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5/8/17: MEET THE NEW BOT BOSS W/ J.P. SOTTILE

Ron Patton | May 8, 2017

MEET THE NEW BOT BOSS

MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

This last Sunday, I was at the Global Chemtrail Summit and it was so amazing to see people who traveled to Portland just to attend the meeting and to meet me. It was amazing to not that people from as far away as Iceland and Calgary, Alberta, Canada attended. I often enjoy attending conferences and talking to fans of my show.

The most wonderful thing about any conference whether it is a chemtrail summit or a UFO conference, I realize that minds are like fingerprints there are no two that are actually alike.

Dialogue is very intense and interesting and though you may differ in opinion, there is an agreement that something needs to be revealed, some nugget of truth – some smoking gun – something that would take to task vicious skeptics who somehow find a way to put their smug “fake” label on everything that contorts their normalcy bias.

To them, it is all just conspiracy theory, which also is the skeptic’s idea of making whatever oddity in our world not worth the time of investigating.

Those who think “conspiracy theories” never contain anything but paranoid fantasy should remember that our government itself and all advanced governments believe in conspiracies and have laws against them.

Nobody can totally refute any truly crazy conspiracy theory, because all such theories have a strange loop in their construction, and thus any evidence against them also functions as evidence to support them, if you want to look at it that way.

As comedian George Carlin once said: They (the government) have made it so that you should not even entertain for a minute that powerful people might get together and a have plan, but of course, we see that these theories or even the reality that they eventually reveal often lead to logical conclusions that seem bizarre to outsiders.

I was reading over the weekend a story that posited the idea that an Artificial Intelligence take over is now being called a new “Luddite Conspiracy.”

The term, Luddite is an old word taken from the textile industries of the 19th century.

That’s when the first generation of workers had the experience of being suddenly thrown out of their jobs by automation. But rather than accept it, they fought back calling themselves, “Luddites,” and staging an audacious attack against the machines.

If the new Luddite is a theory prone paranoid person worried about losing his or her job to a machine, then maybe we should use the old phrase, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you.”

Just today, Bloomberg News, and Forbes magazine, have finally sounded the alarm about the robot take over and in Truthout.org, J.P. Sottile; a regular on Ground Zero published his views on the robot economy.

In August of 2016, I lamented that the issues that were debated by the candidates were old and tired 20th century push button issues and that I wondered why these so-called leaders would not address a possible robot war within 8 to 10 years.

By October of 2016, police had used a robot to kill the Dallas sniper who fatally shot five Dallas police officers. This is the first use of a robotic system by the police in a deliberately lethal manner.

Robots are used all the time by police bomb squad’s forces around the world in bomb disposals. They are also frequently used in surveillance roles by SWAT teams and the like. They have been used in standoffs with armed gunmen in a variety of examples, from helping to figure out where the gunman is hiding to delivering pizza to the gunman and hostages during negotiations when a person wasn’t allowed in. But none of these involved delivering lethal force.

The military had also unveiled their Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System which once again creates the fear that modern technological advancements will be somehow factored into killing people, from the military to police agencies.

When these robot killers aren’t killing people, there will be others that will be replacing people.

In a recent study, economists Daren Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University try to quantify how worried we should be about robots. They examine the impact of industrial automation on the US labor market from 1990 to 2007. They conclude that each additional robot reduced employment in a given commuting area by 3-6 workers, and lowered overall wages by 0.25-0.5%.

A central question about robots is whether they replace human workers or augment them by boosting productivity. Acemoglu and Restrepo’s research is a powerful piece of evidence on the side of replacement. So, brace yourself: According to the International Federation of Robotics, there are already between 1.5-1.75 million industrial robots in operation, and some observers expect that number to more than double by 2025.

Last summer when I spoke of exponential growth in robots replacing humans, I had no idea that it would be happening this quickly.

Industrial robots are most commonly used in the automotive industry, which accounts for 39% of robot usage in the US. It’s no surprise, then, that workers in America’s Midwestern car making capitals have been the most affected by automation.

Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has said it has tens of thousands of robots working across 10 of its US warehouses. According to Amazon, the advantages of offloading more of that work onto machines is an easy decision.

Robots don’t slow. They don’t tire. They don’t get injured or distracted or sick. They don’t require paychecks or try to unionize.

Amazon has organized a “picking challenge” designed to see if robots can “autonomously grab items from a shelf and place them in a tub.” The firm has around 50,000 people working in its warehouses and it wants to see if robots can perform the tasks of selecting items and moving them around the warehouse. During the competition, a Berlin robot successfully completed ten of the twelve tasks. To move goods around the facility, the company already uses 15,000 robots and it expects to purchase additional ones in the future.

In Japan, there is a new hotel called, Henn-na that uses robots to check people in and escort guests to their rooms. The robotic receptionist speaks Japanese or English, depending on the preferences of the guest. It can set up the reservations for people, take them to their rooms, and adjust the accommodation’s temperature. Within the room, guests can use voice commands to alter the lighting and ask questions regarding the time or weather.

In the restaurant industry, firms are using technology to remove humans from parts of food delivery. Some places, for example, are using tablets that allow customers to order directly from the kitchen with no requirement of talking to a waiter or waitress.

