Is Your Job In The Robot Kill Path? RPA, Jim Hightower
Creators.com, March 17, 2021. - Excerpts, Ed.
Some people find hunting for sport to be abhorrent, so hunters have come up with euphemisms to make what they do sound gentler on the ears of the nonhunting public. For example, animals aren't killed; they're "harvested." And dead prey is not gutted but "processed." Corporate America has taken note of this verbal ploy and is now adopting it, for CEOs urgently need euphemisms to soften the image of their constant hunt for ways to kill jobs and funnel more money to themselves and top investors. Their urgency is that they're now pushing a huge new surge in job cuts — this time targeting college-educated, white-collar professionals! Their weapon is the same sort of neutron bomb they've used to dispatch millions of blue-collar workers: robots.
But that term has a very bad reputation, so robots have been relabeled with a nondescript acronym: RPA, "robotic process automation." These are not your grandfather's old bots merely doing repetitive mechanical tasks. Sophisticated automatons armed with artificial intelligence have quietly moved up the corporate ladder to take over cognitive work that had been the niche of such highly paid humans as financial analysts, lawyers, engineers, managers and doctors. This is more than just an incremental extension of a long, slow automation process. It's a transformative Big Bang, presently ripping through America's workforce at warp speed with no public or political attention, and most of the vulnerable employees have no idea of what's coming.
Corporate executives, boards and investors do know, however, for they've been rushing furtively in the past year or so to implement RPA initiatives. The New York Times reports that a survey of executives last year found that nearly 80% of them have already put some forms of RPA in place, with an additional 16% planning to do so within three years. Yes, that's 96% of corporate employers. Sales of the new-age automation software are booming, turning little-known providers like UiPath and Automation Anywhere into multibillion-dollar behemoths intent on radically shrinking the job market here and elsewhere. McKinsey, the world's biggest corporate strategy consultancy, calculated in 2019 that the emerging revolution of thinking robotics would displace 37 million U.S. workers by 2030.
Now, seeing the current corporate stampede to impose RPAs on U.S. workplaces, McKinsey analysts have upped their projection to 45 million job losses by 2030.. professional jobs requiring human-level judgment have been presumed to be beyond the range of robotic firepower. But, as one economist who studies labor now notes, with the mass deployment of RPA technology, "that type of work is much more in the kill path." The corporate vocabulary does not include the phrase "job cuts." Rather, such unpleasantness is blandly referred to as "employment adjustment." Moreover, terminations are hailed as universally beneficial — they're said to "streamline" operations and "liberate" the workforce from tedious tasks...
https://www.creators.com/read/jim-hightower/03/21/is-your-job-in-the-robot-kill-path
= new reply since forum marked as read
called "The Brain Center at Whipple's".
In the end, the boss gets his just desserts and is replaced by a robot.
