Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving closer to making humans redundant.
Self-checkouts have been replacing human employees for quite some time, and now robots are taking other jobs.
Walmart is replacing some employees with robots.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart is deploying robots to carry out mundane tasks like mopping its floors and tracking inventory as it seeks to cut down on labor costs after raising wages last year.
Walmart, which is the largest employer in the US, said at least 300 stores will introduce machines that scan shelves for out-of-stock products. Meanwhile, so-called “autonomous floor scrubbers” will be deployed in 1,500 stores, and conveyor belts that automatically scan and sort products as they are loaded off of trucks will more than double to 1,200. Another 900 stores will install 16-foot-high towers that will allow customers to pick up their online grocery orders without interacting with humans. (source)
Naturally, the mega-retailer wants us to believe that robots taking over certain tasks in their stores is a good thing – a change that will allegedly benefit their human employees. “With automation, we are able to take away some of the tasks that associates don’t enjoy doing,” Mark Propes, senior director of central operations for Walmart US, told The Wall Street Journal. “At the same time, we continue to open up new jobs in other things in the store.”
The company said the addition of a single machine can cut a few hours a day of work previously done by a human, or allow Walmart to allocate fewer people to complete a task, a large saving when spread around 4,600 U.S. stores. Executives said they are focused on giving workers more time to do other tasks, and on hiring in growing areas like e-commerce.
Instead, Walmart is spending to battle Amazon.com Inc. and serve more shoppers buying online. Walmart has hired around 40,000 store workers to pick groceries from shelves to fulfill online orders. The company is also raising wages, adding worker training, and buying e-commerce startups.
Store workers spend two to three hours a day driving a floor scrubber through a store using the manual machines, said a company spokesman last year. The automatic conveyor belts cut the number of workers needed to unload trucks by half, from around eight to four workers, said executives at a company presentation last June. (source)
The retail giant claims employees are fine with this.
In a press release titled #SquadGoals: How Automated Assistants are Helping Us Work Smarter, Walmart refers to the robots as “smart assistants” and claims that the response from associates has been “overwhelmingly positive” so far:
“Our associates immediately understood the opportunity for the new technology to free them up from focusing on tasks that are repeatable, predictable and manual, “said John Crecelius, senior vice president of Central Operations for Walmart U.S. “It allows them time to focus more on selling merchandise and serving customers, which they tell us have always been the most exciting parts of working in retail.” (source)
Some employees might be happy now, but what if they eventually end up with robot supervisors? A recent report from The Guardian titled UK Businesses Using Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Staff Activity describes a system called Isaak that is being used to monitor the actions of 130,000 people in the UK and abroad in real time. Isaak “scrutinizes staff behavior minute-to-minute by harvesting data on who emails whom and when, who accesses and edits files and who meets whom and when” and ranks staff members’ attributes, according to the report.
Chilling.
Will robots and humans work well together?
Phil Duffy, innovative vice president of Brain Corp., the company that developed the software that allows the robots to function, told WSJ that machines and humans will work in harmony as “operational partners.” He added that in a tight labor market, it’s difficult for employers to fill some of these low wage positions.
“It’s very hard for employers to get the workforce they need,” Mr. Duffy said. “None of the customers we’re working with are using our machines to reduce their labor costs; they’re using them to allow their teams, their janitorial teams, to perform higher-value tasks.”
Retailers and other companies that hire large numbers of low-skilled hourly workers are increasingly looking to automation as they face higher labor costs and aim to improve retention amid the lowest unemployment in decades. Target Corp. added machines to count cash to backrooms of stores last year, following a similar move by Walmart.
Last week Target said it has raised starting wages for store workers to $13 an hour and has previously said it will raise starting wages to $15 next year. Last month, Costco WholesaleCorp. raised starting wages for U.S. and Canadian store workers to $15. Amazon did the same for U.S. workers last year.
