Free Republic

Within the next 10 years, there's a good chance that 50% of the jobs today will be gone.And no one in Washington is talking about what to do to deal with this likelihood.The cause of this coming massive economic upheaval is artificial intelligence -- a catch-all term that encompasses everything from driverless cars to sex robots. Its impact is already being felt on the factory floor, where smart machines are making American manufacturers more competitive, more efficient, and more profitable, but without the mass number of workers that used to be the backbone of the American economy.Donald Trump says...

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment. It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology. In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has doubled down on his support of a universal basic income as a possible solution for unemployment caused by the rise of machines equipped with artificial intelligence taking over the workforce. A universal basic income would give a standard amount of money to every citizen to cover basic expenses like food and living costs each month. At the World Government Summit in Dubai on Monday, Musk told a crowd that universal basic income is “going to be necessary” in the future. Musk first joined the growing list of tech executives supporting the payment system in November...

After a factory in Dongguan, China, replaced most of its workers with robots, it witnessed a spectacular rise in productivity. While some of the world’s leaders are obsessed with keeping people out of their country, an unspoken entity is slowly but certainly taking our jobs: robots. It’s been long discussed that robots and computers will start taking our jobs “in the near future” — well that near future is upon us and we’re not really prepared to deal with it. Of course, some jobs are more at risk than others, are few are as threatened as factory jobs. Advertisement According...

AS EXPECTED, the European Parliament's legal affairs committee voted in favour of extending rights to robots, granting them what the committee called "electronic personhood", by 17 votes to two, with two abstentions. The robot 'bill of rights' is intended to cover such issues as liability, such as when automated or robotic systems are involved in accidents or go postal, as well as ethical issues, such as should it be legal to beat your robot? Socialist worker Mady Delvaux, a Luxembourgois politician and vice-chair of the Committee on Legal Affairs, said that the EU "urgently need(s) to create a robust European...

EU legislators today (12 January) called for a universal basic income to combat the looming risk of job loss by the onward march of robots, as well as concerns about European welfare systems. Technological progress is no longer seen as safe path toward prosperity. A new generation of robots and the development of artificial intelligence may improve how we manufacture goods or how we spend our leisure time. But this new wave of intelligent gadgets and autonomous robots could also destroy thousands of jobs without creating new ones in the same proportion, warned a non-legislative report adopted by the European...

In South Africa, people who speak Afrikaans use the word "robot" to mean the same thing it means in English. But it is also the word for "traffic light." Why? Before automated signals, motorists on busy streets were directed by police officers standing on platforms. Those cops were automated out of a job. This bit of trivia comes from the dazzling new book "Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World," by University of Illinois at Chicago economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey. She points out that automation and robots are nothing new, that they are crucial to...

A French woman has revealed she is in love with a robot and determined to marry it. Lilly’s partner is a robot called InMoovator, who she 3D-printed herself and has been living with for a year. On her Twitter page, where she goes by ‘Lilly InMoovator,’ she says: ‘I'm a proud robosexual, we don't hurt anybody, we are just happy.’ . . . She insisted the idea is not ‘ridiculous’ or ‘bad’ but simply an alternative lifestyle.

Those who oppose outsourcing work to other countries -- or to robots - usually justify their opposition as a desire to protect Americans. But it actually reflects a lack of respect for working Americans, and for people in general - a failure to realize that skilled people, not the jobs they happen to occupy, are among the most valuable resources an economy can have.Think of an economy as a double-entry balance sheet, with columns for assets and liabilities. Many look at the balance sheet and see jobs on the asset side of the ledger, in effect consigning people to...

Chinese robots appear to be bringing to an end a path of "serial industrialisation" across Asia that has run for 60-odd years, says Hong Kong-based Bernstein analyst and ex-pat Kiwi Michael Parker. In a research note entitled Adam Smith vs Chinese Robots...The end of The Wealth of Nations, in one chart (not ours), Parker points out that instead of shedding low cost manufacturing as it develops, China is getting rid of the workers but not the work. Parker notes that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, remained broadly relevant to capital allocation decisions globally for 240 years. Basically,...

