Tag Archives: automation

Robotics & Learning

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EXESKELETONS AND TEACHING ROBOTS

October 21, 2020 By Joseph P. Farrell

This story was spotted by M.G. who passed it along, with our thanks. It’s one of those stories that may not seem all that significant, until one connects a few dots, and connects a few technologies not referred to in the article. So without further ado, the article:

Note what’s going on here:

Wearable technology takes on a different meaning in the world of automobiles. As employees get older and younger and avoid the idea of ​​working on a factory production line, auto companies are looking for ways to lighten the load.

High tech exoskeletons are being studied by companies like Hyundai Motor Co., Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. The technology originally developed to help people who can no longer walk or stand alone, relieves fatigue and prevents injuries. It’s especially useful for repetitive processes that can’t be automated, even when robotics is making great strides in the industry.

All types of businesses have an “emphasis on corporate social responsibility and occupational safety” and strive to prevent workplace injuries, said Xu Zhenhua, founder of ULS Robotics, a Shanghai-based company that provides exoskeletons to automakers, airport operators, and other industrial manufacturers.

ULS Robotics is developing three exoskeletons that workers can wear to hold and lift heavy equipment. One is for the upper body, another goes around the waist, and the third focuses on the lower limbs. The first two weigh about seven kilograms each and allow the wearer to lift another 20 kilograms. They are powered by a lithium battery with a lifespan of around six to eight hours. (Emphasis added)

Many people have blogged about the rise of robotics, including this author, and more importantly, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts, who has offered the hypothesis that moves are afoot to robotize everything, including to the extent to make robots “legal persons” for taxation purposes.

With that in mind, I want to focus on this line in the above quotation: “It’s especially useful for repetitive processes that can’t be automated, even when robotics is making great strides in the industry.” It’s that line that forms the core of today’s high octane speculation. Suppose for a moment that you had some manufacturing process that could not be automated, and you needed to learn how to automate it. Solution? Have the humans wear exoskeletons with computer memory that recorded every step of the manufacturing process, including such things as retrieving needed supplies for certain steps, or deciding when one process needed to be suspended in order to work on another. Over time, a database is accumulated allowing one to dispense with the exoskeleton – and the human worker wearing it – and replace it, and him or her, with a robot.

And with that possibility, we’re in Isaac Asimov Foundation trilogy territory, as more and more is robotized and run by technocrats behind computer screens, until the inevitable breakdowns occur, and no one remembers how to actually make things…

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/10/exeskeletons-and-teaching-robots/

Boycotting Self-Checkouts

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People Are Refusing To Use Self-Checkout Because It Will “Kill Jobs”

Do you envision a future filled with nanotechnology, robots, and faster, smarter computers?

Dreams for this type of future may be slowed to a halt, as groups of concerned citizens resist the increasingly present self-checkout. Fear of economic downturn and job loss ward off shoppers from using such automated tellers.

Canadians Proudly Resist Self-Checkout

Canadians Proudly Resist Self Checkout

A Canadian university, sharing results from a national grocery shopping study, was the first to raise the red flag on mounting consumer worries of the rapidly multiplying self-checkout kiosks.

Of Canadians surveyed in the study, more than 1/4 said they had never used the self-checkout stall, not even for a small purchase at the grocery store. Their motivations for avoiding the machines?

The primary mission of these Canadians is to save cashier jobs.

One northern shopper, Dan Morris, told CBC, “They’re trying to basically herd everyone in, get everyone used to the self-checkouts to continuously cut down on staff”.

Some Canadians have taken additional action against the self-checkouts, starting petitions and sharing memes on social media, to get the word out: “never use a self-checkout – they kill jobs.” (1)

Shopping In America

Federal data shows that store cashier is the second most common job in the U.S., employing about 3.5 million Americans. (2)

Despite the significant number of cashiers nationwide, it is surprisingly not all doom and gloom in the U.S. on the self-checkout front.

In fact, the self-checkout concept is spreading and growing at a rapid pace. Sure there have been setbacks, as seen with Wal-mart’s Scan & Go services, but Stores like Sam’s Club and Amazon Go have already presented a working model for completely cashier-less stores.

A few Americans dislike the prospect of job downturn due to automation, but it has not been as pronounced as in Canada or stopped the momentum of the movement. (3)

Shoppers seem to enjoy the experience at these automated stores, marveling at the technology, and they still see a few humans during their visit. For example, cashier-less stores employee ‘Hosts’ who offer in-store assistance to shoppers and software developers.

Overall, embracing technology can reduce your time needed to shop and still bring you in contact with dedicated employees who will meet your customer service needs. (1, 4)

Fighting Automation – An Uphill Battle?

The grocery store is not the only place of business modernizing and automating redundant jobs with machines.

Roles like the bank teller and payroll clerk, as per the World Economic Forum, are “expected to become increasingly redundant” over the next four years.

Are the many people staving off self-checkouts fighting ATM use too? (5)

Ultimately, increasing competition with online stores and mounting labor costs (increasing minimum wage) challenge the financial success of nearly all brick-and-mortar stores.

Automatic tellers could keep the doors open longer, and among more grocery businesses in small cities across America, who already work on thin profit margins.

