On July 15, 2013, Gosia Wozniacka AP writes:
On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization — fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.
Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms, as well as networking and high precision GPS localization technologies. Most ag robots won’t be commercially available for at least a few years.
This is yet another story about the realities of productive capital instruments––human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.––replacing the need for human labor. While this productive technological capability has been evolving for over a century, and initially made us better at our jobs. Now it’s is becoming so sophisticated and prevalent that it is making many workers obsolete.
The reality is that increasingly EVERY human is having more and more interactions with machines and fewer with human beings. If you’ve lost your white collar job to downsizing, or to a worker in India or China you’re most likely a victim of what economists have called technological unemployment. There is no escape as much more is to come.
The field of robotics is at the vanguard of this new wave of automation. The broad universal definition is a machine that can perform the job of a human. Robots can be mobile or stationary and hardware or software, but ALL are instruments of productive capital and ALL are OWNED.
Business investment in machine and robotic super-automation hardware and software is more than it’s ever been. What’s not back is the jobs.
The percentage of Americans with jobs is at a 20-year low due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. In every industry, we are witnessing fewer interactions with other human beings. Everyone should be aware of robotic kiosks––providing bank teller services via ATMs, sales customer services via e-commerce, and switchboard support services via voice recognition technology. Super-automation is transforming commerce. There are heavily automated warehouses where there are either very few or no people around. Increasingly jobs, especially those that involve relatively structured tasks, are being replaced by human-intelligent robotic computerization and physical entities other than humans.
While conventional economists, academia, and political leadership has called upon education as the solution, the changes are coming so quickly it will be difficult for workers to retrain themselves. They are disadvantaged to compete with supercomputers which can program themselves to improve their performance. Even if the entire American population was college educated, there still would not be the need in the private sector to create jobs in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work due to human work constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Technology increasingly is demonstrating skills on a par with and even surprising human skills.
Technology’s impact is rapidly automating the information age using e-discovery software, which will significantly lessen the need for a human workforce that earns income by gathering and analyzing information. Such technology is now used to gather intelligence and fight wars.
While entrepreneurs will continue to create new business opportunities, the reality is that they will not be hiring large numbers of people. Public companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, for example, represent in total about $1 trillion in market capitalization value. Yet together they employ fewer than 150,000 people––less than ALL the new entrants into the American workforce monthly.
Annual investment by U.S. manufacturers in new technology has increased almost 30 percent since the “Great Recession” ended, and research institutions and robotics companies, funded by venture capital, are constantly searching for innovations.
Technological invention and innovation is the ONLY means to effectively return manufacturing to the United States. But realistically, the global competition will be intense as other teams of engineers and scientists in other countries compete to create ever more sophisticated human-intelligent machines, super-automated processes, robotic workers, digital computerized operations etc. Thus, even if offshore manufacturing returns to the United States, most of the jobs will go to “robots.”
We are at the horizon of a new technological frontier and the capabilities of computerization and robotics are projected to exponentially expand whereby the work in a new FUTURE economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen will be largely done by “machines.”
For an insightful look further into this challenge, I recommend viewing the “60 Minutes” which appeared on CBS January 13, 2013 (http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5699). The subject of this program, this article and others previously published, is and will impact your future livelihood and that of your children and grandchildren!
While no solutions are put forth, the obvious solution is to connect EVERY American with individual ownership in the FUTURE corporate productive capital assets represented by “robotics and digital computerized operations” so that they can benefit from the income derived as Americans become the future “customers with money” to purchase the products and services that the “robotics and digital computerized operations” produce.
The “60 Minutes” segment and ALL the other articles on the subject have failed to outline a comprehensive master plan for accomplishing broaden private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital. Yet such has been in development for 55 years but faced with willful ignorance and obliviousness on the part of our leaders, academia and the national media.
The master plan for this paradigm shift in the structure of the American economy can be accomplished with the adoption and implementation of the the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
Please see my article “Democratic Capitalism And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.org/11/economic-justice/ or follow me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/For-Economic-Justice/347893098576250 and http://www.facebook.com/editorgary
Also please see my article “The Absent Conversation: Who Should Own America?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/who-should-own-america_b_2040592.html and by OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-Absent-Conversation–by-Gary-Reber-130429-498.html
Also see “The Path To Eradicating Poverty In America” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/the-path-to-eradicating-p_b_3017072.html and “The Path To Sustainable Economic Growth” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/sustainable-economic-growth_b_3141721.html.
Also see the article entitled “The Solution To America’s Economic Decline” at http://www.nationofchange.org/solution-america-s-economic-decline-1367588690 and “Education Is Critical To Our Future Societal Development” at http://www.nationofchange.org/education-critical-our-future-societal-development-1373556479.
And also see “Achieving The Green Economy” at http://www.nationofchange.org/achieving-green-economy-1373980790. Also see it complete with the footnotes at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=9082.
http://www.businessinsider.com/robots-being-developed-to-automate-farm-labor-2013-7
