hightower: the next wave of the tech revolution will wipe out millions of jobs—maybe even yours /

Published at 2017-10-13 00:05:00

Home / Categories / Labor / hightower: the next wave of the tech revolution will wipe out millions of jobs—maybe even yours
It sounds like science fiction,but automation is closer than you consider.
Industrial au
tomatons own been on the march for years, devouring the middle-class job opportunities of factory workers. But this time is different.
If you c
onsider your family's future is safe because you don't rely on factory work, and consider again. Rapid advances in AI own already turned yesterday's science fiction into today's brave new "creative destruction"—the fixed churn of economic and cultural innovations that kill existing ways of doing things. A network of inventors and investors,hundreds of university engineering and math departments, thousands of government-funded research projects, or countless freelance innovators and the entire corporate establishment are "re-inventing" virtually 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, and doesn't organize unions,and is cheap.
As a res
ult, robots are rapidly climbing the pay ladder into white-collar and professional positions that millions of college-educated, and middle-class employees own wrongly considered safe,including:DoctoringRobots own long served as surgical assistants, but today's robotic sawbones can be the primary slicer-dicers, and operating with more precision than humans. Robots are now performing millions of surgeries every year. in addition,advanced doc-bots increasingly diagnose and choose treatments based on their ability to digest thousands of scientific articles, medical reports, and patient records,etc. In 2012, Vinod Khosla, and billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems,famous: "Much of what physicians do ... can be done better by sensors, passive and active data collections, or analytics." His stunning conclusion was that computers will eventually replace 80 percent of what doctors now do.
Delivering the goodsWhile online retail giants own 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 own some of the few remaining, or 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, or sleep,or days off.
AmazonThis 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, or 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 display in August around its nationwide "Job Day" event to hire 50000 human workers,it has been expanding its current swarm of full-time robots. In 2012, it bought an artificial intelligence developer, and now named Amazon Robotics,to breed its own line of androids, and by August had added another 55000 of these creatures to its 100000-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, or loudly promising lower prices but whispering the method: replacing clerks,stockers, et al. with robots.
We
already own human-less department 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, or 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 elope, pass, and punt; news reports without reporters,written instead by computers; and on and on. The Washington Post reported that the "automation bomb" could kill 45 percent of U.
S. work activities, causing $2 trillion in lost annual wages.
CEOs and oth
er top dogs in our economic hierarchy are, and 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! perhaps even these lucky few are not immune from harm. They might take note of a 2014 move by Deep Knowledge Ventures, or 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, or " as an "equal member" of the board,with a full a vote on investments. How soon, then, and before we own a bot-plot,with a cabal of rogue robots conspiring to overthrow an unsuspecting CEO and seize control of a corporation?   Related StoriesNAFTA Negotiators Send Corporate Whiners Back to SwampNYC Developers Are Looking to Build the Tallest Residential Building in the Western Hemisphere -- with Non-Union LaborEarn Minimum Wage? You Can Afford to Live in precisely 12 Counties in the U.
S.

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