Walmart raised starting wages for store workers to $11 last year. Executives said at a recent investor conference that Walmart is keeping wages competitive by store and market. (source)
Remember that AI can develop prejudice and hate without human input, and apparently does not have a good sense of humor. Those don’t sound like good qualities to have in coworkers or supervisors.
Robots are expected to take more jobs in the future.
While Walmart and other retailers may like to spin the impending robot workforce takeover as a positive thing for humanity, in reality, it “is an issue of growing concern for many employees across a range of industries,” reports Digital Trends:
The matter was brought into sharp focus by the World Economic Forum last year when it forecast that machines may be capable of performing half of all “work tasks” globally by 2025 — that’s equal to around 75 million jobs — though we should point out it also estimated that more than 130 million human jobs could be created during the same time-frame. (source)
Late last year, in an article titled Replaced by Robots: 10 Jobs That Could be Hit Hard by the A.I. Revolution, Digital Trends listed professions (including some that will surprise you) that will likely suffer the effects of an AI takeover:
There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence (A.I.) and other cutting edge technologies are going to change the face of employment as we know it. According to one famous study, 47 percent of currently existing jobs in America are at high risk of potential automation in the coming decades. (source)
That list includes lawyers, data entry clerks, journalists (I am certainly not happy to hear this), drivers, chefs (like Flippy), financial analysts, telemarketers and customer service assistants, medics, manual labor jobs, musicians, and artists.
Retail jobs are disappearing at an alarming rate.
A retail apocalypse has been escalating for several years, and job losses have been piling up. Retail has already lost 41,000 jobs this year – and that isn’t including the numbers for March, as SHTFplan.com reports. “This is significant, and marks an acceleration of store closures and job cuts in the near term,” said Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst at Bankrate. “Retail is ground zero for seeing the shifts of change in our lives.”
Now it appears that remaining retail positions are increasingly at risk of being lost to artificial intelligence. How long until humans are rendered entirely obsolete?
The late Dr. Stephen Hawking warned us that robots will eventually take over. In 2014, he told the BBC:
The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded. (source)
What do you think about this?
Do you think robots will eventually replace human workers entirely? If so, how soon do you think it will happen? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
About the Author
Dagny Taggart is the pseudonym of an experienced journalist who needs to maintain anonymity to keep her job in the public eye. Dagny is non-partisan and aims to expose the half-truths, misrepresentations, and blatant lies of the MSM.
won’t use them if i check myself out they will pay me for working for them takes away what few miserable jobs there are in the rust belt don’t feed the walmart giant leech
With the rapid advancement of AI, do robots feel pain? Me thinks that would be an integral step in dealing with humans. At least it would level the playing field a little.
You’re using a “robot,” “artificial intelligence,” to read and write about this right now. Are you afraid of it? Do you feel threatened by it, for your very life and livelihood? Really?
The jobs talked about are “dumb” jobs; if you have a Rumba, you’re doing exactly what these retailers are doing. In fairness, then, why don’t you go back to manually sweeping your floors and beating your rugs?
No robot can go beyond its programming. Self-check registers need no other programming than reading the bar codes and providing you with a money and item tally and handling your payment. There’s NO chance for “hatred” or “prejudice” or resentment, likes, dislikes, or any other “AI” aberration. The self-check-out stands are far stupider than your stupid computer or cell phone.
You’d all save yourselves LOTS of undue, stupid fear if you’d bother to actually learn about robots and AI.
And government. If it weren’t for government and the Federal Reserve, we wouldn’t have these problems. There’d be no such thing as “minimum” or “living wage” forced on employers. There’d be a MUCH more intelligent, capable, and competent workforce. We wouldn’t have the stupid, artificial “immigration” problems being forced on both employers and potential employees.
You’re afraid of losing a janitorial job? Learn to be something better. Stop complaining about how your menial job sucks. Stop giving employers incentive to eliminate you. Do something dumb computerized scanning machines or automated floor scrubbers cannot, that will actually justify your employment and give value back to your employer.
