Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see morning rain with a high of fifty. Sunrise is 5:50 AM and sunset 7:53 PM, for 14h 02m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 27.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred second day.
The Whitewater School Board will meet beginning at 7 PM, going into closed session and reconvening into open session.
On this day in 1862, the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi begins.
Recommended for reading in full:
John Schmid reports One in four Wisconsin jobs at high risk in a new age of robotic workers and hyper-automation:
When it comes to replacing humans with robots, few companies are as enthusiastic as Foxconn Technology Group.
In its drive to manufacture iPhones, TVs and game consoles at the lowest cost, Foxconn systematically has replaced tens of thousands of inexpensive Chinese workers with even cheaper and more productive robots. A separate subsidiary, Foxconn Industrial Internet Co., one of China’s biggest tech companies, supplies industrial robots to other businesses that want to cut labor costs.
But the topic of automation barely came up in Wisconsin after the 2017 announcement that Foxconn had agreed to build a multibillion-dollar manufacturing campus in the state. Instead, the project’s backers insisted Foxconn would create 13,000 high-paying human manufacturing jobs.
It’s as if the state has little appetite to talk about non-human workers and a new era of hyper-automation that economists say is already underway — a shift that will go far beyond manufacturing.
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Assembly lines will be ground zero but a host of other occupations and industries — from delivery truck drivers to bankers and hospital workers to fast-food staff — also are at risk. In the latest leg of industrial revolution, jobs won’t go to lower-cost immigrants or foreign rivals, even if that’s where the nation’s political debate often gravitates.
“States in the Midwest, Great Plains, and South are most exposed to automation, while ones in the Northeast, West Coast, and Southwest face comparatively less risk,” according to research published this year by the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based policy group.
Brookings spent more than two years compiling data on occupations, industries and regions that are ripe for automation under the current slate of technologies (not counting technologies still on the drawing boards).
Of the 50 states, Wisconsin is 10th most exposed. Nearly half of all occupational tasks performed by humans in the state (47.5 percent) can be replaced by computer-driven technologies that already exist, according to Brookings’ estimates.
Wisconsin finds itself in a cluster of states with a high percentage of at-risk occupations. Indiana is the nation’s most vulnerable with 48.7 percent of human employment tasks at risk. Iowa (48.0 percent) and Mississippi (47.7 percent) have similar rankings.
(Irony: the very company that promised – falsely – to create thousands of high-paying jobs in Wisconsin is, in fact, a world leader in automation. See also Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere. The ignorant local men of the Whitewater Community Development Authority and the ‘Greater’ Whitewater Committee who have pushed Foxconn need a new slogan: WORTHLESS for WHITEWATER™.)