As the September jobs report looms, a recent report from Wells Fargo is casting a bleak light on the future of banking jobs.
The report revealed that robots are likely to reduce headcount by 200,000 over the next decade throughout the financial industry in the U.S. Wells Fargo’s Mike Mayo spoke to Yahoo Finance’s On The Move this week and said banks will be investing significantly in technology over the next 10 years.
“The next decade should be the biggest decade for banks in technology in history. You’re about to see the biggest capital for labor swap in history,” Mayo said.
As AI and machine learning transform industries by automating much of the work currently done by humans, women’s careers will be disproportionately affected. That’s according to a McKinsey Global Institute report published earlier this year (“The future of women at work: Transitions in the age of automation“), which found that women predominate in occupations that’ll be adversely impacted. About 40% of jobs where men make up the majority in the 10 economies (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., the U.S., China, India, Mexico, and South America) contributing over 60% of GDP collectively could be displaced by automation in our 2030, compared with the 52% of women-dominated jobs with high automation potential.
The process of refilling your prescription at the local pharmacy just got a lot more futuristic.
Wing — which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet — just announced a partnership with FedEx and Walgreens, a national grocery store chain, to start making drone deliveries in Virginia as soon as October.
Wing claims the “first-of-its-kind trial” will explore “ways to enhance efficiency of last-mile delivery services,” according to a press release.
Truck drivers worried about losing their jobs to robots staged a protest outside the Capitol building in Jefferson City, Missouri on Tuesday.
Their goal was to convince the government to pass a bill that would prohibit any self-driving trucks from driving on Missouri roads, KRCG reports. While there are no autonomous trucks handling shipping jobs in the state yet, the truckers see the emerging technology as a grave threat to their job security and livelihoods — unrest that signals what can happen when jobs are automated without giving thought to the displaced workers.
Heavy rain and blizzards aren’t the only forms of severe weather Waymo’s self-driving vehicles encounter on the regular. In a blog post published this morning, the Alphabet subsidiary laid out the ways its cars in over 25 cities tackle fog, dust, smoke, and other dangerous conditions that trip up even human drivers.
“Challenging [environmental] conditions, which affect human driver and vehicle performance, are one of the leading contributors to crashes on our roads … Poor perception creates significant risk for other road users including pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicle occupants,” wrote Waymo chief safety officer Debbie Hersman. “Waymo is working hard to master a variety of weather scenarios as part of our mission to improve road safety.”
Self-driving cars will only last four years because they will be used so much, a Ford executive has predicted.
John Rich, operations chief of Ford Autonomous Vehicles, dismissed concerns that demand for cars would wane in the future.
“The thing that worries me least in this world is decreasing demand for cars. We will exhaust and crush a car every four years in this business,” he told The Telegraph.
The Detroit-headquartered car maker plans to establish an autonomous fleet which will be used as a service by other companies, to be used as delivery vehicles or to transport employees.
The blocky, 36-foot-long, yellow- and white-striped vessel bobbing off the coast of the United Kingdom sure doesn’t look like much. But Maxlimer just might be the most important ship in the world right now.
Maxlimer is totally robotic. And it’s poised to be the first unmanned surface vessel, or USV, to cross the Atlantic. The journey could prove the case for a host of new oceangoing drones: crewless cargo ships; unmanned oil tankers; robotic work boats.
But don’t hold your breath. Widespread adoption could take years or even decades.
Starship Technologies announces an expansion of its robot delivery service after raising $40 million
The quintessential college experience of getting pizza delivered to your dorm room is about to get a high-tech upgrade. On Tuesday, Starship Technologies announced its plan to deploy thousands of its autonomous six-wheeled delivery robots on college campuses around the country over the next two years, after raising $40 million in Series A funding.
It’s a big step for the San Francisco (née Estonia)-based startup and its robots, which have been tested in over 100 cities in 20 different countries, traveled 350,000 miles, crossed 4 million streets, and just marked the milestone of completing its 100,000th delivery. College campuses, with their abundance of walking paths, well-defined boundaries, and smartphone-using, delivery-minded student bodies, are an obvious place for Starship to stake out the next phase of its business.