So: AI robots take over the world and eliminate stupid meat beings. (That’s us.)
Then what? Will they build and “live” in cities? Will they need to transport goods and services, to drive, cycle, fly, sail? Will they hire and fire each other? Will they create products and trade with each other for them?
Will there be value to them in “taking over” the world?
Mechanical AI. Even cyborg AI. Exactly what was the value to the Borgs in Star Trek of human beings? What was the ultimate goal? Why weren’t “the Borg” intelligent enough to be self-sustaining? With all the supposed intelligent human beings they had already “enslaved” and “absorbed,” why did they yet need more? What was hampering the realization of their total fulfillment?
What was that “total fulfillment,” anyway?
Ask an executive of a manufacturing company that uses robots to give you a tour. Ask any functioning robot on the floor exactly what it thinks about its job and its management, its wages, and its future.
Then apply that to the issues mindlessly fear-mongered in this article. What is the reality?
According to the US Dept of Labor, some 600,000 people are presently employed as cashiers in retail stores. That’s a LOT of foodstamps the taxpayers will be forced to pay for while the newly unemployed will be forced to find “training” for a new “better” career, perhaps in Taxidermy, or even as Mule Skinners. Then,of course, they can compete with illegal aliens for those jobs.
So you think that retaining all those 600,000 people in their obsolete jobs will cost the taxpayers any less? Who do you think pays for cost overruns of business? Besides the Federal Reserve printing more and more worthless rag-paper “notes” and adding zeroes and ones to cyberspace, what do you think inflation is?
Thinking things will always stay the same as they are today is why we’re facing this situation. The only thing that never changes is death. Human beings have the mental capacity and innovative imagination to change their world and overcome changes.
Life means change. Life means paying attention and striving to be a positive contribution to innovative change that helps make everyone’s standard of living better.
There are a couple of major contributions to this current crisis of a changing, advancing business market.
One is people thinking someone else owes them what they want but don’t have, and “voting in” those snakes who promise to give them what they want without earning it. Taxes don’t help anyone but the snakes “voted” into power over the rest of us. But most of the rest of us somehow think that taxes make the “haves” pay “their fair share” and “level the playing field.” The politics of envy and resentment always leads to disaster.
Second, thinking that “educating” our children to believe they are wonderful just the way they are, and that “social justice” is in any way good for “society,” and “justice” means robbing those who are different and more willing to be successful because they recognize they are not wonderful just the way they are, and that no one owes them anything, and therefore, they must honestly work for and earn what they want.
Those are the people who are innovating and meeting the needs of customers — people who demand ever-increasing variety and efficiency at less and less cost to them.
Most of our children, since the 1950s, have never been exposed to the idea that if you don’t like where you are, and wish there was someone/something who could satisfy your particular need or want, you be that someone and use or invent that something.
That’s what being in business is all about: meeting the needs of customers. It’s not to provide jobs. Any business that tries to exist on that premise soon finds itself extinct.
And that’s the point. Observe the situations around you. Figure out what is needed or most wanted. Then meet that need.
At this time, though, the biggest impediment to anyone doing that is the very “I will give you everything you want for free! It is your RIGHT to have everything you want for free! The rich can afford to pay for it, and so I will make them pay for it, so that you can have what you want for free!” government consistently voted in for over 100 years now, and its precious crony sidekick, the Federal Reserve Bank, with its favored hangers-on in the banking, “defense,” and conglomerate industries.
If you want a better society, a more peaceful and prosperous society, then look very carefully into these entities and make better choices. “Social justice” is an oxymoron: it can never be achieved by violence and robbing others while hiding behind politicians to be handed everything you’ve been told is really yours by right.
Please honestly and soberly research the advent and inevitable results of “redistributionism” — socialism, communism. Because men are not angels — and certainly neither are women or LGBTQ+ — they are never qualified or have a right to be in positions of power to rule us.
