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Say Goodbye To Millions Of Jobs As Events Unfold

October 5, 2020

Say Goodbye To Millions Of Jobs As Events Unfold

Society Needs Good Jobs

Many jobs will not be coming back after the covid-19 crisis ends. We can say goodbye to millions of jobs as events unfold and markets evolve. Millions of small businesses being decimated by Fed policies that favor huge companies coupled with a surge in automation bodes poorly for those looking for work. Over the last three decades, robots have become far more common in factories. In many manufacturing facilities, robots do most of the work. A typical factory may contain hundreds of robots working on fully automated production lines, as it rolls by on a conveyor, a product can be welded, glued, painted, and finally assembled at a sequence of robot stations.Robots are rapidly replacing humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks that people prefer not to do or are unable to do due to size limitations. This includes working in places such as in outer space or at the bottom of the sea where humans cannot survive the extreme environments.  Industrial robots are also used extensively for placing products on pallets and packaging of manufactured goods, for example for rapidly taking drink cartons from the end of a conveyor belt and putting them into boxes, or for loading and unloading machines.

Factories Are Now Full Of Robot Workers

The rise in populism and Trump’s trade war has brought front and center how globalization has often put America’s self-interest behind that of corporate profits. In an article written in April of 2013, I claimed that if factories filled with mostly robot workers are the future then we should do all that we can to see that they are located in America. 

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Robot Dogs Replace K9s Herding Sheep And Help Police Enforce Social Distancing

May 30, 2020

Robot Dogs Replace K9s Herding Sheep And Help Police Enforce Social Distancing

For years now Activist Post has been warning about the rise of robotic technology and artificial intelligence. Now, the technology is being used for police robot dogs and for herding sheep. That means that robots are even coming for our K9 friends’ jobs. Aye caramba!

CNET reports:

Humans and dogs aren’t the only ones who can master the art of herding livestock. Boston Dynamics’ four-legged robot dog Spot seems to be doing a fine job of maneuvering sheep across the pasture.

In a new video posted by robotics software company Rocos on Tuesday, Spot is seen roaming the New Zealand grasslands, showing off its shepherding skills with a group of sheep.

Large creepy robot dogs aren’t just being used for corralling a herd of sheep. They are also being used to enforce social distancing amid this CV pandemic. Activist Post previously highlighted this scary new robotic dog being used by police in Singapore.

Video of Boston Dynamics robots climbing stairs, carrying boxes, and doing basic parkour have long circulated around the internet, creeping out viewers. In fact, Activist Post has covered each and every one of these videos but we never thought that the creepy robotic dog at Boston Dynamics would be anything more than just an experiment; we were totally wrong.

It turns out that the Massachusetts State Police and Singaporean authorities are both using “Spot,” and the trend will only spread like what has happened with pandemic drones. As Activist Post previously wrote, CV will be a gateway for all types of Orwellian technology and will speed up the deployment of robots.

While record unemployment is hitting here in the U.S., automated machines are being rolled out as well to replace even more human workers. Now we can add our K9 friends to the mix.

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The Pentagon is building a ‘self-aware’ killer robot army fueled by social media

May 14, 2016

The Pentagon is building a ‘self-aware’ killer robot army fueled by social media

Official US defence and NATO documents confirm that autonomous weapon systems will kill targets, including civilians, based on tweets, blogs and Instagram

An unclassified 2016 Department of Defense (DoD) document, the Human Systems Roadmap Review, reveals that the US military plans to create artificially intelligent (AI) autonomous weapon systems, which will use predictive social media analytics to make decisions on lethal force with minimal human involvement.

Despite official insistence that humans will retain a “meaningful” degree of control over autonomous weapon systems, this and other Pentagon documents dated from 2015 to 2016 confirm that US military planners are already developing technologies designed to enable swarms of “self-aware” interconnected robots to design and execute kill operations against robot-selected targets.

