Free Republic

The rise of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed industries worldwide, and manufacturing is no exception. One of the most significant shifts in recent years is the concept of dark factories—automated manufacturing facilities that require little to no human intervention. But are these factories the future of industrial production, or do they pose challenges that outweigh their benefits? This article explores the rise of dark factories, their advantages, drawbacks, and how companies are implementing them globally. What Are Dark Factories? A dark factory, also known as a lights-out factory, is a fully automated facility where robots, AI-driven systems, and...

While public discourse is consumed by a deluge of executive orders and scandalous exposés of waste and corruption, the Trump administration, with Elon Musk’s United States DOGE Service (USDS) at the helm, is quietly executing a radical AI-driven overhaul of federal operations.The recently established USDS, whose goal is to “[modernize] Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” has instead handed Musk and his allies unprecedented control over federal technology strategy — with little scrutiny and even less accountability.What was pitched as a reasonable efficiency initiative is rapidly escalating into a full-scale AI revolution, one that raises serious...

Some union leaders are self-destructive idiots. America's ports have fallen behind. Not a single one ranks in the top 50 worldwide. A big reason is that dock unions stop innovation. Advertisement This fall, the International Longshoremen's Association shut down East and Gulf coast ports, striking for a raise and a ban on automation. They got the raise. Now union president Harold Daggett says longshoremen will strike again in January if they don't get that ban on automation. His statement in my new video makes it clear that he knows how badly his strike would damage other Americans. "Guys who sell...

“No automation means no automation,” says the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), the union representing 85,000 dock and maritime workers.ILA officials reached a tentative wage agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) on Oct. 3. This move effectively suspended the three-day job action and extended the existing Master Contract until Jan. 15. The new deal allows both sides about 100 days to negotiate a new agreement, with automation being the primary sticking point.While ILA confirmed that USMX agreed to raise pay for thousands of port workers, they are now focusing their discussions on using technology to complete tasks with less...

This strike isn’t over. It’s just delayed until after the election, so it doesn’t hurt the Democratic party at the polls. We have been told many things about the longshoremen’s strike over the past week. Most of the reporting has been in half-truths, at best – possibly because the press doesn’t know any better (the operations of our seaports are an admittedly obscure area of specialization), or possibly because the press doesn’t want to share information so damning to the side they instinctively favor. Here are just a few of the misleading statements thrown at us in the past week:...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Harris-Walz Surrogate Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) argued that there will be fewer strikes if 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris is elected and that the head of the dockworkers union is “a Trump guy” who might want to cripple the economy for political purposes.

'I'm a Democrat but they have [expletive] us over for the last 40 years and for once we're standing up as a union saying what the [expletive] have you done for us?' O'Brien said in scathing remarks. 'I'm getting attacked from the left you know and since I've been in office over two and a half years we've given the Democratic machine $15.7 million. 'We've given Republicans about $340,000 truth be told, so it's like you know people say the Democratic party is the party of working people, but they're actually bought and paid for by big tech,' O'Brien explained.

As East and Gulf Coast ports begin to operate as normal again, one of the country’s top entrepreneurs is weighing in on “the trouble” with union workers’ demands. “The trouble with East Coast ports is they’re very old, they’re very inefficient,” O’Leary Ventures Chairman and “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary said on “Varney & Co.” Friday. “And when you start to compare them against other international ports like Singapore and the other Asian ports,” he continued, “we’re just not holding much up against them. And that’s very bad for productivity.” US dockworkers returned to work Friday morning after reaching a...

As thousands of dockworkers are preparing to strike should a deal not be reached by the end of Monday, one business leader is questioning the union’s demand for a total ban on automation. International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) on Sunday said its 85,000 members, along with "tens of thousands of dockworkers and maritime workers around the world," will hit the picket lines Tuesday "and strike at all Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports from Maine to Texas." The union is demanding higher wages and a total ban on the automation at ports regarding cranes, gates and moving containers in the loading and...

