Two news articles recently came out that highlight how automation will dramatically impact several industries, specifically entertainment and agriculture, reducing the number of workers over the next 20 years.
This piece from The Atlantic’s City Lab begins:
Economists expect that millions of American jobs are going to be replaced by automation in the coming decades. But where will those job losses take place? Which areas will be hardest hit?
Much of the focus regarding automation has been on the Rust Belt. There, many workers have been replaced by machines, and the number of factory jobs has slipped as more production is offshored. While a lot of the rhetoric about job loss in the Rust Belt has centered on such outsourcing, one study from Ball State University found that only 13 percent of manufacturing job losses are attributable to trade, and the rest to automation.
A new analysis suggests that the places that are going to be hardest-hit by automation in the coming decades are in fact outside of the Rust Belt.
While this piece from the MIT Technology Review shares how robots will take the place of apple pickers:
Roughly $4 billion worth of apples are harvested in the U.S. each year. Startup Abundant Robotics hopes to suck up some of it with a machine that vacuums ripe fruit off the tree.
Today apple orchards rely on people to pick their crops. Dan Steere, cofounder and CEO of Abundant, says recent tests in Australia, where apple season is under way, proved that the company’s prototype can spot apples roughly as accurately as a human, and pull them down just as gently. The machine deposits apples in the same large crates that human pickers use.
“The results convinced us that we’re on the right path to scale up to a full commercial system,” says Steere.
Read more at the MIT Technology Review.
Image courtesy of City Lab.