In what some Chinese news sites are calling a “first of its kind”, a person has been injured by a robot that malfunctioned, causing him to be sent to hospital. It happened Thursday afternoon at the 18th annual Shenzhen High-Tech Fair, where much of the country’s newest technology gets put on display. A robot nicknamed “Little Tubby” is being blamed for getting out of control and smashing a glass display case and injuring a person who had to be taken to hospital on a stretcher.

A robot went out of control at a technology fair in southern China’s Guangdong province Thursday, smashing a glass window and injuring a visitor.... An employee at Shenzhen Spreadview Century told Sixth Tone by phone that the staffer tried to pick up the robot, but that Fabo’s weight — 25 kilograms — was too much to handle, and the operator accidentally pushed the wrong button. Fabo’s automatic mode was turned off, which meant it could not avoid collisions by itself, he said... . The company had visited the injured person in the hospital and had paid compensation, the statement added.

The device is said to be employed at the border and can be used from anything to detecting low-flying drones to targeting a vehicle from six miles away. Chief project engineer Dmitry Perminov said: "In its structure there is a radar unit that detects a target: human - to about 7km distance, the car - up to 10km. "After detection, the target is in engaged using an optical system." And he confirmed that interest in the robot has already been significant. Perminov added: "This system can be applied not only as a military interface , but also for the protection...

<p>Foxconn has deployed 40,000 robots in its factories in mainland China as it aims to reduce the number of workers at its plants creating digital devices.</p> <p>Dai Chia-peng, general manager of the automation technology development committee of Foxconn, said during an interview with local Chinese media that those robots are basically made by Foxconn itself, except for some parts like servo motors and reducers that come from other parties.</p>

Did robots help make your pizza? f you ordered it from Silicon Valley's Zume Pizza, the answer is yes. The startup, which began delivery in April, is using intelligent machines to grab a slice of the multibillion-dollar pizza delivery market. Zume is one of a growing number of food-tech firms seeking to disrupt the restaurant industry with software and robots. "We're going to eliminate boring, repetitive, dangerous jobs, and we're going to free up people to do things that are higher value," said co-founder Alex Garden, a former Microsoft manager and president of mobile game maker Zynga Studios.

More than 70 percent of manufacturing jobs and more than half of jobs involving data collection might be rendered obsolete by automation and robots, according to a report from McKinsey & Company. One study estimated up to 80 percent of current jobs may be threatened by automation, which could become a critical economic issue for policy makers and global leaders in the coming decades. While Americans celebrate Labor Day weekend, it is a good time to contemplate the rise in artificial intelligence and how it can threaten jobs in all types of industries....

Investors in Cambodia’s garment industry are increasingly purchasing modern equipment as they look to produce higher value-added products to compete in the international market and counter rising labour costs, an industry insider said yesterday. Ly Tek Heng, operation manager at the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia (GMAC), said rising factory worker wages were thinning margins on the production of low-value garments and footwear in the face of fierce global competition.

We are such an anxiety-ridden society that we worry about problems that haven't happened, and, almost certainly, won't. Robots are an apt example. Even McKinsey and Co., the high-powered management consulting firm, professes to be concerned. We imagine hordes of robots destroying jobs, leaving millions of middle-class families without work and income. Relax. Unless we adopt self-destructive policies, this is one doomsday we'll avoid. One thing that the U.S. economy excels at is creating jobs. You might doubt this listening to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who promise personally to create millions of high-paying jobs. This is misleading. The overwhelming...

The surreal fact in the human tragedy in Dallas is that the sniper who murdered five police officers was not killed by another officer, but by a mechanical robot. This conjures science fiction images of killer robots deployed against man. It's not altogether reassuring. Technically, of course, the actual killing officer was not the robot, but the man operating the robot. The human element was very much in play, detonating an explosive carried by the robot. Sci-fi buffs might draw disturbing analogies to movies such as "Robocop," the popular 1987 film set in a near-future dystopian world in which a...

It is the worst of times — well no, not really. This past week we had shootings of police and shootings by police. The world economy and political situation is a mess. It is a time of crisis — without an apparent Churchill, Thatcher or Reagan. Yet, in many ways, things have never been better. In 1930, 304 American police officers were killed in the line of duty; last year it was 122. In 1930, the U.S. population was a little over one third of what it is today, so, on a population adjusted basis, there were about seven times...