Atlas and Spot won’t have blank spaces on their resumes.
The Boston Dynamics robots, famous for their YouTube parkour and dancing exploits, could land a position in a heartbeat, as can many non-human job-seekers, part of the wave of robot hires amid a human worker shortage.
As the Associated Press reported, the pandemic ushered in these workplace changes.
Companies are starting to automate service sector jobs, thanks to higher labor costs and the aforementioned worker shortages.
Machines can do many tasks such as toss pizza dough, transport hospital linens, inspect gauges and sort goods. What’s more, machines can’t get sick or spread disease.
The pandemic and the government’s response to it has created a Catch-22 for humans. To get through the worst of COVID, trillions of dollars were pumped into the economy. We had lot of dollars, but not enough goods, the perfect recipe for inflation, which Joe Biden assures us is temporary.
Yet he continues down a path of mega-spending, which would do nothing to tame the beast, assurances to the contrary. Combined with supply chain problems, wages aren’t keeping pace with the soaring price of goods.
People want higher wages. Biden promised $15 an hour, and federal contractors will do just that starting next year. Workers also want benefits, and under the Affordable Care Act, employers with 50 or more employees must provide ObamaCare-qualified health coverage, as The Hill reported.
Parents can pick up a tidy sum of cash per kid under the child tax credits, and extended unemployment benefits took the edge off any urgency to find a job.
But companies want to stay in business, and they need workers. If humans won’t fill out applications, they’ll turn elsewhere.
And they have.
According to the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), a U.S.-based automation trade association, robot orders in the first quarter of 2021 were up 20% over 2020’s Q1. And second quarter orders increased 67% over the same period in 2020.
Jeff Burnstein, president of A3, said last May, “While advances in robot technology, ease of use and new applications remain key drivers in robot adoption, worker shortages in manufacturing, warehousing and other industries are a significant factor in the current expansion of robot use that we’re now seeing.”
Those ‘bots won’t call for higher wages, health benefits or flex schedules to accommodate child care. There are no unemployment insurance premiums to be paid. And the longer they’re in the workforce, saving employers money, doing the job, letting the public get used to seeing robots in service jobs, the easier it will be to see human workers as the less-efficient option.
An Arby’s drive-thru near Los Angeles has Tori on its staff — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that takes orders and sends it to line cooks.
“It doesn’t call sick,” said Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby’s franchise this year. “It doesn’t get corona. And the reliability of it is great.”
Robots are terrific — they can do tasks that are too dangerous for humans, carry loads too heavy, go into places such as mines that could be hazardous — in short, assist people as they work.
But the increasing number of robots in service jobs should serve as a wakeup call to those reluctant to return to work: The boss sees you as replaceable.
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