The Weekly Newspaper of Torrance Herald Publications - Torrance, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hawthorne, Lawndale, & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 7, No. 1 - January 5, 2017 Inside This Issue Certified & Licensed Professionals.......................2 Classifieds............................6 Community Briefs...............2 Crossword/Sudoku.............6 Entertainment......................3 Legals....................................7 Real Estate...........................8 Sports....................................3 TerriAnn in Torrance..........4 Weekend Forecast Torrance in the Wintertime A view from Rocketship Park overlooking Torrance and the Santa Monica Bay. Photo by Peter Thornton. Robots Are Coming for Your Job By Rob McCarthy Yes, American jobs--especially in manufacturing are being lost. But, Mexico and the Far East aren’t where the work is going. Robots are replacing people who do everything from pack shipping boxes to write about college football right here in the U.S.A. Recent promises of President-Elect Donald Trump to bring back jobs that have gone overseas miss the point. The jobs are gone, but not only to foreign competition. Automation is changing U.S. industry in a much bigger way than trade deals. Researchers at Ball State University in Indiana last confirmed that politicians who rail against trade deals as a reason for lost manufacturing jobs, especially in the Midwest and Detroit’s auto industry, have it backward. Trade deals resulted in 13 percent of America’s lost factory jobs compared to 88 percent of jobs that were taken by robots and non-global factors that reduced U.S. factories’ need for human labor. Still, U.S. output is nearing an all-time high and the push toward robots and software is just getting started. “We’re making more with fewer people,” one economist said of the technological revolution quietly taking place in the U.S. economy. The Detroit auto industry is building more cars and trucks than ever with one-third of the labor force it had in the 1970s. Plants that make steel and metals need 40 percent fewer workers than before, and yet their output has grown by nearly the same percentage. While automation is hurting the American worker, it’s making the United States more competitive and attractive for investment. The United States will overtake China as the most competitive country in manufacturing by 2020, global manufacturing executives predict. That vote of confidence is based on costs, productivity and the protection of intellectual property, according to Deloitte that conducted the survey. Technologists themselves disagree on the impact the robotic revolution will have on the average American worker. A 2014 Atlantic Monthly article titled “The Robots Are Coming, But Will They Take Our Jobs?” reported on a different survey that asked specialists trained to work with technology how much the current transition to a robotic workforce will disrupt people’s livelihoods and their lives. Highly skilled workers will thrive as robots and software-guided machinery free up the problem-solvers and creative types to focus on more challenging tasks, many think. However, they acknowledge that automation is a push that will propel many others in manufacturing jobs and with less-adaptable skills into unemployment. About 48 percent of the technology experts believe robots will have displaced a “significant” number of blue-collar and white-collar workers by the mid-2020s. The other 52 percent predict that robots won’t displace more jobs than they create by 2025. Which occupations will be most affected by the reliance on machines to do the work of people? Well, let’s start with the one I’m performing now: journalist. Mine is an endangered profession because of software that is able to report and write stories about financial markets and college football games. Software developed at Northwestern University reportedly can write a baseball or softball story within minutes using the box scores, reducing the need to have a reporter at the game. The scorekeeper transmits the game statistics via email, and the Big Ten Network is happy with the system because sending a sportswriter to every home and away game is costly. Business-reporting software also writes up company reports ahead of earnings announcements. Its creator, Narrative Science, claims that Forbes can expand its financial reporting to thousands of companies--far too many for Forbes’ current staff to analyze and report. Doctors: IBM’s supercomputer Watson is offering dozens of U.S. hospitals advice on the best cancer treatments. It also assists doctors in spotting early-stage skin cancers by using vision software developed by IBM. Robots in the operation room aren’t new, where they’ve assisted doctors to perform surgeries. Doctors wo’’t be replaced by robots, although patients who want a second opinion may ask for a robotic consultation about their disease or condition as a backup. Robotic surgical assistance also has been linked to 144 deaths over a decade, so machines make mistakes the same as trained physicians do. Lawyers and Paralegals: A Palo Altobased company, Blackstone Discovery, developed software that analyzed 1.5 million documents for under $100,000. Legal document review done by software rather than people working in a legal office mean less billable hours for law firms. Store Clerks: South Bay shoppers already are seeing supermarkets and large retailers using self-checkout, though it hasn’t replaced cashiers and probably never will. Judging by the lines at the checkout aisles, including the 15 items or less, food shoppers would rather have a cashier ring up their grocery purchases rather than go through the speedier, but less reliable automated checkout stands. See Robots, page 4 Friday Partly Cloudy 60˚/52˚ Saturday Cloudy 62˚/57˚ Sunday Partly Cloudy 71˚/58˚
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