover from this short-term adjustment period.

Pessimists argue that not everyone will benefit from this industrial revolution in the same way that the standard of living for ordinary workers rose after the last industrial revolution. Over the last two decades, most gains in productivity have gone to the owners of businesses rather than people who work for them. Global inequality has for the last several decades soared.

But theres a lot of stuff going on outside of technological developments, argue the automation optimists, like the decline of unions, weakening of labor laws, tax laws that benefit rich people, and education policies that havent adapted to a changing worldthese are policy problems, and we should fix them rather than blaming technology.

There is, however, one point that cannot be easily brushed aside. Pessimists point to the pace of innovation as a reason that, this time, advances in technology will impact jobs more brutally than they have in the past. In the past, when you had disruption, the economy adjusted and jobs were created elsewhere, says Ethan Pollack, an economist at the Aspen Institute who says he wavers between optimism and pessimism on automation. What happens if [in the near future], each period of disruption comes so quickly, that it never recovers?

There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently mused at the World Government Summit in Dubai, before suggesting that a universal basic income would be necessary. But even as he talked of the threat to jobs, he also spoke of positive impacts of automation technology. With automation, there will come abundance, he said. Almost everything will get very cheap.

The optimism camp tends to have similarly mixed feelings about automations impact. AI can seem dystopian, tweeted Box CEO Levie, because its easier to describe existing jobs disappearing than to imagine industries that never existed appearing. He doesnt deny that automated technology will make some labor obsoletehe just focuses on the long-term, big-picture opportunity for potential benefits.

Both sides generally agree that there should be measures in place to reduce the impact of labor displacement from automation, like education programs for re-skilling workers who will lose their jobs. One side just tends to have a more darker view of what happens after that.

So which side is right? If history is any guide, both.

In the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes famously coined the term technological unemployment. Less famous is the argument he was making at the time. His case wasnt that impending technology doomed society to prolonged massive unemployment, but rather that a reaction to new technology should neither assume the end of the world or refuse to recognize that world had changed. From his essay, Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren:

The prevailing world depression, the enormous anomaly of unemployment in a world full of wants, the disastrous mistakes we have made, blind us to what is going on under the surface to the true interpretation, of the trend of things. For I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time-the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.

The Obama White House, in a report about how automation may impact jobs, recommended responding to automation by investing in education; creating training programs for workers, like drivers, who will be displaced by automation technology; and strengthening the social safety net. Bill Gates has suggested that we tax robots productivity similar to how we tax humans income in order to finance retraining programs and jobs for which humans are well-suited, like care-taking. Others have suggested wage subsidies and direct government employment programs. These proposed solutions are not so dissimilar to those provided to President Johnson in 1964, which included a massive program to build up our educational system and a major revision of our tax structure.

Even so, little progress has been made since then in making the US more resilient to job displacement caused by automation. The cost of college education has never been higher. As a society, the US has not shown a commitment in building effective, equal-opportunity re-skilling programs. Inequality continues to increase. And the Trump Administration has so far focused on preventing companies from hiring people into manufacturing jobs overseas rather than preparing the economy for the impact of automation. This is an insufficient approach.

As MITs Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee put it more recently than Keynes in their 2014 book about automations economic impact, The Second Machine Age: Our generation has inherited more opportunities to transform the world than any other. Thats a cause for optimism, but only if were mindful of our choices.

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How automation will impact jobs: the optimistic version Quartz - Quartz

There is remarkable angst growing over the role of machines in the production of goods and services. While we are right to be concerned over the labor market effects of automation, most folks worry about the wrong things. That can lead to some stunningly wasteful, if not outright hurtful, public policies. Heres why.

All technological change, from the shovel to the microcomputer, is designed to save labor. At the same time and only in market-based economies new work continues to materialize and business endeavors to hire more workers. For all of recorded history, automation and productivity improvement creates demand for workers while making some tasks unneeded.

Productivity growth is the very essence of economic growth, and we should not fear it. Very real worries come not from the automation itself, but from our inability to adapt to it. It is clearly true that the new jobs created by automation are oftentimes not in the same location, or do not require the same skills as those that automation destroys. This leaves large numbers of people with redundant skills living in clusters of other people with the same skills. Thus, today the antipode of any Rust Belt city is Palo Alto.

This fear of job losses and the obvious distress it causes leads us to ill-considered policy interventions. This is especially true because the labor market signals of supply and demand are hard to read from a state capital or Washington office. Lets consider the example of todays businesses clamoring for more, better-trained, young workers. As I write this column, a search for truck drivers in Muncie yields dozens of jobs, with pay exceeding $50,000 a year.

