Wal-Mart to roll out thousands of robots to replace workers (income, analysis)
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I’m also not sure how Walmart doesn’t have competition. They eliminated it? No, they face ruthless competition. Target, Costco, the big time home and garden places, Kroger, Amazon....
Ect...
Correct. They have barely > 10% retail. In the early 20th century, Sears approached 20% of retail sales nationally.
I am one of 150 million weekly Wal Mart shoppers, but like most, I go to other stores, also.
All sell 98% of same stuff, so their value is offer lowest price for each of these commodity type skus.
Coke is Coke, Tide is Tide, Hanes is Hanes, all over.
Cut distribution costs to sell it at lowest price, and watch yourself grow from 1 tiny store in Arkansas to over 4,000 nationally. You earned it.
There was a very interesting VICE special on The Future of Work last night. It was very interesting, and even I didn't realize the shifts that were already occurring. For instance I did not know that the floor of the NYSE was no longer filled with young men starting out as traders...it looks like an empty casino now, and all the new traders have tech degrees. The programming and digital department is now the biggest portion of Goldman Sachs employees.
The show covered everything from warehouse work to health care jobs, but the gist was you need advanced tech knowledge in the future even to be a nurse. There is no more nurse handing a scalpel to a surgeon in increasing number of hospitals, but a surgeon behind a TV screen guiding a robotic surgeon.
Even they admit they don't know how to retrain. Even if you can re-train coal miners to be coders, they said in 10 years we won't need coders anymore, either.
The sheer number of jobs it's going to affect is crazy to even think about, and we are at the very beginnings. In 25 years, the tech we have now, the AI we have now, will seem like an icebox or transistor radio seems to us now.
There was a very interesting VICE special on The Future of Work last night. It was very interesting, and even I didn't realize the shifts that were already occurring. For instance I did not know that the floor of the NYSE was no longer filled with young men starting out as traders...it looks like an empty casino now, and all the new traders have tech degrees. The programming and digital department is now the biggest portion of Goldman Sachs employees.
This isn't much of a revelation. The big, and somewhat secret problem with the market is that automated trading driven by AI making split-second decisions has long been supplanting traders waving call sheets. The SEC not infrequently suspends automated trading when it could cause a catastrophic cascade in an unstable market situation.
So if "traders" are now just machine operators and standby resources...
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The show covered everything from warehouse work to health care jobs, but the gist was you need advanced tech knowledge in the future even to be a nurse. There is no more nurse handing a scalpel to a surgeon in increasing number of hospitals, but a surgeon behind a TV screen guiding a robotic surgeon.
Again, this isn't really news. That some technical understanding is now needed for a vast number of jobs down to the complex drink dispensers at McDonald's is 1980s news. (I won't go into detail, but I just had a long talk with my orthopedic surgeon about robotic assist... he says it's just fine if you want a procedure to take four hours instead of 90 minutes. Nurses as pit crew are not an immediate thing.)
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The sheer number of jobs it's going to affect is crazy to even think about, and we are at the very beginnings.
And that's really it, but the focus - including yours, here - is that it will all be in moderate-level, hands-on, worker-drone (even if highly trained worker drone) fields. That's a given and has been a rising tide for decades; see the other thread about how Ford churns out F-150s with hardly any people on the plant floor.
The watershed, which is all but upon us, is that AI is going to start replacing brain/judgment/intellectual/white collar jobs - something that has been smugly assumed not just to be safe from the robotic invasion, but where all those displaced assembly-line workers will go when the revolution comes.
Surprise. Not only will your skilled-assembly job be toast, but your dusty Accounting degree will be wastepaper as well.
And that's really it, but the focus - including yours, here - is that it will all be in moderate-level, hands-on, worker-drone (even if highly trained worker drone) fields. That's a given and has been a rising tide for decades; see the other thread about how Ford churns out F-150s with hardly any people on the plant floor.
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I was very impressed touring Nissan a decade ago, to see how much of each auto's labor assembly time was being done by robots.
BTW, AI is still decades away from making big dents in skilled employment, but it is coming.
Now the A/P clerk or A/R clerk jobs can go faster, but those are like cashiers, rote, repetitive tasks, and low skill levels.. Much of USA A/P at big corps is done, now, in Asia, btw. So to eliminate it, AI must cost less than cheap Asian labor.
The analysts job is safe from AI until the latter develops many, many times where AI is at now.
This isn't much of a revelation. The big, and somewhat secret problem with the market is that automated trading driven by AI making split-second decisions has long been supplanting traders waving call sheets. The SEC not infrequently suspends automated trading when it could cause a catastrophic cascade in an unstable market situation.
So if "traders" are now just machine operators and standby resources...
Again, this isn't really news. That some technical understanding is now needed for a vast number of jobs down to the complex drink dispensers at McDonald's is 1980s news. (I won't go into detail, but I just had a long talk with my orthopedic surgeon about robotic assist... he says it's just fine if you want a procedure to take four hours instead of 90 minutes. Nurses as pit crew are not an immediate thing.)