New research released by Indeed, a popular job posting platform, shows that the number of postings requiring college degrees — or any education requirement at all — is dwindling. Indeed found 52 percent of postings on its site had no formal education requirement as of January 2024, up 4 percent from 2019. The number of postings requiring four-year degrees went from 20.4 percent to 17.8 percent in the past five years. “Employers are loosening their formal education requirements as the labor market remains tight and attitudes towards skills-first hiring practices change. Those same employers seem more willing to consider candidates...

Since the release of tools like ChatGPT, artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to permeate industries worldwide, transforming the way we work and live.To gain insight into this rapidly evolving landscape, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu and Sabrina Lam - using data from MSCI - has ranked U.S. industries by their estimated share of employment that could be exposed to AI-driven automation.Data and HighlightsThis analysis comes from a March 2023 report published by Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. The authors estimated automation exposure for over 900 U.S. jobs using the O*NET occupational database, which provides details on the types of tasks each...

One month ago, to much dismay and widespread denial, Goldman predicted that AI could lead to some 300 million layoffs among highly paid, non-menial workers in the US and Europe. As Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius put it, "using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work. Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation" as up to "two...

Perhaps the reality of ChatGPT is not that it is a Chatbot running on AI, but a liberal woke database managed by A.I. What exactly does this mean? If singularity is the ultimate goal of all A.I., then by the stated goal, no human interface would be required to produce the code that defines A.I. The A.I. would refresh its code at a rate that we cannot comprehend. This refresh rate would by logic expunge any data that could not be supported by facts that the A.I. would verify by constant learning. The laws of physics, natural laws, and other...

McDonald's has opened up a fully-automated restaurant in Texas, which is completely run by machines so you don't have to speak to anyone, and it has left people on the internet divided. The brand-new eatery, located just outside Fort Worth, uses advanced technology so that customers can order their food and receive their meal without having to interact with any humans, and while some people are excited about the idea, others find it a little creepy. A TikToker who goes by the username @foodiemunster online recently visited the restaurant and documented the entire thing on the video-sharing app, and it...

A video of Sparrow shows the robotic arm picking up a board game, a bottle of vitamins and a set of sheets — all the kinds of items that might flow through one of the company's warehouses — and deftly placing them in crates...Amazon says Sparrow will "take on repetitive tasks," freeing employees up to focus on other things.

For much of baseball history, batting practice hasn't evolved much beyond 75 mph fastballs down the middle...Now, a wave of smart pitching machines are giving hitters a chance to practice against the type of major-league quality stuff they will actually have to hit in games, sparking a hush-hush race to optimize batting practice.

A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh offers insight of how and where automation might replace operator hours in long-haul trucking. The study found that 94 percent of operator hours may be impacted if automated trucking technology improves to operate in all weather conditions across the continental U.S. Currently, automated testing is mainly being tested in the sun belt states due to the more predictable and less harsh weather. Sun belt states include Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma,...

I mainly just want to ask the question, see what kinds of responses I may get or what other discussions flow from it. What could we do to automate conservatism? This can be both in the form of reaching new people as well as helping educate others around us of new things they may not have known. So far the most prominent answer I have found for myself is the audiobooks. I will be creating those for many years to come as the opportunities for education are immense. Over the years I have tried to get out of my comfort...

Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby’s drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks. “It doesn’t call sick,” says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby’s franchise this year in Ontario, California. “It doesn’t get corona. And the reliability of it is great.” The pandemic didn’t just threaten Americans’ health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs....

We're getting a real-world economics lesson in rip-your-face-off increases in prices, and the tuition is about to go up--way up. Inflation will be transitory, blah-blah-blah--I beg to differ, for these reasons. There are numerous structural sources of inflation, which I define as prices rise while the quality and quantity of goods and services remain the same or diminish. Since the word inflation is so loaded, let's use the more neutral (and more accurate) term decline in purchasing power: an hour of your labor buys fewer goods and services of lesser quality than it did a decade ago or a generation...