Naturally, Indianas regional workforce officials are eager to help fill those jobs and subsidize training for truck drivers. Indeed, truck driver ranks third out of 50 "Hot Jobs" for Indiana. I personally know many employers desperate for more truck drivers, but the apparent excess demand for workers might well be a signal of something else. Impending automation.

On the labor demand side, there is nothing like a labor shortfall to incentivize automation. As anyone who pays any attention knows, tests of driverless vehicles are underway on public roads. I predict that by 2030, commercial trucks will no longer be built for drivers. Oh, sure, theyll still have steering wheels and a place to sit, but that will be incidental to the automation. While the Teamsters Union will fight tooth and nail to keep a driver in the seat, it will ultimately fail.

On the labor supply side, workers know this all too well. Many workers will find other things to do in anticipation of technologies that will shake up many common jobs. Workers typically understand that the future of employment requires skills that are not substitutes for machines. Government is a lot worse at figuring this out, and drives some potentially costly mistakes in public policy.

Workers of the future will increasingly need skills that are complemented by automation and technology. These sorts of skills come directly from math, science and liberal arts. Without enduring aptitude in these areas, most of todays young workers will be displaced by automation long before they hit middle age. Policies that lose sight of the imminent role of automation on workers is destined to fail, at a heavy and enduring cost.

Michael J. Hicks, Ph.D., is director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and professor of economics at Ball State University. Contact him at cberdirector@bsu.edu.

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Michael Hicks: We need better planning for automation - Kokomo Tribune

It's no secret that during the second decade of the 21st century, governments are loathe to spend a cent more than they have to, and Centrelink is shaping up to be the touchstone for using automation as its salvation and failing badly at it.

One can easily imagine how the powers that be within Centrelink and its overarching Department of Human Services (DHS) ended up taking the decision it did.

According to Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) National Secretary Nadine Flood, after years on the receiving end of efficiency dividends -- government-speak for reducing spending by a single digit percentage and expecting the same level of output and service -- DHS suffered a 10 percent cut in 18 months.

"It is not an exaggeration to say that the Department of Human Services is an agency is crisis, and it's not something I say lightly," Flood told the Senate Community Affairs References Committee on Wednesday.

Flood said DHS is unable to provide Australians with a basic level of service following a reduction of 5,000 permanent roles by governments of both stripes.

Given such a situation, it is hardly surprising that management decided to automate a decades-old process. But there was a catch. The process itself was not sound, as thousands of former Centrelink recipients found out over the Christmas break.

In the pantheon of decision-making, automating an already bad process is up there with drinking two pots of coffee back to back: It will allow you to do stupid things at a much faster rate.

"The department has been put in a position where it has made decisions, with the recent introduction of the automated debt recovery program, to remove or reduce the role of DHS staff in that crucial hands-on element of the work -- investigating suspected overpayments and advising on appropriate debt recovery actions," Flood said.

"This new approach which removes or reduces human oversight of suspected overpayments and reduces employees' roles at a range of elements of the system has been an absolute disaster for many Centrelink users, but also for the workers charged with implementing a system they know to be deeply flawed and unfair."

Copping some flack for its perceived involvement in the data-matching, the Australian Tax Office was at pains to distance itself from DHS, and said it merely provided annual payment summaries to DHS, as it had done for years. If there was any division by 26 in this process to miscalculate fortnight income and generate debt notices, the ATO was not the source of it.

With an environment focused on saving money, and a budget target of collecting AU$1.2 billion from former welfare recipients, it is disturbing but not surprising that DHS took its human process and ported it across to a machine.

"If we want to look at where robodebt has come from, it is a fairly obvious consequence of a department that no longer has the resources to provide effective services," Flood said.

"It has, of course, proven to be a classic false economy -- and has created costly reverse workflows where staff are taken offline to deal with complex and difficult disputes over incorrectly raised automated debts.

"Sadly, I would suggest in the last few years, one of the things DHS has become an expert in is band-aid solutions as it lurched from one crisis to the next -- this is simply the largest of those."

In its defence, DHS told the committee a lot of the trouble was caused by people not engaging with the notices they were sent.

"I think what we underestimated was how many people would not clarify, and would not engage," DHS Secretary Kathryn Campbell said.

"If I was to sum up what the problem has been, it is that when we wrote those initial letters, that recipients and former recipients didn't engage."

36 million unanswered calls would suggest that when Australians engaged, DHS was wholly unable to cope with what it had unleashed.

Automation has been far from Centrelink's saviour; in fact, it has been a very naughty boy.

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Centrelink robodebt resulted in automation false economy: CPSU - ZDNet