Will You Lose Your Job to a Robot?

By The Week

22 September 19

ver the next decade, automation and artificial intelligence could throw 54 million Americans out of work. Here's everything you need to know:

Why is automation a threat?

Rapid technological advances are enabling machines to perform a growing number of tasks traditionally done by humans. Law firms now use artificial intelligence (AI) — ­sophisticated computer programs that can learn from ­experience — to conduct contract analysis, hunt for client conflicts, and even craft litigation strategy. McDon­ald's is replacing drive-thru workers with order-taking AI, and cashiers with self-checkout kiosks. Walmart is automating truck unloading, while Cal­i­for­nia farms are employing robots to harvest lettuce. From 1990 to 2007, robots replaced about 670,000 U.S. jobs, mostly in manufacturing; every robot introduced into a local economy claimed 6.2 jobs. That trend will accelerate over the next decade, as advances in mobile technology, AI, data transfer, and computing speeds allow robots to act with greater independence. Oxford Uni­ver­sity researchers concluded in a major 2013 study that 47 percent of Amer­i­can jobs are at "high risk" of automation within two decades. McKin­sey Global In­sti­tute came to a similar conclusion in 2017, warning that by 2030 robots will have forced 16 million to 54 million ­Americans — as many as a third of U.S. ­workers — to retrain for a new job.

What jobs are most at risk?

Generally speaking, those involving repetitive physical tasks in predictable environments. For instance, some restaurants in China have already begun replacing servers with robots. The Palm Beach County Court recently began using four robots — Wally Bishop, Rosie Tobor, Kitt Robbie, and Speedy — to read court filings, fill out docket sheets, and input data into its case management system. In theory, at least 91 percent of a short-order cook's tasks can be automated using existing technology. It's 100 percent for a dredge operator, plasterer, stucco mason, motion picture projectionist, and logging equipment operator. Conversely, jobs that involve managing people, creative thinking, and social interaction will see less automation. But even the jobs you'd think are safe aren't. The Guardian Australia newspaper published its first article this year written entirely by a computer. The Indian e-­commerce site Myntra recently created one of its best-selling T-shirts by delegating the design to two algorithms that analyzed previous designs and invented new ones. Sales of AI-designed shirts are "growing at 100 percent," said Ananth Narayanan, Myntra's CEO. "It's working."

How will this affect the workforce?

History has shown that previous apocalyptic warnings about technology wiping out the need for human labor have proved untrue — although there is often a difficult transition period to new jobs requiring new skills. In the 19th century, farmers rendered obsolete by mechanized agriculture found their way to new, better-paying jobs in factories. When industrial automation in the 20th century threatened factory workers, many of the displaced transitioned to service work (often with lower salaries, however). "If history is any guide," McKinsey said in its study, "we could also expect that 8 to 9 percent of 2030 labor demand will be in new types of occupations that have not existed before."

So will the impact be modest?
Not necessarily. The futurist Martin Ford acknowledges the "long record of false alarms," but argues that this time is different. The pace of automation, he says, is no longer linear, but exponential, like the growth in computing capacity predicted by Moore's Law. The economy, Ford says, will not have time to create new professions to absorb the tens of millions of workers displaced by automation. By some estimates, Amer­i­ca is less than a decade away from autonomous ­vehicles — and yet 3.5 million Amer­i­cans still work as truck drivers. White-collar jobs are also at risk for the first time, Ford says. On Wall Street, the number of financial workers has already plunged by 50,000 since 2000, as computers can process 100,000 transactions in a tenth of a second. Radiologists may lose their job analyzing medical images. Displaced workers might find new jobs, but at much lower salaries.

How will this affect society?

Predictions vary, but there is a lot of grim prognostication about a "robot apocalypse." The Demo­cratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang warns of an automation "buzz saw" that will eliminate millions of jobs and lead to political polarization, "suicides, drug overdoses, anxiety, depression," as well as "derelict buildings," "jobless zones," and "a hyper­strat­i­fied society like something out of The Hunger Games." He, like tech titans Elon Musk and Mark Zuck­er­berg, believes it will be necessary for government to provide a universal basic income to each citizen. Meanwhile, there is some comfort to be had in the claim made late last year by a Forrester Research team that while 10 percent of American workers would lose their jobs to automation in 2019, artificial intelligence was "still at least 100 years away from sending all of humanity on a permanent vacation."

