Labour Shortage is going to speed up the Robot and AI trend
The great takeover is now fully underway. it is an unstoppable trend which means that the days of carbon-based workers that fall in the mediocre category are limited. There are also millions of unnecessary jobs that robots will easily replace.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-labo ... 24355.htmlCiting data from the Association for Advancing Automation, Reuters pointed out that industrial firms rang up nearly $1.5 billion worth of robots (29,000 to be exact) — a whopping 37% more than the comparable period in 2020. Separately, Google Cloud research in June showed that two-thirds of manufacturers using artificial intelligence (AI) are relying more heavily on it.
The Morning Brief has ruminated about the impact of the labor shortage and its close blood relative, the Great Resignation. Connecting the seemingly disparate threads, it poses a burning question: Are workers reluctant to fill open jobs — or stay put in them, for that matter — sowing the seeds of humanity’s eventual demise in the labor force?
However irrational, the theme that human workers should fear the dawn of our robot overlords is hardly a novel one. Yet like everything else in the pandemic-era, the fallout from COVID-19 has poured accelerant on an already raging fire. With conditions worsening, we cannot help but wonder if workers are hastening the rise of automation in a way that displaces human labor — but in a more permanent way?
As the coronavirus pandemic enveloped the world last year, businesses increasingly turned to automation in order to address rapidly changing conditions. Floor-cleaning and microbe-zapping disinfecting robots were introduced in hospitals, supermarkets and other environments. Some enterprises found that, given the new emphasis on hygiene and social distancing, robotic operations offered a marketing advantage. The American fast food chain White Castle began using hamburger-cooking robots in an effort to create “an avenue for reduced human contact with food during the cooking process”.
All of this has created a powerful incentive for businesses to invest in automation as a way to adapt to the worker shortage. As British farms confront the absence of seasonal workers who once flooded in from eastern Europe, interest in agricultural robots is growing. The UK-based startup Small Robot Company, for example, has developed two robots capable of killing weeds in wheat fields while cutting down dramatically on the use of chemical pesticides. The first robot autonomously prowls a wheat field, and with precision and patience that no human could match analyses each individual wheat plant using several cameras, mapping the exact locations where weeds are beginning to encroach. Once this data has been collected, a second, somewhat frightening, five-armed robot follows, killing the weeds by administering a powerful electric shock.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ence-covid
Restaurants prep for long-term labor crunch by turning to robots to work the fryer, shuttle food to tables
At Inspire Brands’ Innovation Center in Atlanta, the Flippy robot is taking on a new challenge. The automated worker, made by Miso Robotics, first came onto the scene as a burger solution. Now, it’s frying wings for the first time.
The bots, known as Flippy 1 and 2, have been in development for nearly five years, taking on pilots at brands such as CaliBurger and White Castle. The wings iteration is being tested at Inspire’s Buffalo Wild Wings brand as a way to ramp up production and speed. The hope is to scale up its usage in 2022 and beyond.
“Our strategy and our vision for automation at Inspire is really not about the labor shortage, it is all about how we increase our capacity,” said Stephanie Sentell, SVP of restaurant operations and innovation at Inspire. “The automation that we are looking at will allow us to unlock that and provide faster food to our guests.”
But the labor shortage is unavoidable. The National Restaurant Association recently reported that 4 in 5 operators are understaffed. This includes 81% of full-service operators and 75% of limited-service operators. Robotics can help ease the staffing challenges and speed up operations.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/22/restaur ... bots-.html
Pandemic Wave of Automation May Be Bad News for Workers
When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse.
Gamers at Dave & Buster’s in Dallas who want pretzel dogs can order and pay from their phones — no need to flag down a waiter.
And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a voice-recognition algorithm.
An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring workers — at least at the wages that employers are used to paying — is providing new momentum for automation.
Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.
“Once a job is automated, it’s pretty hard to turn back,” said Casey Warman, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic.
The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of leverage, leading to higher pay, more generous benefits and other perks.
Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those gains. A working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United States but around the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/busi ... demic.html