And that's really it, but the focus - including yours, here - is that it will all be in moderate-level, hands-on, worker-drone (even if highly trained worker drone) fields. That's a given and has been a rising tide for decades; see the other thread about how Ford churns out F-150s with hardly any people on the plant floor.
The watershed, which is all but upon us, is that AI is going to start replacing brain/judgment/intellectual/white collar jobs - something that has been smugly assumed not just to be safe from the robotic invasion, but where all those displaced assembly-line workers will go when the revolution comes.
Surprise. Not only will your skilled-assembly job be toast, but your dusty Accounting degree will be wastepaper as well.
Why does something have to be brand new “news” or revelatory in order to be covered in depth on a show? It was meant to educate those curious about the topic and who will be in the workforce then, not to reveal surprises no one knew. Like I said, much of it was new knowledge for me at least and I’m sure I’m not alone.
BTW, AI is still decades away from making big dents in skilled employment, but it is coming.
The analysts job is safe from AI until the latter develops many, many times where AI is at now.
Well, if you say so. My colleague whose field is the AI/human interface (in the largest sense) is pretty firmly convinced we'll see inroads to white collar jobs within five years, and it will accelerate from there.
Anyone who is aware of where AI implementation is at - right now - will concur, just maybe with a slightly different timeline. But the idea that it's so far off as to not be a problem - right now - is... wrong. "Mechanization" of the more rote desk jobs is already being implemented on small scales.
Why does something have to be brand new “news” or revelatory in order to be covered in depth on a show?
It doesn't. But it's still pretty old news given that this thread is mostly about where automation and AI are going now, a good ten years past all that information. Think of it as a documentary about how some cars can be powered by batteries - wow, right?
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It was meant to educate those curious about the topic and who will be in the workforce then, not to reveal surprises no one knew.
Well, then they likely missed the point. The short-sighted mindset that jobs then will be like jobs now, just different is increasingly out of step with reality. The real surprise is that the next wave of automation - use whatever term you like - is going to drastically reduce the number of jobs. And not labor and assembly and warehouse jobs, or even cashier and receptionist jobs, but what have heretofore been classed as "good" jobs high-paying, white-collar careers long regarded as immune to being "automated."
The other part of the outdated view, that somehow all the displaced workers will find new careers, is pretty easy to demolish as well. Junior accountants are not going to become AI developers... and there won't be any need for them to do so. The smaller overall job pool will already be filled.
Just like (to bring this back to topic) the workers Walmart will be displacing are not going to become robot systems managers, developers or even maintainers. Not any meaningful fraction of them, anyway. So where do 100,000 WM floor staff go when the robots take over most of their functions? (Now apply that to accounting, actuaries, the lowest tier of software development, IT management...)
Well, if you say so. My colleague whose field is the AI/human interface (in the largest sense) is pretty firmly convinced we'll see inroads to white collar jobs within five years, and it will accelerate from there.
Anyone who is aware of where AI implementation is at - right now - will concur, just maybe with a slightly different timeline. But the idea that it's so far off as to not be a problem - right now - is... wrong. "Mechanization" of the more rote desk jobs is already being implemented on small scales.
You reminded me of a part of the show I forgot about. They had a newly developed AI lawyer read a business contract and look for errors (including a line they put in about “shall incur penalty of $15,000 per event to Vice News” and had an experienced lawyer across from it found the same. The AI lawyer was done in 24 minutes with 95% accuracy including finding that line. The human lawyer took an hour and a few seconds, had an 83% accuracy rate and did not spot the line.
They still need a lawyer to look over the flagged content, but probably won’t even need that in 10 years. It may do away with paralegal work.
It doesn't. But it's still pretty old news given that this thread is mostly about where automation and AI are going now, a good ten years past all that information. Think of it as a documentary about how some cars can be powered by batteries - wow, right?
Well, then they likely missed the point. The short-sighted mindset that jobs then will be like jobs now, just different is increasingly out of step with reality. The real surprise is that the next wave of automation - use whatever term you like - is going to drastically reduce the number of jobs. And not labor and assembly and warehouse jobs, or even cashier and receptionist jobs, but what have heretofore been classed as "good" jobs high-paying, white-collar careers long regarded as immune to being "automated."
The other part of the outdated view, that somehow all the displaced workers will find new careers, is pretty easy to demolish as well. Junior accountants are not going to become AI developers... and there won't be any need for them to do so. The smaller overall job pool will already be filled.
Just like (to bring this back to topic) the workers Walmart will be displacing are not going to become robot systems managers, developers or even maintainers. Not any meaningful fraction of them, anyway. So where do 100,000 WM floor staff go when the robots take over most of their functions? (Now apply that to accounting, actuaries, the lowest tier of software development, IT management...)
They said all of that and discussed BMI as well. Why don’t you actually watch it before you critique it? How can you critique it without first seeing it? To me you sound like you just want to be the smartest guy in the room.
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