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Amazon is looking to reduce costs at Whole Foods with a new automated checkout system that would render thousands of cashiers redundant, it has been reported. Carmen Clark, 37, an employee at the Mount Pleasant Whole Foods, said, 'Everybody's been kind of joking that it's going to be robots and drones,' after the Amazon bought the grocery chain for $13.7 billion. It turns out Clark wasn't that far off, since Amazon is trying to reduce prices by replacing cashiers with a new mobile payment system, according to a person familiar with the company's plans who spoke to Bloomberg. But Amazon...

Some of the reasons Japan loves vending machines have nothing to do with an aging society of love of robots. Video series Vox Borders recently came to Tokyo, taking a look at aspects of everyday life in Japan. Something that caught host Johnny Harris’ eye, as with many new arrivals to the capital, is the incredible number of vending machines to be found in Japan. The purpose of vending machines is pretty self-explanatory (to sell things), but Harris wondered why Japan has so many, and seeks to answer that question in the straightforwardly titled video “Why Japan has so many...

The tech industry collectively face-palmed when Trump's treasury secretary said earlier this year that the threat of robots taking human jobs was "not even on our radar screen." There is a growing evidence that robots and artificial intelligence could displace huge swaths of the American workforce....

CNN says automation is to blame for America’s manufacturing job losses; and what’s worse, there’s more to come—and no, it has absolutely nothing to do with bad trade deals like NAFTA, nor China’s predatory trading strategy. Nope. Nothing to see here people. Move along. Automation is bad, and your jobs are never coming back. This view was echoed recently by the Guardian too. Of course, this is all just fake news—CNN has to earn its reputation somehow. In reality, automation is only half the story: if you look at its impact relative to output, you’ll see that automation doesn’t really...

SAN FRANCISCO (CNNMoney) -- Sally doesn't clean, chop or toss vegetables. The new salad robot making its debut in San Francisco this month is more like a salad vending machine: Press a few buttons on a touchscreen and it drops neat portions of refrigerated ingredients into a bowl. But Sally the Salad Robot could be the latest step in automating some of the more repetitive parts of food preparation. Its creators hope food robots can help with one of Silicon Valley's biggest restaurant problems: a shortage of kitchen workers. Sally is the first product from Chowbotics, a Redwood City startup...

The future of U.S. homebuilding depends on more people like Cyndicy Yarborough, a 26-year-old former Wal-Mart clerk with no background in construction. At Blueprint Robotics in Baltimore, she works in a factory that builds houses like cars, on an assembly line, using robots that fire thousands of nails into studs each day and never miss. Yarborough operates a machine that lifts floors and walls and packs them onto a flatbed truck, the final step before delivery to a development site where they’ll be pieced together. “I like being a part of something new, on the cutting edge,” said Yarborough, a...

Tucked away in Apex, a robotics company is about to nearly double its headcount. Robert Little, CEO of ATI Industrial Automation, says the company breaks ground next week on an expansion that will create 275 new jobs and grow its Apex footprint to 185,000 square feet. The company currently has 300 employees. Little says it has reached the limits of its Apex facility, and that the new robotics lab will be bigger with state of the art features. With the new facility, ATI intends to focus on new and better robots with force-control. Little describes it as equipping robots with...

Recently, much has been made of the role that artificial intelligence will play in taking our jobs. From manufacturing to driving to fighting wars, AI’s ascendancy into the workforce elicits everything from celebration to consternation. Depending on who you ask, AI will save jobs, or create jobs, or will banish humans from the job market forever. While the singularity is a long way off, the anxiety has set in. Salespeople are nervous, too. A million business-to-business salespeople are already in danger of losing their jobs to websites by 2020, according to Forrester. The basic sales jobs are already migrating to...

The potential threat of technological unemployment is one of the most hotly debated economic issues of our times: in boardrooms and trade union offices but also increasingly amongst policy-makers. The catch-all term ‘digital’ may have been added to numerous political concepts in recent years but beyond such branding there has been very little debate of substance about what a comprehensive policy response to this threat should be. We do not know whether some of the more sombre predictions about large-scale job losses will materialize but we do know that governments and others need to be prepared if and when substantial...

Humans have needs, but we need some things more than others. Back in the 1940s, American psychologist Abraham Maslow famously classified human needs into a hierarchy, often shown as a pyramid. At the foundation are our physiological needs: air, water, food, etc. Only when these needs are met can we reach upward to more and more refined stages of material, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment. You could say, the very existence of civilization depends on the stability of the bottom layer. It’s thus no accident that a huge part of the economy exists to fill these basic needs. Even smart...

