Your New High Tech Best Friend

Although some people would argue that the smart phone has replaced them, I think most still consider dogs as “man’s best friend.” I do feel bad though for my neighbors as they stroll, leash in hand, past my front window in all kinds of weather.

Despite the fact that having a dog as a pet is a major time and financial commitment, people still find the idea appealing. But does it have to be that way?

According to this site, the first year cost of a dog can easily reach between $1500 and $2000. From then on “costs for food, treats, veterinary exams, routine diagnostic testing, vaccines, deworming, preventive medications, licenses and health insurance” can add up to a “total lifetime cost of caring for a dog to $10,000 to $14,000,” with some exceptions running to $30,000 or more. That doesn’t include the value of time spent on those daily walks, the anxiety when your dog gets loose (which seems to happen once a week to someone in my neighborhood based on nextdoor.com emails) and the grief of eventually losing a family member.

Despite the cost and inconvenience, the attraction remains and the latest news reports explain why. This comes from CNN, but the New York Times, Yahoo and several others passed along the story. According to scientists, “'Puppy dog eyes' have evolved to appeal to humans.” By dissecting dog and wolf heads, they discovered that domestic dogs have an extra eyebrow muscle that “allows them to ‘intensely’ raise their eyebrows.” This movement, the look known as puppy dog eyes, elicits a strong nurturing response in humans, like the reaction to a human baby “and also resembles a movement humans produce when they are sad."

Does that mean that dogs evolved in a way that allows them to better appeal to the ones who feed, walk, shelter and play with them? As the lead researcher puts it, "The AU101 movement is significant in the human-dog bond because it might elicit a caring response from humans but also might create the illusion of human-like communication." Hence we unconsciously move from pet owners to “pet parents” by this evolved talent for psychological manipulation!

But the Twenty-first Century question is: Why can’t we have it all without the cost? And technology has the answer.

Several companies have been developing and testing robot pets for use in nursing homes where pets often aren’t allowed or patients don’t have the ability to look after them. The latest entry is a fluffy dog called Tombot, designed by muppet master Jim Henson's Creature Shop. They built the robot to "emulate live animal appearance and behaviors, providing ongoing fun, happiness, and emotional support." Machine learning and artificial intelligence allows companies to design more lifelike, sentient robots to “focus more on human companionship rather than [traditional] task-oriented performance.”

So far tests of robotic companions have focused on their benefit to the elderly. Live dogs still produced better long-term effects than robotic toys, but the gap may be closing. One study from 2016 found only small differences in responses to a dog or a robot at first, but interaction with robot pets decreased more quickly over time. Surprisingly, they found “no measurable benefits of six weeks of interactions with either fake or real therapy animals.”

As advancements continue, though, and robots become more lifelike, act more spontaneous and are able to do more than just respond, this relationship may change. A different brand already claims their robotic pet “keeps on growing and changing, constantly updating its data in the cloud.” As it accumulates a record of the owner’s interactions with it, it will gradually shape its own personality and learn new tricks.

Prices range from $450 to about $2,000. Compared to a real dog, this sounds like a bargain. We may see this trend extend from nursing homes to ordinary homes, especially as the robots develop the same longterm appeal while incorporating new features like security cameras. Kids clamoring for a dog can try out a robot first and possibly be satisfied for the long term. Imagine a future where airline comfort animals are replaced by a robot rented at the origin and dropped off at the destination. No, that will never happen – not until some celebrity turns it into a fad!

The Robots are Coming!

Picking strawberries is hard work. Pickers spend a lot of time on their hands and knees peeking under leaves and straw to find and pick the ripe ones. I know first hand. A few years ago a small team of Master Gardeners at my local Demonstration Garden picked and donated over 500 pounds of strawberries to local food banks in a matter of about three weeks. We spent a couple of hours, three days a week, working our way down the rows. (The following year about half of the older rows were plowed under and not replaced with strawberries! It was too hard to find interested volunteers.)

Picking strawberries is also exacting work. Each picker must determine which strawberries are ready and which to wait on. Unlike bananas and many other fruits and vegetables, strawberries will not continue to ripen after harvesting. And if you don’t get them at the right time, they will rot on the plant. That’s why coming back day after day is necessary.

Besides being difficult and exacting, picking strawberries is delicate work. No one wants to eat a squished strawberry. People who buy them in the stores are usually even fussier than people getting them for free at a food bank.