As evidenced by other technological advances of the past, there is a strong reason to believe that more jobs will be created in the same or other sectors as automation increases.

Ultimately, no machine can replace the services provided by one human for another. (1)

By Crystal Phyllis Mcleod, Guest writer

from:   https://humansarefree.com/2020/01/people-are-refusing-to-use-self-checkout-because-it-will-kill-jobs.html

What’s Going on?

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As Always – Do your research, The Decide for yourself:

Mark Zuckerberg is running the Bucky Fuller agenda

by Jon Rappoport

 

“Every time somebody comes up with a universal plan to improve the world, you have to ask yourself this burning question: who will impose the plan? And then you have ask: what are the imposers’ true motives? And you have to remember what a Trojan Horse is.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Over a period of 50 years, Buckminster Fuller explained his plan for making a better world. He talked about the coming wave of automation that would throw gigantic numbers of people out of work. He talked about the need for a universal system of support, whereby everyone on the planet would be guaranteed, from birth, the essentials of survival: food, clothing, shelter, and limitless free education.

Read this statement by Fuller:

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

Obviously, Fuller’s plan carries great appeal for many young people, for whom the idea of earning a living is a full-bore horror movie.

Fuller also believed that freeing up the young to “think about new solutions” for humanity and come up with new technology would justify his plan.

Compare Fuller’s agenda with Mark Zuckerberg’s. The Facebook founder recently gave a commencement address at Harvard. Read his words carefully:

“…today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs…Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together.”

“Every generation expands its definition of equality. Previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society. Now it’s our time to define a new social contract for our generation.”

“We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things… And as technology keeps changing, we need to focus more on continuous education throughout our lives.”

By direct statement and implication, Zuckerberg is echoing Bucky Fuller. The threat of automation. Massive unemployment. Guarantee the means of survival for every person. Free education for life. Come up with new ideas that contribute to the progress of the human species.

But as with Fuller, the thorny question about who is going to put this new universal plan into action is sidestepped. It appears the answer is: “the government.”

The most incompetent, bloated, corrupt, conniving force on the planet is in charge.

Doesn’t that fill you with confidence?

There is more. Who, behind the scenes, influences and controls government decisions and policies? A few groups come to mind: Bilderberg; Council on Foreign Relations; Trilateral Commission; United Nations. Fill in others yourself.

These are people we can trust?

And then there is this: what is the overall effect of gifting everyone on the planet with the basics of survival? On balance, does it produce visionaries and determined entrepreneurs? Or does it produce massive numbers of Welfare dependents, who drift in a sluggish space and want, at most, periodic stimulations of adrenaline to relieve their interminable boredom? Do they seek out endless free education, or do they ingest various drugs and sit glued to screens—and occasionally take to the streets to demand MORE?

Are fervent Globalist, Leftist, technocratic academics prepared to offer an honest assessment of the effects of a few billion people living on universal Welfare?

It’s quite convenient that “utopian” thinkers like Bucky Fuller and Mark Zuckerberg avoid these questions.

It’s not a stretch to infer that Zuckerberg views his brainchild, Facebook, as a means to expand the Surveillance State to new dimensions, because a few billion people living on Welfare are a potentially volatile demographic and “need to be watched.”

Is this liberation? It’s about population-pacification, passivity, endless “entertainment,” lowest common denominator, mind control, creating “voting blocs”; and yes, elimination of all borders, and a global superstructure of management for planet Earth. It’s about smaller living spaces, assigned from above, overcrowding in cities, and governments taking over more and more public lands…

This is the reality behind the utopia.

As usual, the devil is in the details. It’s easy to envision whole generations of empowered visionaries finding new solutions for the planet. But on even a cursory examination, the whole plan sinks into a morass of grotesque consequences.

If you’re up for it, try researching this question: How many government programs, and how much funding, is devoted, in all countries of the world, to authentically stimulating the freedom and power and creativity and independence of The Individual?

A related question: How many college courses around the world teach The Freedom and Power and Creativity and Independence of The Individual?

Answering these questions will give you some idea of governments’ “genuine caring” for individual innovation.

Good hunting.

Zuckerberg is Bucky Fuller 2.0. Unlike Fuller, he has billions in the bank. He has allies in the Deep State. He has the means to push the Fuller agenda.

From the top down.

And as usual, that’s where all the trouble starts. “Here, all you people, this is what you want. This plan will make life easier for you. Don’t you want things to be easier? We will make it happen. It’s our gift.”

The gift sounds appealing. It looks appealing.

Roughly 3200 years ago, after Greek forces failed to penetrate the gated city of Troy during a decade of war, they abandoned the field in apparent defeat. They left behind a giant wooden horse. The Trojans took the beautiful and appealing statue as a trophy and brought it into the city. At night, under cover, a door opened in the horse, Greek soldiers slipped out, opened the gates of Troy, and the rest of the Greek force, which hadn’t really retreated, flooded in.

The gift that wasn’t a gift.

“Oh look, that’s a wonderful idea to make a better future. I’ll take it in. I’ll believe in it…”

The gates of a city; the gates of a mind.

from:    https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/06/02/mark-zuckerberg-is-running-the-bucky-fuller-agenda/