Minimum Wage And Car Wash Automation
An article in Reason on the effects that a $15 per hour minimum wage will have on car wash employment is a mini history of car wash automation. What is most surprising about it: the level of car wash automation has not steadily increased. When cheap illegal immigrant labor flooded into certain regions (notably New York City) the level of automation actually went down. This happened for multiple reasons including the ability to locate a non-automated car wash on a smaller piece of property. A higher minimum wage (coming to California, New York State, and perhaps some other states) will bring back much higher levels of car w...
Source: FuturePundit - June 4, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Drones To Take Inventory At Wal-Mart Warehouses
By Q1 2017 Wal-Mart will be using drones to fly around inside warehouses to take inventory. What strikes me as odd: Why don't they know inventory at all times by exactly measuring what goes in and out? In a warehouse where robots stock and unstock all shelves I do not expect these drones will be necessary. Ground-based robots moving around the warehouse will be able to take inventory as they add and remove boxes and items. Automated store stocking seems more interesting and probably would save a lot more labor. Automated store stocking could also lead into automated robots picking up your items for you. We might see the ri...
Source: FuturePundit - June 4, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Robots Coming To Restaurants
Ed Rensi, former CEO of McDonalds, says a higher minimum wage will bring more robots into fast food making. its cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee whos inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries Rensi also says ordering Kiosks are already deployed in higher wage areas of Europe and are in limited deployment in the United States. Panera has ordering Kiosks in about 20% of their American restaurants and expect roll-out to all restaurants in a few years. In Japan Pizza Hut is rolling out robot order takers. So we do not even need a high minimum wage for mass replacement of restaur...
Source: FuturePundit - May 28, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Start-Up Targets Autonomous Long Haul Trucks
A San Francisco start-up named Otto seeks to bring self-driving trucks to market before self-driving cars. Their argument is that the ROI for autonomous trucks is higher because each truck has such a high price ($150k) and high distance driven per year. Makes sense. What I found interesting: the idea that autonomous vehicles will hit small towns especially hard. Long haul truckers live in smaller towns with lower real estate costs. They do not need to be near major cities since when they go to work they travel long distances. So when the over 3 million long haul truckers in America lose their jobs to autonomous trucks they...
Source: FuturePundit - May 16, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Rising Competition From The Genetically Engineered
I assert: Genetic engineering of human offspring will start some time in the 2020s. It will take off sharply in the 2030s. The rapid rate of advance in CRISPR gene editing technology combined with the rapid rate in decline of genome sequencing costs will make this possible. People will jump on offspring genetic engineering because they want kids that will excel at something. The range of desired areas of excellence is quite large (ballet dancing, novel writing, software development, painting, music composition, musical instrument playing, investing, managing, etc). The challenge: what to choose for the genetic endowment of...
Source: FuturePundit - May 7, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Many Labrador Retrievers Have Hunger Boosting Mutation
Labs are fat because they've got genes for perpetual hunger. Starting with an initial cohort of 15 obese and 18 lean Labrador retrievers, Raffan and her colleagues selected three obesity-related genes to examine, all of which were known to affect weight in humans. This first analysis turned up a variation in a gene called POMC. In more of the obese dogs, a section of DNA was scrambled at the end of the gene. The deletion is predicted to hinder a dog's ability to produce the neuropeptides β-MSH and β-Endorphin, which are usually involved in switching off hunger after a meal. POMC isn't the only gene contributing to canine...
Source: FuturePundit - May 6, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Hurricanes Recharge Aquifers, Boost Carbon Capture
Hurricanes are good: Increases in carbon uptake by southeast US forests in response to tropical cyclone activity alone exceed carbon emissions by American vehicles each year. "Our results show that, while hurricanes can cause flooding and destroy city infrastructure, there are two sides to the story," said Barros, the James L. Meriam Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University. "The other side is that hurricanes recharge the aquifers and have an enormous impact on photosynthesis and taking up carbon from the atmosphere." So if we harden our infrastructure to reduce the damage from hurricanes we can ...
Source: FuturePundit - May 5, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Middle East To Become Too Hot To Live In?