Why all this discussion of strawberries? A robot is coming to do this difficult, exacting and delicate work and may be in limited operation on strawberry farms within three years. As the article points out “a robot that can pick strawberries may ease the industry’s labor problem and revolutionize the way crops are harvested.” It’s getting harder to find workers, and the ones that show up often move on to other crops before the job is complete.

Some machines are pictured in the article, but a search on “strawberry harvesting robot” yields a number of YouTube videos. Once in operation they will run for about 20 hours a day with the ability to pick up to 8.5 acres in that time. If there is an abundance of fruit, they automatically slow down to get them all. The robots will be able to do the job with more precision than humans; and will be able to pick at night, when cooler fruits are more resistant to bruising and when lower temperatures at picking time increase shelf life and reduce cooling costs. In addition, the “machine is going to know exactly where each plant is in the field” and “be able to have yield data at the plant level.”

Based on personal experience, I was fascinated by the idea of machines harvesting strawberries. Seeing pictures and videos of the huge robotic arms working in auto assembly where hard work and precision are so important is one thing, but having robots do the delicate work of harvesting fruit and vegetables adds another dimension. As one spokesperson for the robot designer says, “We’re not going to stop with strawberries.” 

Fewer jobs are safe anymore from automation. It’s something to keep in mind as the minimum wage debate rages on. As labor becomes more expensive, the option to substitute machines becomes more attractive – especially if they can do the job with more precision while simultaneously collecting meaningful data. Economic understanding reminds us that every day we are selling our skills in competition against others worldwide with those same skills, and more and more in competition against the threat of substitution by machines.

Kids can no longer bank on the idea of working the same low skill job as their parents and retiring after thirty years with a union pension and healthcare. More skilled robots are coming, and they are coming fast.

Economic Understanding

Everyday we see on the news some reference to economic results or statistics. These should be of interest to everyone, not just those Wall Street tycoons and rich investors. Whether shopping at the grocery store, filling the car with gas or looking for a new job, economics affects our lives in so many ways.

One basic tenet of economics is the law of supply and demand. 

In a free market, the relationship between supply and demand determines the price of goods and services. Things that are scarce cost more because people who own them can wait to get the best offer from the highest bidder. Things that are common cost less because people who need them have a choice of sources; they can take their time to shop around for the best deal. As the supply of a product increases, the price goes down, simply because there is more of it. The opposite is also true.

This idea of supply and demand is behind many price changes, but it hits close to home when it affects jobs and wages. 

A couple of weeks ago the Business Insider ran a headline that made the point clearly: “The US unemployment rate fell to 3.7%, a 48-year low, in September.  What should be good news is bad news for the fast food and retail industry.” Why would it be bad news for the likes of McDonalds and Wal-Mart? The answer is supply and demand.

When the unemployment rate drops to today’s historic lows, the supply of available workers has decreased. That pushes up the cost of hiring people, that is, buying their services. Many of those jobs typically do not require a high level of education. Needed skills can be learned on the job. But with openings at many potential employers, workers would wisely look to where they could get the best deal – selling their skills to the highest bidder as fast-food locations and retail outlets compete for their time and loyalty.

But there is a downside to this as well. As I have written often before, there is no magic money tree.

The Business Insider continues: “Companies are giving workers higher pay and better benefits to compete – and trying to figure out how to cut labor hours by replacing employees with robots.” The higher wages and benefits must be paid for somehow. Do they pass along the added costs to their customers by raising prices? Do they try to absorb the added costs by making their operation more efficient? In the first case, it would be illegal to collude with their competition to get everyone to raise prices. They must continue to compete honestly. In the second case, using robots is one answer. Fast-food restaurants, grocery stores, banks and others have already increased the amount of self-service they expect from their customers.

Neither of these options is evil. People have raised prices and used automation for years. They are just trying to stay in business. Long distance phone calls used to be very expensive until they replaced operators with computers. Now distance is not even a consideration.

But what happens when the controlling factor is not supply and demand, when instead the government forces or coerces companies to pay more? For example when Senator Bernie Sanders wants McDonald's to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour, they have the same options, raise prices or find ways to reduce overall labor costs. 

Notice that when Amazon came under the same pressure, they did promise all workers a $15 minimum wage. But according to CNBC, “the company is getting rid of incentive pay and stock option awards.” Although Amazon denies it, many workers complained that they will make less with the pay raise than they did before with the other benefits.

