The Robots are Coming

Buzzfeed Talks to Uber and Lyft Drivers
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Buzzfeed made a video where they took rights with Uber and Lyft drives and talked to the about driverless cars and what it might mean for their jobs,…

Robot Sex Dolls
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So, Real Doll has been around for years – I remember them being a blocked site on my company’s computer network back in 2000 or so, The company makes…

Will the machines ever wake up?
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Could we ever replicate consciousness in machines? Might they ever become sentient like Skynet in the Terminator films? TechCrunch looks at the…

Y Combinator Basic Income Study
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Y Combinator – the startup incubator – is about to start up a study on the feasibility of basic income . We’re going to try something new – our first…

The Crash of Air France Flight 447
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A Vanity Fair article examines the 2009 crash of Air France flight 447, which went down in the Atlantic en route from Brazil to France. The Human…

Disembodied Objects of Speed and Efficiency
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In a discussion about automated business processing in Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans . It is here perhaps that IBM gets us…

Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us
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Bill Joy is one of the world’s great computer scientists, He started Sun Microsystems, and he had a lot to do with the creation of the Java…

The Gig Economy for Welfare
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Two conservative Washington policy wonks write in Politico that we should use the gig economy to put welfare recipients to work: Historically, some…

Narrative Science
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Narrative Science is a company that launched out of a project at the Intelligent Information Lab at Northwestern University. They make a software…

Robot Farming
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Japan is going to harvest lettuce with robots . So much so that Spread is creating the world’s first farm manned entirely by robots. Instead of…

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
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Swiss Bank UBS has released a report saying that the move to automation is the “fourth industrial revolution,” and will drive considerable gains to…

Rise of the Robots
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Martin Ford’s book, Rise of the Robots was on many “best of” books for 2015, It’s a broad overview of the problems of automation and the potential…

Reduced to Helping the Machines
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“The newest space, and the one that’s most exciting, is where machines are actually in charge, but they have enough awareness to seek out people to…

Automation Replacing Jobs at Panera?
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There is significant conservative spin on this article , clearly, but it summarizes what apparently happening on an earnings call for Panera Bread.…

Life on Chicken Assembly Line
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Interesting information in this article about how automation drives the pace of a chicken assembly line. Today, the maximum permissible rate is 140…

Middle Management and The Gig Economy
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This article claims that the Gig Economy has another casualty: middle management. With real-time rating systems, we’re turning into a world of…

Good Analytics Means Less Workers
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Here’s an interesting note in the middle of this article about temp workers at Amazon : At the same time, we are living in an era of maximum…

Automation and The Minimum Wage
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The tail end of this NY Times opinion piece on raising the minimum wage includes this bit about the threat of automation as a reason not to raise the…

Politicians Take Notice of the Gig Economy
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Politicians are working with start-ups to understand the so-called “gig economy.” It’s driving conversations about worker protections, lack of health…

The Threat to White Collar Jobs
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This article argues that it’s not just middle class jobs at risk. Indeed, there’s apparently nothing special about white collar jobs either. “The…

World Summit on Technological Unemployment
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There’s an upcoming conference on technological unemployment: The World Summit on Technological Unemployment is the first high-level forum and…

Pilotless Planes
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It seems that planes don’t even need pilots . Advances in sensor technology, computing and artificial intelligence are making human pilots less…

Server-less Restaurants
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We don’t need waiters anymore , apparently, as a new place in San Francisco is trying to prove. At this restaurant, customers order, pay and receive…

The Onion on Automation
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The Onion offers this humorous respite: Secretary Of Labor Assures Nation There Still Plenty Of Jobs For Americans Willing To Outwork Robots : During…

We Live to Work
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Here’s an interesting article on how white collar work in the U.S. will resist automation because we will simply invent more work , because that’s…

Money for Free
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Here’s an interesting documentary from a Dutch “future affairs” television series on the idea of a “basic income” and how it might work. The idea is…

Writing Gigs; Payment By The Page
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Inside an article about Amazon’s business practices , there’s an interesting note about how the “gig economy” is coming to book writing: Amazon…

