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The robots are coming to labor-strapped North American warehouses. Growing numbers of self-driving machines are shuttling clothing and sports equipment down warehouse aisles, pulling bins of groceries, cosmetics and industrial parts from high stacks and handing off goods to human workers to help deliver orders faster... The push toward automation comes as businesses say they can’t hire warehouse workers fast enough to meet surging online demand for everything from furniture to frozen food in pandemic-disrupted supply chains. The crunch is accelerating the adoption of robots and other technology in a sector that still largely relies on workers pulling carts... “This...

Larry Collins has met quite a few celebrities over the years at his job. Niners Hall of Famer Joe Montana stopped by with a trailer full of horses once. NBA legend Bill Russell was the nicest, stopping to chat with him for a few minutes. Another NFL Hall of Famer, Ronnie Lott, even gave him an autograph. Collins said he’s probably met many more famous people without even realizing it. But Collins doesn’t work at a fancy restaurant or in the VIP area of a concert venue — he was a Bay Area toll collector for 23 years on the...

Improved Team Member Experience: The beloved elements of the typical Cantina with an open-kitchen and alcoholic drinks paired with the digital design elements of the Times Square Cantina simplify and modernize the consumer experience, which in turn, optimizes and redeploys the role of the team member within the restaurant experience.

Increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour has resulted in exactly what critics have predicted: A loss of low-skilled jobs and, according to a recent study, increased prices for the goods and services provided by companies that employ low-skilled workers. Brad Polumbo reported at the Foundation for Economic Education on a recent study from Princeton economist Orley C. Ashenfelter and Czech economist Štěpán Jurajda, which found that minimum wage hikes led to much higher menu prices at McDonalds. “They found a ‘full or near-full price pass-through of minimum-wage-induced higher costs of labor.’ In English, this means that by vastly...

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that we’d be having 15-hour workweeks by the end of the century. But by the time it was 2013, it was clear that the great economist had gotten something wrong.Welcome to the era of bullshit jobs, as anthropologist David Graeber coined it. Since the 1930s, whole new industries have sprung up, which don’t necessarily add much value to our lives. Graeber would probably call most jobs in software development bullshit.I don’t share Graeber’s opinion, especially when it comes to software. But he does touch an interesting point: as more and more processes are automated,...

While this column isn't about the threat posed by Transformers, it is about a robot apocalypse that's going to ravage the Midwest. I know, I know, the last thing you want to hear about right now is another imminent doomsday -- aren't global warming and COVID-19 and murder hornets and measles and the ever-present specter of thermonuclear war and the possibility of hyper-intelligent toilet lampreys enough? Well, it's likely you haven't heard too much about this particular apocalypse because it's not a sexy blood-and-guts kind. Instead of armies of Terminators hunting down handfuls of survivors for their sweet sweet spinal...

This winter semester, more UW-Madison students are bundled up inside, counting on app-based delivery robots to feed their appetites. The maker Starship launched a fleet of thirty self-navigating campus food carriers in November. Since then, Peter Testory, the university’s director of dining, said orders have jumped more than 700 percent. Testory said there’s also a correlation between bad winter weather and service use. When the order comes in with a “ding,” dining staff prepare the food at a campus kitchen. Runners or, oftentimes, kitchen managers take the food to the delivery bots parked outside. Once runners close the lids, the...

Pennsylvania Turnpike users can expect 6% toll increases in 2020 and 2021 but then — if the state Legislature follows through with plans to change how the state funds public transit — the rate of annual increases gradually will go down to 3% in 2028. Nikolaus Grieshaber, the turnpike’s chief financial officer, outlined the agency’s financial future recently in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the 6% toll hike that begins Jan. 5. The increase marks the 12th year in a row that rates have gone up and will increase the fee for a car traveling the length of...

Floridians will vote next year on whether to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026, an amendment initiative led by Orlando attorney John Morgan that’s already drawing opposition from Republican leaders and the business community. The initiative that will be called Amendment 2 made the November ballot after its wording was approved by the Florida Supreme Court in a decision released Thursday. Court review was the last obstacle to getting the measure on the ballot after Morgan’s Florida For A Fair Wage collected more than 770,000 of the required 766,200 signatures. The amendment would raise the...

In the highly competitive race to get self-driving cars to the market, most companies hold their secrets close. But when it comes to helping those cars figure out where they are on the road, some experts are ready to open up. Argo AI, based in the Strip District, and Aptiv, based in O’Hara, publicly released some of their own data sets earlier this year in an effort to further advancement in the field. The companies shared parts of their own maps of cities where they are testing self-driving cars, including Pittsburgh. That may seem strange considering the abundance of applications...