With a little economic understanding, none of this comes as a surprise, but people continue to act like there really is some magic money tree and that any well intentioned changes just make the world a better place with no ramifications whatsoever. Then, when the robots fire up and companies are only willing to hire people with $15-an-hour skills to fill the few jobs that are left, where do young people go for a first job experience? Where do today's fast-food workers find other employment?

Robots and Climate Change

There is something about adapting to a bad situation that makes a lot of sense.

This occurred to me when I ran across this article about robots coming to steal everyone’s job. It tells how a couple of economists are worried about the ability to adapt to the relentless march of automation. Their point is: “Too much time discussing whether robots can take your job; not enough time discussing what happens next.

A popular solution has been to “try to stall or reverse the trend of automation,” a kind of resistance movement to make it more difficult. Such measures include extra taxes on robot-produced goods or taxes on the robots themselves, which I wrote about in March of last year. Some propose new government regulations to make automation more difficult. The economists expect this approach to fail because consumers will naturally gravitate toward “cheaper goods or services” made possible by automation. (You don’t see anyone wanting to pay more for phone service to allow telephone operators to keep their jobs.)

Another proposed strategy is to “reduce the cost of human labor, by driving down wages or cutting benefits” making hiring workers preferable to buying robots. No one could seriously endorse this.

The other class of solutions they call “coping strategies.” These include teaching workers whose jobs are threatened new skills, skills less likely to be taken away by automation. Or the government could provide a guarantee to displaced workers, like a universal basic income (UBI). Both are iffy for various reasons: what skills fall into that category, how trainable are workers in mid-career, and how can any country, especially a poor one, support a UBI plan?

There is a need for more creativity around coping strategies, but at this point most of the energy goes toward ways to slow progress, a futile strategy when automation looks inevitable.

Is there a parallel here with climate change? At present all the efforts seem to be directed toward convincing everyone that climate change is real, inevitable and driven largely by human activity. There are a lot of good arguments to back this up. The intention is to promote individual and governmental action to reduce the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – a stalling, not a coping, strategy.

People put their hopes on things like the Paris Agreement to make this happen and many despair at the thought of America bowing out. But how familiar are most Americans with the agreement? It is voluntary. Each country gets to pick its own goals known as its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC).

China, for example, commits “To achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030 and making best efforts to peak early.” Peaking in 2030 means continuing to increase between now and then. India is no better: “India’s INDC do not bind it to any sector specific mitigation obligation or action.” They commit to decrease “emissions intensity” by 33% to 35% in an  economy where the demand for electricity expected to increase by more than 3 times – in other words, they plan meet much more energy need slightly more efficiently. In another instance, Norway commits to “a target of an at least 40% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels.” They get to pick the target and the comparison and when serious development will start, but there is no penalty for missing. (See all countries here.)

Many NDC commitments, when read in detail seem timid at best. Paris doesn’t look like the real solution, just a strategy to postpone the inevitable.

Where are the people talking about dikes and levees around the major coastal cities or better drainage systems for Houston? Why is the government still subsidizing flood insurance for new construction too close to oceans, rivers and streams? So many creative possibilities, adjustments and adaptations for coping are being ignored or overlooked.

In both cases, it makes sense to think critically about how to allocate our resources, putting up roadblocks or planning ahead.

Not Enough Babies!

Oh, no!  We're running out of people!

The Washington Post, along with several other news outlets reported a few weeks ago that the birth rate in the US is down. It fell 1% from 2015 to 2016. Why is this news? Is it a problem?

 Apparently it is. The article says we are “in the midst of what some worry is a baby crisis.” The birth rate has been declining for years and is now at a historic low according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some predict it will result in “economic and cultural turmoil” and that “there's a danger that we wouldn't be able to replace the aging workforce and have enough tax revenue to keep the economy stable.”

The workforce issue could be a worry if the birthrate falls and stays below the replacement level, unless robots fill some of those jobs that the aging workforce leaves. Of course, the idea of robots taking jobs is another of the worries that the news media presents as a potential crisis! But maybe it would be a good thing.

With robots doing the work, there would not be enough human workers to pay into the Social Security fund that the retirees draw from. But that is already a problem, a flaw in the design of the program rather than a crisis brought about by not enough babies. It is compounded by the inadequate savings of many older Americans, but fewer children would cost parents less and with a little more discipline the may be averted.

Then there is the fact that as economies strengthen and the standard of living improves it is natural for parents to have fewer children. Populations migrate from farm to city, and the childhood survival rate improves as healthcare improves. It happens in every country, not just here. According to the article countries that already have low birthrates are fighting this trend by putting “pro-family policies into place to try to encourage couples to have babies.” 