Climate-exodus expected in the Middle East and North Africa: Part of the Middle East and North Africa may become uninhabitable due to climate change Lelieveld and his colleagues have investigated how temperatures will develop in the Middle East and North Africa over the course of the 21st century. The result is deeply alarming: Even if Earth's temperature were to increase on average only by two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold. By mid-century, during the warmest periods, temperatures will not fall below 30 degrees at night, and duri...
Source: FuturePundit - May 1, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
James Miller Interviews Razib Khan On Human Genetic Advances
Offspring genetic selection for IQ will come sooner than widespread adoption of electric cars. Razib thinks we'll know enough about the genetic structure of intelligence to start doing embryo selection for higher intelligence by 2020. We will see people accept genetic research results by their own choices when they come to reproduce. Says Razib: "Revealed preferences do dictate history at the end of the day". Say in the year 2021 we can select embryos for higher IQ. What will be the cost of testing a few dozen genomes well enough to select the ideal embryo? g Razib says the rate of advance of CRISPR genetic editing on embr...
Source: FuturePundit - April 30, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
When Self-Driving Cars Achieve Sentience
Your self-driving car could decide you have a bad job, send your resume and work history to an AI at a different company,and negotiate a new job for you. The first you'll find out about it is when, on the way to work, the car will take an unexpected turn, drive you to a different building in a different town, and a robot will roll out to greet you as you get out of the car. The robot will tell you what your new job is as you follow it into your new office building or factory. Then there's the new autonomous vehicle blind date. You get in the car, it pulls up in front of an apartment building, and... (Source: FuturePundit)
Source: FuturePundit - April 30, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Semi-Autonomous Trucks And More Tasks For Drivers
We are headed for a transitional phase where trucks mostly drive themselves but human drivers have to remain present to take over in circumstances that computers can't handle. A piece in Wired speculates that drivers will take on other tasks remotely while driving. Is this idea viable? If the trucks could have high speed internet through much of their trips and the high speed internet was cheap enough then I can see a number of potential users of trucker time: Drivers could monitor video streams of businesses to look for criminals invading business premises in off hours. Or monitor video streams of stores to spot shoplifte...
Source: FuturePundit - April 27, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Farming Automation And Robots
Japanese farmers are old and as they retire younger Japanese aren't replacing them. Japan imports most of its food. So what to do? Develop a variety of robots to automate farming. One Japanese company is developing a fully automated indoors farm. They expect it to be more energy efficient than outdoors farming. Automated farming is, as one would expect, under development in other countries as well. Two different robotic weed sprayers are under testing at a Yorkshire England farm and at farms in Queensland Australia. In Minnesota automated milking equipment boosts productivity per cow. A robot that picks thru and sorts orga...
Source: FuturePundit - April 22, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Mediterranean Diet Helps Heart Patients
Even after you already have a heart condition the Mediterranean diet is still good for you: 'Mediterranean' diet linked to lower risk of heart attacks & strokes in heart patients. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Eat more whole grain and less refined grain foods. Something worth noting here: The unhealthy majority, by preferring unhealthy foods, reduce the options for healthier eating for the rest of us in restaurants. If more people shifted toward a preference for whole grains then we'd have more whole grain choices when eating out. As it stands now in many restaurants, especially fast food restaurants, there are no whole ...
Source: FuturePundit - April 12, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Saturated Fat Really Harmful?
Does a switch to polyunsaturates increase mortality by increasing inflammation? Seems plausible. See this Harvard Health article on foods that promote and reduce inflammation. I already avoid polyunsaturated fats due to the inflammation risk of excess linoleic acid in the diet and stick to olive or canola oil (or butter for that matter). As for meat with saturated fats: I do not avoid them to avoid the fat. I avoid red meat in order to avoid the iron load. High blood ferritin seems like a more serious worry than high blood cholesterol.... (Source: FuturePundit)
Source: FuturePundit - April 12, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Automation, Robots, Jobs
There are now 260,000 robots working in U.S. factories. My own reaction: Only 260k? I was expecting more. Robot sales are growing at over 10% per year. Amazon alone has 30,000 robots. I think that's a global number. "Fintech" (financial technology) start-ups look set to provide levels of automation that will become much more disruptive to employment in banking and finance. Employment in banking has peaked due to automation and is in a long term declining trend. Citibank analysts believe "Banking's Uber Moment" has arrived and employment in banking will decline 30% by 2025. Some fearful people want to stop the robots. That'...
Source: FuturePundit - April 8, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
