By PAUL F RENDA
If you have read the recent papers, you see that Google has recently purchased Boston Dynamics, a renowned robotics company. That makes seven robotics companies that Google has purchased. Boston Dynamics has created a number of bipedal and quadruped creatures including a big and little dog. I watched the video of a big dog walking through a snow-covered field, navigating a pile of cinderblocks, and slipping on ice. I watched this video again with my golden retriever, Max, and when big dog slipped on the ice and tried to get up Max started barking at him.
Google is also working on a driverless car. You can maneuver in traffic around obstacles such as stop lights without getting in an accident, and pretty soon a driverless bus will be invented.
When most of us think about robots, we think of big, expensive industrial robots that are in cages. These are gruesome and menacing machines. However, there is new type of robot that has been developed called Baxter that has a human-looking face and people can be around him. He’s not menacing looking or dangerous and Baxter can be programmed just by moving his hand back and forth through a number of different procedures—like picking up an object and dropping it into a box. He costs $22,000, a low enough price that he competes with the federal minimum wage. I don’t know if this will be the breakthrough robotics or not but it’s the way to go. Incredibly enough it can compete with min wage labor.
Workers at the Amazon warehouse earn minimum wage. They run back and forth retrieving merchandise and readying it for shipment. In the near future, they will be replaced by bipedal robots. Amazon is also looking at using drones to deliver merchandise for same-day deliveries. While this may still be a number of years off, a totally robotic warehouse is not.
Today, computing power has dropped in price dramatically as in the old days, mainframes were expensive. One IBM engineer thought only about three or four companies could ever afford a computer. Today, computers are everywhere and there is more computing power in a midsize car today than there was in the lunar excursion module that landed on the moon. The powerful IBM Watson won a series of Jeopardy contests and artificial intelligence is accelerating along with fuzzy logic and neural networks.
Logistics is the movement of material or people from one place to another. Examples of people involved in logistics jobs are bus drivers, postal workers, deliverymen, and warehouse workers. My cousins had good jobs as mailmen and bus drivers, solid middle class jobs that enabled them to put their kids through college, have a house, and in general, a middle-class lifestyle. Unfortunately, many of those jobs are now going away. African-Americans are disproportionately involved in jobs related to logistics. These jobs were good vehicles for African-Americans to advance in the middle-class. Nobody in Washington has the foresight to see that a large group of jobs are going away as they look to replace them.
In business, you can always note the competition between labor and capital as is it cheaper to buy a new machine than it is to hire a new worker. Increasingly, robots are capable of performing more complex functions. Fast food workers have been demonstrating for higher wages and the President wants to increase the minimum wage as he is simultaneously introducing Obamacare. One problem is that both of those things make labor more expensive and capital right now is cheap. It is inexpensive to finance a machine such as Baxter, which costs just $22,000—similar to one minimum wage worker. Robots don’t need the National Labor Relations Board, they don’t get sick, they don’t strike, and they show up on Mondays and Fridays.
Hundreds of years ago, about 90% of the US population was involved in agriculture. After the Civil War, the majority of African Americans worked in agriculture. Today, less than 2% of the population is involved in agriculture. It should come as no shock that logistics, which is very labor-intensive, will sometime in the future be run by robotics.