Replacing Humans with Robots
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The title of this post is apparently the title of an official Chinese government program which subsidizes and rewards companies for actively…

Will Your Job Be Automated?
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NPR has come up with a cute, if simplistic, app to tell you if your job will be automated . The parameters it reviews are: Do you need to come up…

Automating the Twilight of DVD-By-Mail
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Here’s some information on Netflix’s eventually-doomed DVD-by-mail business and how they’re keeping it going by making it more efficient using…

Automation and the Balance of Power
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There’s not a lot new in this New York Times piece from April , but this quote is a good summation of the problem. This is the way technology is…

Don’t Fear the Robots
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Here’s an article which argues that we should welcome an increase in automation and productivity: […] don’t worry that the robots will take your job.…

Empathy
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Meg Bear was a VP for Oracle, In this LinkedIn post she makes this point which shows how computers and humans will never be the same: I have come to…

Why We Will Always Need Humans
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Here’s a phenomenal article adapted from an upcoming book: Humans Are Underrated . The article seeks an answer to this question: What are the…

Why Today Isn’t a Luddite Fallacy
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Here’s an argument that the reason why our current predicament isn’t a Luddite Fallacy is because of the rate of change. But what is missing from…

Auto Insurance Disruption
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Self-driving cars will disrupt more than the automotive industry. They’ll mess with the insurance industry too . […] getting rid of the driver could…

The Freightliner Inspiration
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Freightliner has a semi-autonomous truck licensed for use in Nevada . The lorry has the same “NHTSA Level 3” rating as Google’s self-driving car,…

The Gig Economy
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An interesting term is in this article about Uber drivers trying to file for unemployment . The companies of the gig economy, the on-demand economy,…

Technological Employment Debate
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A Yale researcher is on the record about technological unemployment : Thanks to the efficiency of the internet and automated systems, productivity…

Driverless Trucks in the Oil Sands
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Falling oil prices and revenue have gotten oil sands producers interested in driver-less trucks. Suncor is buying 175 of them. The layoffs will be…

Unimate
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There is a Robot Hall of Fame , One of the inductees is the first automobile assembly line robot: Unimate : In 1961 the first industrial robot,…

Single Man Railroad Crews
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Railroad companies are trying to reduce the number of employees onboard trains : Railroads have proposed eliminating the job of on-board conductor on…

Robot Strawberry Picker Re-visited
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An article with more about the robot strawberry picker , but this article claims it will fix a labor shortage, and why this shortage exists. For some…

The Machines Are Workers, Not Tools
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From the introduction of Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford. [This] is an era that will be defined by a fundamental shift in the relationship between…

Raising the Retirement Age Because We Can
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Here’s an article about the idea to raise retirement age which argues we should actually lower it. It starts with some common knowledge about…

Automated Strawberry Picker
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Wither the migrant agricultural laborer: Harvest CROO Robotics Develops Strawberry Picker, the Latest Solution in Agricultural Robotics Harvest CROO…

Fortis Smart Meters
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The city in Canada gets rid of meter readers in favor of smart meters. If you’re under 10 years old, you may never remember what a meter reader…

LaGuardia’s New Checkout
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All of the checkout clerks at LaGuardia’s convenience stores have apparently been replaced with machines.

Does the Internet kill jobs?
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Here’s an article from the Harvard Business Review which argues that the Internet is killing job creation in the middle class. The Internet […] has…

Wither the Parking Attendant?
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There’s very little detail in this article about parking at a Dallas stadium, but the last line is pretty clear: Last week American Airlines Center,…

The Effect of Usability on Employment Rates
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I’m wondering about much usability and HCI will affect automation and job losses. I’ve been thinking that a lot of transactions cannot be automated…

The Uber-ization of Work
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The New York Times talks about something that we discussed in the past. Uberization of work may soon be coming to your chosen profession. Just as…

More on Driverless Cars
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Zack Kanter writes about autonomous cars : Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030, and the sweeping change they…

Bill Gates on Reddit
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Bill Gates did another Reddit AMA , There were a couple questions about technological unemployment: Someone: How much of an existential threat do you…

