Automation

Michael Tam, chief brand officer at Shenzhen-based UBTech, which has partnerships with carmaker BYD and Apple contractor Foxconn, said its Walker S2 robots were 30 to 50 per cent as productive as humans and only in certain tasks such as stacking boxes and quality control. Yet manufacturers are still racing to order them to avoid losing out to competitors, Tam told the FT. “You can imagine . . . if Tesla has the advantage of…

Summary by Claude. Let me break down what Jones and Tonetti are arguing. The Core Question How much of past economic growth came from automation, and what does that tell us about AI's future impact? The Key Insight: "Weak Links" The paper's central concept is that economic production involves complementary tasks — you need all of them to produce output. Think of it like a chain: your output is limited by your weakest link,…

Anything that can be automated should be. There’s no good reason humans should be making excel models or powerpoints in 10 years, any more than they should be hand-washing clothes. It’s toil and drudgery. What will remain? Anything we want to do because it’s fun or interesting. May be weird but I view automation as a moral imperative so that everybody can spend their time gardening or making art or playing chess or making…

If you’re thinking about starting an argument with “AI will eventually automate all jobs,” I’m begging you to (1) talk to a plumber and a kindergarten teacher, and (2) have an economist walk you through how a big increase in the efficiency of producing X impacts demand for not-X. “Not only do most jobs involve doing work in the physical world (plumbers), many jobs involve forming emotional relationships with other human…

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers. Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to…