The last 'robot apocalypse'

Fear that automation would replace human workers has come in several waves in U.S. history. The most recent came during the 1950s, when World War II technologies were integrated into private industry and the computer chip was invented. Gen­eral Elec­tric ran an ad reminding people that robots replace ­"drudgery — not people," while IBM found office managers often too frightened to buy its computers out of fear the clever machines would eventually replace them too. "Computers," IBM assured them, "can only do what they are programmed to do." The Nation called automation "a ghost which frightens every worker in every plant," and the nonprofit Science Ser­vice complained, "With the advent of the thinking machine, people are beginning to understand how horses felt when Ford invented the Model T." In the end, Uni­ver­sity of Chi­ca­go economist Yale Brozen found that technology destroyed some 13 million jobs during the 1950s, but also created more than 20 million, as vast productivity growth led to the demand for more workers in aggregate — office personnel, engineers, maintenance staff — to keep pace with rising demand. "The catastrophe that doom criers constantly threaten us with," Brozen wrote, "has retreated into such a dim future that we simply cannot take their pronouncements seriously."

If This Isn't Impeachable, Nothing Is

By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic

22 September 19

The president reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against Joe Biden.

he president of the United States reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against an American citizen who might challenge him for his office. This is the single most important revelation in a scoop by The Wall Street Journal, and if it is true, then President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office immediately.

Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a Republican-controlled Senate.

Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation—a witch hunt, one might call it—of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.

As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the Daily Beast when asked about the president’s apparent requests, “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”

Clearly.

If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.

The story may even be worse than we know. If Trump tried to use military aid to Ukraine as leverage, as reporters are now investigating, then he held Ukrainian and American security hostage to his political vendettas. It means nothing to say that no such deal was reached; the important point is that Trump abused his position in the Oval Office.

In this matter, we need not rely on a newspaper account, nor even on the complaint, so far unseen, of a whistle-blower. Instead, we have a sweaty, panicked admission on national television by Trump’s bizarre homunculus, Rudy Giuliani, that he did in fact seek such an investigation on Trump’s behalf. Giuliani later again confirmed Trump’s role, tweeting that a “President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job.”

Let us try, as we always find ourselves doing in the age of Trump, to think about how Americans might react if this happened in any other administration. Imagine, for example, if Bill Clinton had called his friend, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, and asked him to investigate Bob Dole. Or if George W. Bush had called, say, President Vicente Fox of Mexico in 2004 and asked him—indeed, asked him eight times, according to The Wall Street Journal—to open a case against John Kerry. Clinton, of course, was eventually impeached for far less than that. Is there any doubt that either man would have been put on trial in the Senate, and likely chased from office?

The Republicans, predictably, have decided to choose their party over their country, and the damage control and lying have begun. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, for one, has already floated the reliable “deep-state attack” nonsense that will play well on Fox and other conservative outlets. And while Giuliani did Trump no favors with his incoherent ranting on CNN, he did manage to hammer away at the idea that Biden, and not Trump, tried to shake down the Ukrainians while he was vice president.

The problem for Giuliani, the Republicans, and the president himself, however, is that Biden and his actions are now irrelevant to the offenses committed by Trump. The accusations against Joe Biden are false, as we know from multiple fact checks and from the Ukrainians themselves (which is why I won’t deign to repeat them here). But even to argue over this fable about Biden is to miss the point, because it changes nothing about Trump’s attempts to enmesh Biden in a foreign investigation for Trump’s own purposes.

There is no spin, no deflection, no alternative theory of the case that can get around the central fact that President Trump reportedly attempted to use his office for his own gain, and that he put the foreign policy and the national security of the United States at risk while doing so. He ignored his duty as the commander in chief by intentionally trying to place an American citizen in jeopardy with a foreign government. He abandoned his obligations to the Constitution by elevating his own interests over the national interest. By comparison, Watergate was a complicated judgment call.

In a better time and in a better country, Republicans would now join with Democrats and press for Trump’s impeachment. This won’t happen, of course; even many of Biden’s competitors for the presidency seem to be keeping their distance from this mess, perhaps in the hope that Biden and Trump will engage in a kind of mutually assured political destruction. (Elizabeth Warren, for one, renewed her call for impeachment—but without mentioning Biden.) This is to their shame. The Democratic candidates should now unite around a call for an impeachment investigation, not for Biden’s sake, but to protect the sanctity of our elections from a predatory president who has made it clear he will stop at nothing to stay in the White House.

I am speaking only for myself as an American citizen. I believe in our Constitution, and therefore I must accept that Donald Trump is the president and the commander in chief until the Congress or the people of the United States say otherwise. But if this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their elected leaders to demand Trump’s removal, then we no longer have an accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional order in the United States.