On August 11, 2014, Dylan Love writes on Americas Freedom Fighters:
A company called Momentum Machines has built a robot that could radically change the fast-food industry and have some line cooks looking for new jobs.
The company’s robot can “slice toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.” The robot is “more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.” That’s one burger every 10 seconds.
The next generation of the device will offer “custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem.”
Momentum Machines cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas told Xconomy his “device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.” Indeed, marketing copy on the company’s site reads that their automaton “does everything employees can do, except better.”
This directly raises a question that a lot of smart people have contemplated: Will robots steal our jobs? Opinion is divided of course. Here’s what Momentum Machines has to say on the topic:
The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment. The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy.
If we are to undertake the lofty ambition of changing the nature of work by way of robots, the fast-food industry seems like a good place to start, considering its inherently repetitive tasks and minimal skill requirements. Any roboticist worth his or her salt jumps at tasks described as repetitive and easy — perfect undertakings for a robot.
Here’s a schematic of what the burger-bot looks like and how it works. It occupies 24 square feet, so it’s much smaller than most assembly-line fast-food operations. It boasts “gourmet cooking methods never before used in a fast food restaurant” and will even deposit your completed burger into a bag. It’s a veritable Gutenberg printing press for hamburgers.
http://www.businessinsider.com/momentum-machines-burger-robot-2014-8
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 is becoming so sophisticated and prevalent that it is making many workers obsolete.
Given that there is no question that robotic technology will continue to expand the productivity and in large measure destroy jobs and devalue the value of human labor, the question that SHOULD be urgently addressed is WHO SHOULD OWN THE FUTURE TECHNOLOGY ECONOMY? Will ownership continue to concentrate among the 1 percent wealthy ownership class who now OWNS America, or will be reform the system to provide equal opportunity for EVERY child, woman, and man to acquire personal ownership in FUTURE non-human capital assets paid for with the FUTURE earnings of the investments in our technological future?
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.
This 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.
