For Lower-Paid Workers, the Robot Overlords Have Arrived

Morning Star

It's time to stop worrying that robots will take our jobs -- and start worrying that they will decide who gets jobs.

Millions of low-paid workers' lives are increasingly governed by software and algorithms. This was starkly illustrated by a report last week that Amazon.com tracks the productivity of its employees and regularly fires those who underperform, with almost no human intervention."

 

Amazon's system tracks the rates of each individual associate's productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors," a law firm representing Amazon said in a letter to the National Labor Relations Board, as first reported by technology news site The Verge. Amazon was responding to a complaint that it had fired an employee from a Baltimore fulfillment center for federally protected activity, which could include union organizing. Amazon said the employee was fired for failing to meet productivity targets. 

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before software started firing people. After all, it already screens resumes, recommends job applicants, schedules shifts and assigns projects. In the workplace, "sophisticated technology to track worker productivity on a minute-by-minute or even second-by-second basis is incredibly pervasive," says Ian Larkin, a business professor at the University of California at Los Angeles specializing in human resources.

Industrial laundry services track how many seconds it takes to press a laundered shirt; on-board computers track truckers' speed, gear changes and engine revolutions per minute; and checkout terminals at major discount retailers report if the cashier is scanning items quickly enough to meet a preset goal. In all these cases, results are shared in real time with the employee, and used to determine who is terminated, says Mr. Larkin.

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Futurist Predicts AI Will Take Jobs, Benefiting the Rich But Not Workers

slashdot

Citing "significant" new corporate investments in AI technology, futurist Gary Grossman argues that AI "may be the fastest paradigm shift in the history of technology -- and warns there's a counter-argument to the theory that AI will create as many jobs as its displaces. "The other view is that this time is different, that we are not just automating labor but also cognition and many fewer people will be needed by industry.

"KPMG claims more than half of business executives plan to implement some form of AI within the next 12 months... The disruption is already beginning, with fully 75% of the organizations KPMG surveyed expecting intelligent automation to significantly impact 10 to 50% of their employees in the next two years. A Citigroup executive told Bloomberg that better AI could reduce headcount at the bank by 30%. In the face of all this change, many companies publicly state that AI will eliminate some dull and repetitive jobs and make it possible for people to do higher-order work. However, as a prominent venture capitalist relayed to me recently on this topic: "most displaced call center workers don't become Java programmers." It is not only low-skilled jobs that are at risk. Gartner analysts recently reported that AI will eliminate 80% of project management tasks....

A New York Times article noted that while many company executives pay public lip service to "human-centered AI" and the need to provide a safety net for those who lose their jobs, they privately talk about racing to automate their workforces "to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers." The article also cites a Deloitte survey from 2017 that found 53% of companies had already started to use machines to perform tasks previously done by humans. The figure is expected to climb to 72% by next year.... The net of this dynamic is that workers are not a major factor in the economic calculus of the business drive to adopt AI, despite so many public statements to the contrary.

So perhaps it's not a surprise when the Edelman 2019 AI survey shows a widely held view that AI will lead to short-term job losses with the potential for societal disruption and that AI will benefit the rich and hurt the poor.
He also shares a sobering quote from historian, philosopher, and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari on why Silicon Valley supports Universal Basic Incomes.

"The message is: 'We don't need you. But we are nice, so we'll take care of you.'"

The Delusional Futurism Of “Liberal World Order” Academics

Brandon Smith

Perhaps this is an overly broad generalization, but I feel there is an almost universal feeling among the public that there is something intrinsically annoying about academia. The source of this annoyance is up for debate, but I believe it stems from the image academics project versus the reality of their personal character and intent. Your average university approved academic will say that some people find them distasteful because they are “so smart”, and this makes others envious. I would say it’s the opposite – the average academic is actually quite ignorant, but brandishes a false image of being a genius. This is why I often refer to them as “academic idiots”.

Fake intelligence and faux wisdom are like sandpaper to people’s exposed nerves, and the average person is not as dumb as academics think they are.