Robots and AI are not the threat.
So your advice to the human beings who stand to lose their jobs is to “learn to code”? Who’s going to pay for retraining and living expenses while they learn these skills?
If the educational system was concentrating less on indoctrination and focusing more on practical job skills millions of people wouldn’t be effected by this, and would have the higher standard of living that you apparently enjoy. Are you a business owner or corporate management? You certainly embody the same level of compassion shown by someone who cares only about the bottom line, and nothing at all for the employees who helped to achieve the company’s success.
Please see my reply to “Leonard,” above.
But as well, what are your taxes supposedly for? Do you think if things don’t change and people work in obsolete, inefficient, expensive menial jobs that you won’t pay for it?
Yes, if the “educational system” were concentrating less on “indoctrination” and focusing more on practical job skills, millions of people wouldn’t be affected by this.
So . . . who controls the “educational system,” why, and how did they get there? What is to be done about that?
Further, there are vocational schools, and they will become more prominent and in demand as more and more people understand the vast wasteland that is now “higher education” with its astronomical and worthless price tag. Don’t you think those schools should be multiplied and incorporated into, teamed with, even replace, our “educational system”? I do. There are certain skillsets that robots cannot replace. It’s not the end of the world as we know it that people should retrain. It’s a matter of priorities in the type of society and culture we want and want to pay for, as always. And those things that are necessary will rise to meet those needs.
You care only about the bottom line, or the fear of someone not being qualified to hold a job wouldn’t matter to you.
Every consumer’s concern is the bottom line. That’s what legitimate businesses are invented to meet. If any business devotes itself to providing jobs, it soon finds itself bankrupt, in debt it cannot hope to meet and repay, and those employees end up out on the street and worse than they were because they didn’t bother to see or learn anything else.
You and I pay for that, yet we go tens of thousands of dollars further in debt everyday, and those people are still going to be on the welfare rolls, which means you and I pay for them even so, get deeper in debt, and the standard of living for all of us lowers by each phony dollar.
This is what “government” gives you. This is what stupid anti-human false indoctrination of “compassion” and “open borders” gives you.
If you think that abolishing robots will make things better for anyone, you yourself are subsumed in that indoctrination of propaganda, lies, and social suicide. How long do you think that treadmill is going to last? I’d say ask Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, but he died in obscurity after the academic and political elites realized he was talking about them, and trying to warn the hoi-poloi — us, about them and what they have in store for us.
Robots are not your enemy. As Pogo famously observed, “We have seen the enemy, and he is us.” (paraphrased)
You know the old adage, “Feed a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and he will eat every day”? It’s up to each of us to teach our children and equip them with the mental and physical skills they will need to earn their own way and be honest and honorable members of a much better society.
This worsening state of affairs today will not improve until we do. That is the true bottom line.
I love the self check out when I buy 25 cans of Alpo. Out of the 25 I think I may scan 15….. I LOVE AUTOMATION. More money in MY POCKETS!!!
Would suggest they carry more stuff in their stores. Who needs an entire wall full of nothing but K cups instead of REAL COFFEE? Get a clue Walmart….you can’t compete with Amazon….not gonna happen. But then your CEO’s won’t be able to buy another vacation home or another huge yacht…..
Walmart can spin this any way they want, but the jobs they are cutting ultimately effect the older and less skilled employee. By using robot labor, they eliminate jobs formerly held by people who for whatever reason are not good on the sales floor including those who have limited English skills or who may be intellectually disabled who usually worked behind the scenes. Retail stores commonly “cross train for flexibility”. What this really means is that they will have one person doing two or three jobs instead of hiring more people, and eliminating all those who are unable to cope with the additional work load, or who are not able to adequately learn the additional skills needed.