More alarmingly, the documents show that the DoD believes that within just fifteen years, it will be feasible for mission planning, target selection and the deployment of lethal force to be delegated entirely to autonomous weapon systems in air, land and sea. The Pentagon expects AI threat assessments for these autonomous operations to be derived from massive data sets including blogs, websites, and multimedia posts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

The raft of Pentagon documentation flatly contradicts Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work’s denial that the DoD is planning to develop killer robots.

In a widely reported March conversation with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Work said that this may change as rival powers work to create such technologies:

“We might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are, and as that competition unfolds we will have to make decisions on how we best can compete.”

But, he insisted, “We will not delegate lethal authority to a machine to make a decision,” except for “cyber or electronic warfare.”

He lied.

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We asked for an energy miracle and all what we are getting are lousy killer robots

May 14, 2016

We asked for an energy miracle and all what we are getting are lousy killer robots

If you have four minutes, turn down the horrible background music and watch this clip up to the end, which is truly revealing. So, maybe you were hoping that science would bring to us a technological miracle that could solve the energy problem. But this is what we are getting. Oh, wait…. at least this may solve the overpopulation problem. (source)

Automating Ourselves To Unemployment

April 28, 2016

Tatiana Shepeleva/Shutterstock

Automating Ourselves To Unemployment

How shortsighted policies are creating a long-term crisis
Students of Austrian business cycle theory are familiar with the term malinvestment. A malinvestment is any poor use of resources or capital, commonly made in response to bad policy (usually artificially low interest rates and/or unsustainable increases in the monetary supply). The dot-com bubble that popped in 2001? The housing bubble that similarly burst in 2008? Those were classic examples of malinvestment.

With this article, I’d like to introduce a related term: malincentive. While not part of the official economic lexicon, I consider a ‘malincentive’ a useful word to describe any promise of short-term gain whose long-term costs outweigh any immediate benefits enjoyed. The temptation to urinate in one’s pants on a cold winter day to get warm is a (perhaps unnecessarily) graphic example of malincentive. Yes, a momentary relief from the cold can be achieved; but moments later, you’ll have a much larger problem than you did at the outset.

Malincetives and malinvestment go hand-in-hand. In my opinion, the former causes the latter. As humans, we respond remarkably well to incentives. And dumb incentives encourage us to make dumb investments.

In this current era of central planning, malincentives abound. We raced to frack as fast as we could for the quick money, while leaving behind a wake of environmental destruction and creating a supply glut that has killed the economics of shale oil. Our stock exchanges sell unfairly-fast price feeds for great sums to elite Wall Street high-frequency-trading firms, and as a result have destroyed investor trust in our financial markets.  The Federal Reserve keeps interest rates historically low to encourage banks to lend money out, yet instead the banks simply lever up to buy Treasurys thereby pocketing vast amounts of riskless free profit. The list goes on and on.

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Hawking: Greedy capitalists may pocket wealth as robots replace human workers

October 9, 2015

Hawking: Greedy capitalists may pocket wealth as robots replace human workers

© Issei Kato
© Issei Kato / Reuters

The scientist was commenting on so-called technological unemployment, a trend of automatization taking over the jobs that previously required humans. According to some estimates, in a matter of decades robots may become better and cheaper than humans in most tasks and make most of the human workforce unemployable.

Hawkins believes that in such a scenario we should expect not prosperity but drastic economic inequality in the future.

“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed,” he said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session Thursday.

“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

Hawkins’ previous predictions of emerging threats dealt with automatic weapons controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential dangers of actively searching for alien life.

READ MORE: US & Israel inequality champions of developed world – OECD

Economic inequality is a problem growing worse in developed countries. According to the OECD, the situation is worse than 30 years now, with the US and Israel performing worst.