At the top of the fraudulent academic totem pole are what I would call the “academic philosophers”; the gatekeepers, the people who pontificate regularly on the meaning of life and society while living the most charmed life one can imagine. These are people who in most cases come from upper class backgrounds. They have been provided for every waking moment of their existence. They have had every door opened for them by someone else on the path to success, and have experienced little to no struggle or suffering in the whole of their time on this Earth. And yet, they somehow deem themselves expertly qualified to comment on the human condition.

It should come as no surprise that the ideas these academics develop tend to deny concrete reality. They seek to pursue agendas that are fanciful at best and would be ultimately destructive if ever applied in the real world.

I find this to be common with many philosophers, not just today but throughout history. The venerated Plato was such a person; the youngest son of wealthy aristocratic parents who was required to do very little in early life but ponder. The trials surrounding his friend Socrates aside, Plato never abandoned the notion of elitist rule over society. Plato’s Republic is a shrine to the elitist model, imagining a world governed essentially by academics – People born with superior intellectual abilities and who were destined to rule over the rest of us as benevolent demigods.

It’s a funny coincidence that supposedly objective elitist academics always come to the conclusion that THEY are the best equipped people to manage society.

The academic cabal is not entirely naive, however. They have realized over time that their sales pitch of an intellectual priest class and Utopian pyramid schemes are not very effective, and they have opted to switch narratives. The new narrative is one of inevitability; the inevitability of socialism, the inevitability of globalism and the inevitability of algorithmic automation.

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Is The World Becoming Wealthier Or Poorer?

Charles Hugh-Smith
OfTwoMinds blog

At the request of colleague/author Douglas Rushkoff (his latest book is Team Human), I'm publishing last week's Musings Report, which was distributed only to subscribers and patrons of the site.)

The core assumption of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and other plans to redistribute wealth and income more broadly is that the world is becoming wealthier, and so the pool of income and wealth that can be taxed is always expanding.

This pool of available wealth and income is so vast, we're assured, that taxing the super-wealthy will not really dent their wealth or the economy as a whole.

But what if the world is rapidly becoming poorer in every important sense?

What if the decline in the standard of living of the bottom 90% of households that I've often addressed is not simply the result of the top 10% taking a greater share of the output (gains), but of the entire pie shrinking?

I believe the steady decline of the purchasing power of labor--the source of most households' income--is not just the result of way income is distributed, but of a steadily diminishing pool of real-world wealth.

We must start any discussion of total wealth/income by asking: what are we measuring with currencies such as dollars? What's not being measured?

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Guardian Warns Automation May Lead To Class Warfare And Genocide

SHTFPlan.com
 
Recently the establishment mouthpiece known as The Guardian, posted an article that tells you a lot about what the elites want. Specifically, how the elites want to control us with automation. The article discusses Bill Gates’ recent idea to tax robots as a way to mitigate the possibility that automation will cause more income inequality.

What’s particularly interesting about this article, is the nightmarish future that it predicts. If automation eventually eliminates all of our jobs; and with it, the political power and wealth of the common man, how will the elites respond? By separating themselves from the rest of society in private fortified communities, and then exterminating us when we grow resentful.

If that scenario isn’t bleak enough, consider the possibility that mass automation could lead not only to the impoverishment of working people, but to their annihilation. In his book Four Futures, Peter Frase speculates that the economically redundant hordes outside the gates would only be tolerated for so long. After all, they might get restless – and that’s a lot of possible pitchforks.

“What happens if the masses are dangerous but are no longer a working class, and hence of no value to the rulers?” Frase writes. “Someone will eventually get the idea that it would be better to get rid of them.” He gives this future an appropriately frightening name: “exterminism”, a world defined by the “genocidal war of the rich against the poor”.

To be fair, I don’t doubt that this is something that the elites want (and by elite, I don’t mean the 1%. More like the .00001 percent), or at least see as unfortunate and inevitable. The real propaganda in this article is the solution that is offered to this problem.

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