Others enable people to pay directly, obviating the need for cashiers.

Last night, Janine and I ate at a local Red Robin restaurant – I paid using a tablet.

Another area where robots will be taking over is in the medical field.

Machine-to-machine communications and remote monitoring sensors that remove humans from the equation and substitute automated processes have become popular in the health care area. There are sensors that record vital signs and electronically transmit them to medical doctors. For example, heart patients have monitors that compile blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, and heart rates. Readings are sent to a doctor, who adjusts medications as the readings come in.

There also are devices that measure “biological, chemical, or physical processes” and deliver “a drug or intervention based on the sensor data obtained.” They help people maintain an independent lifestyle as they age and keep them in close touch with medical personnel. “Point-of-care” technologies keep people out of hospitals and emergency rooms, while still providing access to the latest therapies.

Implantable monitors enable regular management of symptoms and treatment. For example, the use of pulmonary artery pressure measurement systems has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of heart failure hospitalization.

Doctors place these devices inside heart failure patients and rely upon machine-to-machine communications to alert them to potential problems. They can track heart arrhythmia and take adaptive moves as signals spot troublesome warning signs. Automated machines are being integrated into health care in several different respects. Some people are relying upon “rehabilitation robots” to aid people with specific tasks.

Service robots meanwhile help people personalize their treatment and deal with health, safety, and mobility issues. Companion robots attempt to improve quality of life through interactivity and social ability.

In conjunction with wired “smart homes”, it is possible integrate robots into the day-to-day lives of senior citizens and improve their medical treatment.

But would sympathetic A.I. be enough of a companion for the sick and afflicted?

Today, at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) in Baltimore, Maryland, surgeons presented research outlining how they were the first to successfully use a remote-controlled robotic system inside the human eye during an operation.

The researchers recruited 12 patients in need of retinal surgeries and placed them in randomized clinical trials. Of these, six underwent surgery with the robot while the other half were treated using the standard human approach.

The results?

Out of the six in the manual procedure group, five experienced retinal micro-hemorrhage events. Meanwhile, the group that received robotic assistance only had two cases of such bleeding.

To many, this is just one more example of how robots could be helpful to humans. Others might argue that it mirrors how robot apocalypses begin in any sci-fi story.

In a January 2017 report, McKinsey Global Institute estimated that 60 percent of all occupations are at least 30 percent automatable. But while certain parts of many human jobs might get reshuffled to robots, apps, software and predictive algorithms, the bots aren’t full-on job-stealers.

Soon, you will have to prepare to meet your robo-colleague or even more terrifying is the Bot Boss.

The arrival of robotic CEOs, when it does happen, might not even make headlines. It may be so gradual that one day we wake up as a society to find our boss is a robot and no one can recall the tipping point.

It wouldn’t be a robot sitting at a chair like in science fiction – it would be nothing more than a box programmed to mimic intellectual ability. Some argue that this really wouldn’t be a big change from human bosses that act the same way.

Today’s robots can replicate some specific elements of intellectual ability and it is indeed possible that a robotic CEO will replace CEOs at top companies.

Culturally, it’s possible this would lead to more equitable promotions. Human emotions would not play a role in the promotion [or lack of a promotion] of individuals within the organization.

It would be interesting of course to see how motivations within the workforce change when a computer is monitoring employee key performance indicators.

If a computer goes by merit and labor, maybe their human counterparts would be paid what they are worth.

The rapid increase in emerging technologies suggests that they are having a substantial impact on the workforce. Many of the large tech firms have achieved broad economic scale without a large number of employees.

For example, “Google is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees – less than a tenth the size of AT&T’s workforce in the 1960s.”

According to economist Andrew McAfee, “we are facing a time when machines will replace people for most of the jobs in the current economy, and I believe it will come not in the distant future.

In a number of fields, technology is substituting for labor, and this has dramatic consequences for middle class jobs and incomes.

According to JP Sottile, author of the recently published, “The Robot Economy: Ready or Not, Here It Comes” — the acceleration fourth industrial revolution is here now and that we should be prepared.. According to Sottile “The Future of Employment’s” apocalyptic premonition — that 47 percent of all jobs in the United States may be lost to automation over the next two decades – will create a solemn epitaph for the rapidly fading era of manufacturing-based, consumption-driven economics.

He also says that this future economy will be where manufacturing jobs require a college degree, artificial intelligence replaces administrative workers, automated kiosks dislodge food service workers and driverless vehicles threaten the livelihoods of up to 10 million Americans who take the wheel for a living.

The U.S. labor force has been shaped by millennia of technological progress. Agricultural technology birthed the farming industry, the industrial revolution moved people into factories, and then globalization and automation moved them back out, giving rise to a nation of services. But throughout this reshuffling, the total number of jobs has always increased.

But economist are saying this new labor force — the mechanical labor force will thrust many people into technological unemployment, in which computer scientists and software engineers essentially invent us out of work, and the total number of jobs declines steadily and permanently.

This fear is not new. The hope that machines might free us from our problems has always been intertwined with the fear that they will rob us of our jobs.

Always remember the promise of the internet. We were told that it would simplify our jobs making us work less and enjoy life more.

All it did was create more time, to do more tasks.

Written by Ron Patton




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