Chinese Company Moves to Replace 90% of its Workforce with Robots

May 7, 2015

Chinese Company Moves to Replace 90% of its Workforce with Robots

I’m not one of those people who thinks robots taking over menial labor from human employees is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think such a displacement could ultimately prove very positive for the species. Nevertheless, the short-term pain and suffering that this could cause for displaced workers and their families likely will have tremendous negative repercussions to the societies that are most affected in the near and intermediate-term.

Since robots entering the workforce is probably one of the most significant economic trends in the decades ahead, we should all start thinking about how to deal with what will be a major adjustment for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.

From the South China Morning Post:

Construction work has begun on the first factory in China’s manufacturing hub of Dongguan to use only robots for production, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

A total of 1,000 robots would be introduced at the factory initially, run by Shenzhen Evenwin Precision Technology Co, with the aim of reducing the current workforce of 1,800 by 90 per cent to only about 200, Chen Xingqi, the chairman of the company’s board, was quoted as saying in the report.

Robots are set to take over in many factories in the Pearl River Delta, the area of southern China known as the ‘world’s workshop’ because of the huge export manufacturing industry there, as labour shortages bite and local authorities face the need to spur innovation to counter the economic slowdown.

Since September, a total of 505 factories across Dongguan have invested 4.2 billion yuan in robots, aiming to replace more than 30,000 workers, according to the Dongguan Economy and Information Technology Bureau.

By 2016, up to 1,500 of the city’s industrial enterprises will began replacing humans with robots.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Shape Shifting Robot To Inspect Damaged Fukushima Reactor

February 11, 2015

Shape Shifting Robot To Inspect Damaged Fukushima Reactor

Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which suffered three reactor meltdowns from an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, can’t be decommissioned until its ruined reactors are inspected. But because of deadly radiation, no human can get close to the facility to survey the damage.

So the Japanese electronics giant Hitachi and an affiliate, Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, have designed a snaky-looking, remotely controlled robot to do the job, perhaps as soon as April, to gather information about the state of the No. 1 reactor building to prepare for the removal of its radioactive rubble.

The utility that operates the power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), intends to repair and seal off all damaged chambers in the facility, then fill them with water as a step toward eventually removing the melted remains. That is expected to take place in about 10 years.

Hitachi and Hitachi-GE demonstrated the shape-shifting robot on Feb. 5 at a plant owned by Hitachi-GE. It showed that the slinky, 2-foot-long robot can morph a bit depending on the space it needs to occupy and the work it needs to do.

In the demonstration, the robot, equipped with a camera and a lamp on its “nose,” snaked its way through a pipe with a diameter of only 4 inches. When it emerged from the other end of the pipe, it expanded to a U shape, then crawled around, taking live images of the immediate area and capturing temperature and radiation levels.

 

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charles hugh smith-Our New Robot Overlords & The Third Type of Capital

October 18, 2014

charles hugh smith-Our New Robot Overlords & The Third Type of Capital.

Our New Robot Overlords & The Third Type of Capital   (October 18, 2014)

Fortune will instead favor a third group: those who can innovate and create new products, services, and business models.A recent issue of Foreign Affairs sported a catchy cover teaser: Our New Robot Overlords. This brings to mind various sci-fi scenarios, but the actual article title is academic to the point of obscurity: Labor, Capital and Ideas in the Power Law Economy.

Rather than rehash the usual failed Keynesian Cargo Cult economics, the authors describe three powerful ideas that resonate very strongly with my own work:

1. Digital technologies (networked software, automation and robotics) are radically reducing the need for human labor and the leverage of traditional capital (land, fixed assets and cash) globally.

2. Premiums flow to whatever inputs are scarce. Labor and traditional capital are no longer scarce; what’s scarce is innovative, practical ideas. Ideas (for new models, products, services, processes, etc.) are a third form of capital that will accrue most of the rewards.

3. This distribution of premiums/rewards follows a power law, i.e. the Pareto Distribution where the “vital few” with the 3rd type of capital (good ideas) reap most of the rewards.

…click on the link above for the rest of the article…

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