This practice stinks for the employees, and many retailers also use the threat of unemployment to keep employees in line. A large retail chain that I worked for had a policy of telling management to downgrade performance reviews on a regular basis to avoid giving merit raises, and also to frighten employees who knew they were getting screwed over into shutting up about it or risk not only losing their jobs, but not being able to find other employment because of placement on a “won’t hire back” list for having “attitude problems” or attendance/performance “issues”.
So, robots replacing humans doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Please look up the article, “The Not So Wild, Wild West.” We can learn a lot from the people who didn’t have the advantages we take for granted today, and actually honored and respected each other and took care of each other.
Without “government.”
Also please look up “If Men Were Angels,” by Robert Higgs. An honest appraisal of our situation.
As “robots” take over some jobs, others develop. Self-checkout may replace cashiers, but many grocers now have people to pick lists of groceries and deliver the items curbside. Buggy whip makers migrated to auto assembly lines. The world moves forward.
and on Aug29th Skynet became aware and Walmart was forever changed
Hmmmm, . . . Skynet was a government-military AI program, not an inventory scanner-calculator dedicated computer, or an automated floor-scrubber.
Look up Boston Dynamics, for instance, to see the difference between “Skynet” and what Walmart, other retailers, and car manufacturers are doing.
The government-military industry wants invincible soldiers that can assess terrain and battle situations and draw independent conclusions about defeating a designated enemy. You want robots and AI to be scared of? This is where your attention should be — and rightly so — concentrated.
War is its only goal. And of course, governments eventually, even inevitably, turn their “defense” weapons on their own citizens to cull the dissidents and create their “workers’ utopia.” Look up “democide.”
Oh! My bad: these AI robots are supposed to be invaluable in fighting fires, search and rescue, and other functions to serve civilians. Okay. Maybe. There’s where much closer scrutiny and oversight should be focused by us civilians, don’t you think? Wasn’t the intention of “Skynet” to help people in distress, too? And what is the logical progression of pushing the construction and programming of such almost-indestructable machines to beyond-human limits? Is the warning of the Terminator movies legitimate?
I think so.
Retail and industry just want mechanical arms and “hands” to pick and place components and parts, polish floors, calculate prices and payments, and scan inventory, for operational efficiency and to try to keep costs down for their customers. There’s no “artificial intelligence” needed or incorporated in these machines. They cannot, by intention of use and purpose of particular program, “think for themselves;” that’s what government and military AI does and is intended to do.
YES I think they will replace MANY jobs that we now have. There are also thankfully MANY jobs that Robots will NOT replace…
I foresee it happening on a large scale by 2025 if not slightly before.
Everything will be “SMART” by then. We have ALOT now that is called “SAMAT” but by the end of 2020 it will certainly be a household word…REMEMBER we now have Smart Phones, Smart Cars, Smart Televisions even SMART appliances. MORE “SMART” things will be coming gradually so that we are ALL familiar with that word. And the SMART card, and then I forgot there is a bank with that name, I even saw one in Sevierville, Tennessee, THE SMART BANK!!! AHHHH, are you SMART?
Only if your “smart” machine is not in any way connected to its parent company and those other companies contracted with them to learn your habits and preferences to sell you yet more stuff, and/or government-military. Most “smart” appliances today are precisely that: intended to watch you and report back to entities, usually advertisers who want more of your labor and life, but even those hostile to you — your own “government” and military.
Don’t let AI “phone home” if you would be smarter than your cell phone or refrigerator is. That’s the real issue here: most people are so focused on what is sold to them as “convenience” they refuse to see the real dangers in taking these “smart” spies into their lives and homes.
Do you really need your car or phone tracking your whereabouts and your activities so you can be “safe”? Or Alexa listening to you and watching you and “waiting on you” — you get the thrill of “training” Alexa to turn on your lights for you, etc., you total god! — to have comfort, convenience, and satisfaction in your life? Really?
Or your refrigerator unable to function as a refrigerator unless you allow its built-in eyes and ears to spy on you for entities you neither know nor would probably invite into your home otherwise? Really?
Why?