The Pennsylvania Turnpike is done with four years of testing and will move full speed ahead with a $129 million project to become a completely cashless toll system by the fall of 2021. Although the system won’t take cash after that point, the agency expects to continue using toll booths at some exit ramps across the state until 2026. Those booths will record E-ZPass transponder signals or take license plate photographs so the agency can mail bills to drivers until the agency finishes installing 43 overhead gantries on the mainline and Northeast Extension in three phases over the next six...

Artificial intelligence could be used to make your next pizza, if you order one at T-Mobile Park. A Seattle startup called Picnic has developed a machine capable of turning out hundreds of pizzas an hour. The CEO of the company said the machine can also help solve a staffing shortage in the food services industry. “You can make different pizzas, each one in a row,” said Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic. The machine gets the pizza order from an iPad app that was developed in-house, at the company’s office and lab in Seattle’s Interbay neighborhood.

The idea behind fast food is speed and efficiency. When it comes to fast-food chains, McDonald’s is always on the cutting edge of getting people fed quickly—too quickly, some say. In the rush to gobble down food, much of the joy of eating is lost. Fast food is a soulless commodity that neglects the spiritual appreciation of flavor and taste. It can turn what should be a dining place into a biological fueling station. The bad news is that it has just gotten worse. Just when you think the fast-food giant has reached a peak of efficiency, it comes out...

The sooner we face up to this unpleasant reality, the better off we'll be. Shed a single tear, if you haven’t gone entirely dry, for America’s beleaguered, struggling, and anxiety-ridden law-firm partners.Sara Randazzo, writing in the Wall Street Journal, chronicles the lamentations of the lawyers: “Being named a partner once meant joining a band of lawyers who jointly tended to longtime clients and took home comfortable, and roughly equal, paychecks. Job security was virtually guaranteed and partners rarely jumped ship. That model, and the culture that grew up around it, is all but dead. Law firms are now often partnerships...

Starsky Robotics is now testing autonomous trucks that have no driver inside, the San Francisco Bay Area startup announced on Wednesday. As of June 16, Starsky began operating truly driverless semi-trucks on the Florida turnpike. It's a first in the industry. To be sure, there are plenty of autonomous trucks on the road. TuSimple has a fleet of more than 50 trucks making three to five revenue-generating routes per day in Arizona. Waymo resumed testing its self-driving trucks in Phoenix, after ending the tests two years ago. Embark's trucks drove more than 124,000 automated miles last year. And Tesla has...

AUBURNDALE — Florida has one of the world’s most famous asphalt ovals in the Daytona International Speedway. A slightly smaller track recently completed in Auburndale won’t draw massive crowds for races, but it’s part of a project that could hasten the day when self-driving vehicles take over the roads. Crews finished laying asphalt for the 2¼-mile oval — phase one of SunTrax — in early May, and construction will begin in the coming months on infield elements designed for the development and testing of connected and autonomous vehicles. The second phase of SunTrax, a project overseen by Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise...

An Aeroflot passenger jet burst into flames during an emergency landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport yesterday, resulting in a conflagration that left 41 of 78 people aboard the plane dead. While the plane was not a Boeing and did not involve a control system like the one implicated in the recent crashes of Lionair Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, the overall circumstances eerily echo the conditions that led to the loss of the two 737 Max jets. In all three cases, pilots suffered a dangerous and unexpected emergency during takeoff, lost the automation that they were used to...

Quality inspectors at Boeing, angry at management’s plan to streamline and automate some quality-control processes with fewer inspectors overseeing the work of mechanics, point to a recent quality-control audit that missed one of its targets as evidence that the company’s effort is unwise. Boeing plans to eliminate up to 900 quality- inspector positions as part of a sweeping transformation of its manufacturing system over the next two years. The idea is to move away from reliance on inspections by a second set of eyes to find any defects after a mechanic does a job. Instead, Boeing is redesigning tasks to...

They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible. I know this because, for the past week, I’ve been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. And I’ve noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening. In public, many executives wring their hands over the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers. They take part in panel discussions about building “human-centered A.I.” for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — Davos-speak for the corporate...

Maybe Donald Trump is such a powerful communicator and pot-stirrer that other countries, embarrassed by their own trade barriers, will eliminate them. Then I will thank the president for the wonderful thing he did. Genuine free trade will be a recipe for wonderful economic growth. But I fear the opposite: a trade war and stagnation -- because much of what Trump and his followers say is economically absurd. "(If) you don't have steel, you don't have a country!" announced the president. Lots of things are essential to America -- and international trade is the best way to make sure we...