Humans Need Not Apply
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This video is stone-cold terrifying. It lays out the fundamental case for technological unemployment, and explains that technology evolves faster…

Robotic Guilt
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The New York Times reports further on the inability for robots to have morals or make moral-based judgments. One innovator is trying…

Bill Gates on software substitution
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Bill Gates, speaking last week at The American Enterprise Institute, said this: Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses…

Camel Racing Robots Protect Human Rights
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Camel racing in the Middle East is big business, and the sport has worked for over a decade to replace all the jockeys with robots , However, in a…

Documentary on Death and Work
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This documentary just got funded in Kickstarter. It connects the death of work to the death of…well, actual death , and discusses how the two relate…

Wither the Waiter?
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Waiters might be next on the chopping block, given that a company making pay-at-the-table tablets is raising significant capital . E la Carte Inc., a…

The Human We Need might not be a doctor…
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The Week has a short piece, provocatively titled “ How computers will replace your doctor .” I loved this quote about “the human we need.” But the…

The Ethics of the Robots
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The next frontier of self-driving cars is teaching them ethics. It turns out that some split-second decisions are as much value judgments as clear…

Universal Basic Income
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Marshall Brain of the How Stuff Works franchise, and the Manna novella, presents his case for a universal basic income . He starts off by painting a…

Elon Musk on the Dangers of AI
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A recurring theme of some of Elon Musk’s comments have been that the rise of artificial intelligence might end very badly for humans. From a CNBC…

Computers and Ediscovery
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In 2011, the New York Times was telling us about how so-called “ electronic discovery ” would be putting lawyers out of business by enabling the…

The Luddites
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Let’s just take a second to reflect on how long the battle against worker automation has been fought. Here’s where the pejorative term “ Luddite ”…

Open-Source Library Self-Checkout
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If you have a public library, you can have automation even if you don’t have a budget, thanks to this open-source, web-based self-checkout system .…

Self-Service Retail
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This article is over three years old: Retail jobs are disappearing as shoppers adjust to self-service . You can bet the trend has just accelerated in…

Manna
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Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future is a novel set sometime in the future with a protagonist living in Cary, North Carolina and working at a…

47% at Risk
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You see the “47%” figure floating around a lot, refering to how many jobs the economy could lose to technology. Here’s where it comes from – an…

What Does the Future Look Like?
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Interesting discussion over on Reddit: Imagine a robot that is a complete replacement for the average American worker. What economic system develops…

The Great Decoupling
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Author and and professor Erik Brynjolfsson is convinced that technology is increasing productivity at the cost of jobs, and he has a chart that he…

The Amazon Picking Challenge
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Amazon has created The Amazon Picking Challenge to spur improvements in picking robot performance. These are the robots that fill boxes in Amazon’s…

America DOES Still Make Stuff
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It’s a common complaint that “America doesn’t make anything anymore.” Well, yes we do, it just doesn’t get as much press as the latest tech startup.…

Automate This
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I read this Automate This over the summer: The bot takeover began with high frequency trading on Wall Street, and from there it spread to all manners…

The Innovation Cycle
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All innovation is not created equal. This article identifies three different types, in chronological order: Empowering innovations “transform…

More Stuff, Less People Required
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From a 2011 study entitled The Case of the Disappearing Large Employer Manufacturing Plants : […] the dramatic disappearance of large employers is…

Not Working
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Found in an article entitled The Art of Not Working at Work : Everywhere we look, technology is replacing human labor. In OECD countries,…

The Onion on Serving the Machines
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The Onion claims that Man’s Whole Job Undoing Handiwork Of Self-Checkout Machine : Admitting that he basically just stands there until one of the…

OTR Trucking in a Self-Driving World
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If I was an over-the-road trucker, I’d be watching Google’s self-driving car research with a careful eye, because the human behind the wheel of a…

The Slow Elimination of Hotel Housekeeping
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Every year, my Dad and I go to Las Vegas for a rugby tournament. The last time we were there, we managed to get a very high-end hotel at off-season…