That smacks of yet another government attempt to sway individual decisions – there is already a tax break for having children and assistance payments are calculated on a per child basis.  Now should programs like mandatory parent leave be added? Do we have people in Washington (or anywhere) capable of fine-tuning the birthrate by turning on and off programs and regulations? Even if we did, is it politically realistic to expect that such benefits could easily be turned off? 

At the same time we have a distress call every summer that children are out of school and will be going hungry because they no longer get free breakfasts and lunches. Charitable organizations are putting together programs to address this problem.  Would more babies compound this problem?  

Finally, since everyone is worried about climate change, isn’t having fewer people burning fossil fuel, otherwise adding to greenhouse gases by eating meat and generally using up the earth’s resources a good thing? Technically, your children and grandchildren are part of your carbon footprint. Maybe this is another case of wanting to clean up the planet by letting someone else do it.

The news media are always eager to pick up on the worries of certain experts even if they seem to conflict with the worries of other experts.  This sounds like another crisis where the experts have already made up their minds about the problem and course of action without looking at the many trade offs and contradictions – puzzling.

Why Is This So Important?

The behavioral model is very important for a number of reasons.  One is that the focus on behavior moves the discussion away from personal attacks.  If a person’s behavior is good, it is recognized as such, to encourage more of the same.  If a person’s behavior is poor, the discussion is not about attitude, motives or intentions; it’s about what changes to behavior will make him or her more successful.

Another important aspect of the model is the insistence that we all improve behavior in the five key dimensions.  This is no longer optional.  The world is getting more complex at an accelerated rate.  We cannot face that complexity with the same casual approach that suited our ancestors even a few generations ago.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet’s board of directors, the parent company of Google, made an interesting observation at a technology conference in 2010:  “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.”  And that was 7 years ago!  He added that he doesn’t believe people are ready for what’s coming in terms of technology.  Of all that information how much is accurate or even useful?  Yet we are exposed to so much more every day at an increasingly alarming pace and must cope with it.

How did our grandparents deal with the fear of phishing emails or identity theft, traffic light cameras or drones and other invasions of privacy?  They didn’t.  Was anyone concerned about teen cyber-bullying or “sexting” even a few years ago?  In years gone by we had locks on our doors instead of security systems, and we thought hacking meant you had a bad cough, not that your savings or personal information might have been compromised.  No one was “addicted” to their “device.”  The frequency and stress level over the latest health news or food warnings were significantly lower.   The world didn't screech to a halt when the computers crashed.  And today credit cards, home equity loans and other financial tools make it so much easier to go into debt and stay there.

What about the avalanche of advertising we face?  The ad-blocker on my browser counts the ads as it blocks them.  One day I made note of the time as I caught up on (and stored and disposed of) personal email.  In 30 minutes the software blocked 97 ads.  That’s someone trying to sell me something at a rate of more than 3 times per minute.  Advertising exposure within our society is exploding.

Here is another example.  Last week I received an email telling me I may be a “Class Member” in a lawsuit against Staples “if between March 24, 2009 and April 25, 2017, you [1] bought a Rewards-eligible product and a non-Rewards eligible product in the same transaction, [2] used an item-specific coupon on the non-Rewards eligible product, and [3] were negatively impacted by Staples’ pro rata coupon accounting.”  If I don’t want to opt out of the settlement and I submit a claim form, I would be “eligible to receive $10 in Staples Rewards.”  (Further reading told me the class representative – I think that means the guy who sued – will get $5,000 and the law firm will receive $500,000 in fees and cost.)

How in the world do I know if I was negatively impacted?  Should I pull out all my Staples receipts for the last eight years to check?  Just reading this and trying to understand it is not worth $10 of my time, no less filling out an online form.  Yet apparently this stuff is happening every day to punish companies for apparently shady activities, although they admit no wrongdoing and settle to avoid the hassle.

I read recently that if everyone took the time to read only the privacy policies on all the websites visited, the annual cost in lost work time would be over $780 billion.  And that doesn’t even address what rights we might be signing away when we check the box without reading the even longer “terms and conditions.”

We must face it.  The world is getting more complex at a speed nearly impossible to keep up with.  People think technology is wonderful as they play games on their phones, but the technology is a double-edged sword with significant dangers.  As the robots are coming for our jobs and the hackers are stealing our data, the degree of critical thinking, discipline, responsibility, economic understanding, and perspective that served humanity in the past will no longer cut it.  We must do better or be overwhelmed.