“The U.S. military is very likely to pursue forms of automation that reduce ‘back-office’ costs over time, as well as remove soldiers from non-combat deployments where they might face risk from adversaries on fluid battlefields, such as in transportation.” Driver-less vehicles poised to take taxi, train and truck driver jobs in the civilian sector also could nab many combat-support slots in the Army. “Robots will continue to replace the dirty, dull and dangerous jobs, and this will affect typically more uneducated and unskilled workers,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Institute for Contextual Robotics at UC San Diego. “You need...

Within the next 10 years, there's a good chance that 50% of the jobs today will be gone.And no one in Washington is talking about what to do to deal with this likelihood.The cause of this coming massive economic upheaval is artificial intelligence -- a catch-all term that encompasses everything from driverless cars to sex robots. Its impact is already being felt on the factory floor, where smart machines are making American manufacturers more competitive, more efficient, and more profitable, but without the mass number of workers that used to be the backbone of the American economy.Donald Trump says...

For the dramatic impact of technology, and specifically trade automation from algo, quant and robotic trading  on today's capital markets, look no further than Goldman's cash equities trading floor at the firm's headquarters which, according to the MIT Tech Review, employed 600 traders its height back in 2000, buying and selling stocks for Goldman's institutional client clients. Today there are just two equity traders left. Complex trading algorithms, some with machine-learning capabilities, first replaced trades where the price of what’s being sold was easy to determine on the market, including the stocks traded by Goldman’s old 600.Call it the...

Thursday, Bloomberg published an article titled “Machines Can Replace Millions of Bureaucrats” which offers some amusing insights into what the future of bureaucracy might look like. The story is largely based on the work of two Oxford academics, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, who have been studying the likelihood of various jobs being automated. What they found is that some of the jobs which are ideal for automation are government jobs: Government clerks who do predictable, rule-based, often mechanical work also are in danger of displacement by machines. In a recent collaboration with Deloitte U.K., Profs. Osborne and Frey...

After a factory in Dongguan, China, replaced most of its workers with robots, it witnessed a spectacular rise in productivity. While some of the world’s leaders are obsessed with keeping people out of their country, an unspoken entity is slowly but certainly taking our jobs: robots. It’s been long discussed that robots and computers will start taking our jobs “in the near future” — well that near future is upon us and we’re not really prepared to deal with it. Of course, some jobs are more at risk than others, are few are as threatened as factory jobs. Advertisement According...

Massachusetts is in the midst of debating the Fight for 15, with proposals on the table to raise the minimum wage that high at least for a few industries including big box stores and fast food outlets. That would have a serious impact on businesses such as McDonald’s, which hires a lot of younger workers looking for their first entries on their resumes, particularly if they don’t have a secondary school education. While we’re on the subject, if you happen to be in the Boston area be sure to stop by one McDonald’s where you can meet their new...

A Boston McDonald’s is set to launch a machine that dispenses the fast-food chain’s trademark sandwich, the Big Mac. The automated cheeseburger machine will offer three different sizes: traditional, the Mac Jr. and the Grand Mac, according to Metro Boston. The sandwiches are expected to be free of charge and available for a short time period. People in the area can obtain the stacked sandwich without conversing with any humans, which seems to be part of a trend for casual restaurants.

It sounded like great news when Carrier said last week that it would invest millions in the Indiana plant it decided to keep in the U.S. The company's deal with President-elect Donald Trump to keep a furnace plant from moving to Mexico also calls for a $16 million investment in the facility. But that has a big down side for some of the workers in Indianapolis. Most of that money will be invested in automation said to Greg Hayes, CEO of United Technologies, Carrier's corporate parent. And that automation will replace some of the jobs that were just saved. "We're...

To some extent, blue-collar workers gave back to Silicon Valley a bit of the disruption it has long given them Nearly the entire tech industry, with the exception of PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, publicly lined up against Donald Trump and for Hillary Clinton in the recent presidential election. But words are one thing and actions another. And actions taken by the tech industry in the last decades helped seal Trump’s surprise victory. Trump won, in large part, thanks to support by blue-collar voters without college degrees in the Rust Belt, particularly in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan....

Chinese robots appear to be bringing to an end a path of "serial industrialisation" across Asia that has run for 60-odd years, says Hong Kong-based Bernstein analyst and ex-pat Kiwi Michael Parker. In a research note entitled Adam Smith vs Chinese Robots...The end of The Wealth of Nations, in one chart (not ours), Parker points out that instead of shedding low cost manufacturing as it develops, China is getting rid of the workers but not the work. Parker notes that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, remained broadly relevant to capital allocation decisions globally for 240 years. Basically,...