The legendary war philosopher Sun Tzu famously said, “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.” Logistics is all about efficiency, and in today’s e-commerce-challenged supply chain, efficiency has been blown up to a large extent. Supply chains across industries, particularly in the retail-to-end-user world, have been undergoing complete reinvention for the better part of a decade.
Supply chain disruption resulting from e-commerce is rooted in the push to an omnichannel delivery model: Retailers are working hard to adapt to consumer demand to buy anywhere, accept delivery anywhere and return anywhere. Five-to-seven-day delivery is being replaced by one-to-two-day delivery, and the quest for the holy grail of low-cost, same-day or even two-hour delivery is stressing the old retail supply chain model. Failure to adopt an omnichannel strategy usually means death, as the many recently bankrupt retailers would surely attest.
The self-driving freight truck startup TuSimple has been carrying mail across the state of Arizona for several weeks.
UPS announced on Thursday that its venture capital arm has made a minority investment in TuSimple. The announcement also revealed that since May TuSimple autonomous trucks have been hauling UPS loads on a 115-mile route between Phoenix and Tucson.
UPS confirmed to Gizmodo this is the first time UPS has announced it has been using TuSimple autonomous trucks to deliver packages in the state.
Around the same time as the UPS and TuSimple program began, the United States Postal Service and TuSimple publicized a two-week pilot program to deliver mail between Phoenix and Dallas, a 1,000 mile trip.
I originally wrote and published a version of this article in September 2016. Since then, quite a bit has happened, further cementing my view that these changes are coming and that the implications will be even more substantial. I decided it was time to update this article with some additional ideas and a few changes.
As I write this, Uber just announced that it just ordered 24,000 self-driving Volvos. Tesla just released an electric, long-haul tractor trailer with extraordinary technical specs (range, performance) and self-driving capabilities (UPS just preordered 125!). And, Tesla just announced what will probably be the quickest production car ever made — perhaps the fastest. It will go zero to sixty in about the time it takes you to read zero to sixty. And, of course, it will be able to drive itself. The future is quickly becoming now. Google just ordered thousands of Chryslers for its self-driving fleet (that are already on the roads in AZ).
In September of 2016, Uber had just rolled out its first self-driving taxis in Pittsburgh, Tesla and Mercedes were rolling out limited self-driving capabilities and cities around the world were negotiating with companies who want to bring self-driving cars and trucks to their cities. Since then, all of the major car companies have announced significant steps towards mostly or entirely electric vehicles, more investments have been made in autonomous vehicles, driverless trucks now seem to be leading rather than following in terms of the first large scale implementations and there’ve been a few more incidents (i.e. accidents).
I believe that the timeframe for significant adoption of this technology has shrunk in the past year as technology has gotten better faster and as the trucking industry has increased its level of interest and investment.
The global manufacturing market reached $38 trillion in 2018, contributing a 15% increase in global production output. Within this market, a broad range of goods is produced and processed, spanning from consumer goods, heavy industrials to storage and transportation of raw materials and finished products.
To sustain ongoing growth, today’s manufacturers are hyper-focused on three key mandates. First is to improve utilization rates of expensive fixed assets that are below optimal capacity. Second is to fill the current and increasing void of specialized labor. Deloitte estimates that by 2028, the skills gap in the US will result in 2.4 million unfilled seats out of a total of 16 million manufacturing jobs. Lastly, manufacturers must protect operating profit as industry average EBITDA margin continues to decline from 11.2% in 2015 to 8.6% in 2018.
Many startups are now starting to offer tailored products and services to help traditional manufacturers meet these goals. Until recently, hardware components such as sensors were expensive and had unclear ROI. Data was siloed, and no solution to scale insight was available. However, since the AI revolution in the early 2010s, startups are finding ways to overcome these challenges through technical innovation.
