You may have heard about dockworkers striking on the East and Gulf Coasts. The strike is about both wages/benefits and replacement of jobs by automation. On the latter subject, I thought this was interesting:
Geraldine Knatz, a former executive director of the Port of Los Angeles who is now a professor at the University of Southern California, notes that ports that introduced automation say they have experienced increased safety and more standardized performance. But her research shows that, in her words, “None of the U.S. terminals realized the level of benefits for reduced labor costs that they anticipated, and two overestimated the reduction in labor costs.” [WaPo]
I think there’ll be more successful automation of jobs that are difficult to do, such as reading radiographs, than for jobs that are not so difficult. Sure, there are scheduling advantages to automation, but often these jobs are full of unexpected events and interrupts that are better dealt with by humans that are immediately present than the rigid programming of automation.
The difficult jobs that are more likely to be taken over by automation are often isolated from such events, much like radiographs, and a human manager can stand by to help, such as when a radiograph occasionally slips out of the sensor range of the automaton.
