What Happened Today: January 20, 2022
Biden’s on defense; U.K. arrests in Texas synagogue investigation; the slow robot revolution
The Big Story
At the White House yesterday, President Biden touched on nearly all aspects of his first year in office in an almost two-hour-long press conference that saw Biden often playing defense as he explained to reporters why major components of his policy agenda have struggled to get off the ground. With the president’s approval rating dropping to 56% of respondents saying they somewhat or strongly disapprove of the president’s performance in the most recent Associated Press poll, an all-time low for Biden, the possibility that his party might take a significant loss in the upcoming midterms looks like an increasing possibility. The potential loss of the already thin Democratic majority in the House puts even more pressure on Biden to get some portion of his Build Back Better Act passed, even if it means whittling away the marquee healthcare, education, and child-care policies that Biden campaigned on and promised to pass once he took office. Biden told reporters that he’s been engaged in negotiations across The Hill and feels “confident we can get pieces, big chunks” of his bill passed piecemeal. On how his administration has handled the coronavirus pandemic, Biden conceded that there should have been a focus on testing capacity earlier in the outbreak but felt optimistic that his administration’s distribution of free tests through the mail, and a promise to “not [go] back to closing schools” or government-enforced lockdowns, meant an eventual return to normal. When that would be, Biden didn’t say. “I call it a job not yet finished.”
The Rest
→ In the wake of the Supreme Court striking down President Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large workplaces last week, Starbucks has announced it will no longer require vaccines for its 228,000 U.S. employees, reversing a policy the coffee giant had installed last month while it awaited the court’s ruling. Other corporations have followed suit, including General Electric, which lifted the vaccine mandate it put in place for some 56,000 U.S. employees. As much a political stance as a workplace safety issue, some employers have stuck to the mandates for their employees despite the court’s decision. Earlier this week, the clothing manufacturer Carhartt announced that its 3,000 U.S. workers still had to abide by their vaccine mandate. “Carhartt fully understands and respects the varying opinions on this topic,” it wrote to its employees. “However, we stand behind our decision because we believe vaccines are necessary to protect our workforce.”
→ After reversing its previous position that a British man, Malik Akram, holding a rabbi and three congregants hostage in a Fort Worth suburban synagogue was not ideologically motivated, the FBI now describes the event “as a terrorism-related matter in which the Jewish community was targeted.” Earlier today, British counterterrorism forces arrested two men and continue to hold them for questioning in relation to Akram’s activities in Texas. British police briefly detained and then released two of Akram’s sons during their investigation, telling reporters that the sons were in touch with Akram during the standoff.
→ If you cashed out a big bag of coins before the recent drop in the crypto market, you might want to pop over to Rome to eye up the Villa Aurora, a 30,000-square-foot property that’s home to a smattering of fine art, including the only surviving Caravaggio mural, and that went on sale Tuesday with an asking price of a cool $534 million. Originally constructed in 1570, the six-level hilltop villa has hosted an odd lot of major historical figures over the years, including Henry James, Galileo, and Gogol. It includes Aurora, the frescoed ceiling that inspires the estate’s name, a masterpiece from the Italian painter Guercino.
Read more: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/17/1073592203/villa-aurora-princess-rita-boncompagni-ludovisi
→ The resettlement of some 70,000 evacuees from Afghanistan in the United States has helped drive new businesses and reverse long-standing declines in populations for Rust Belt cities and rural areas across the nation. Of the refugees that landed in New York, more than 80% settled in upstate towns and cities such as Utica and Syracuse, where populations have struggled to attract young people and families. Other Afghans have joined rural outposts that have already seen their local economy revitalized because of a steady flow of refugees fleeing to the United States over the past decade. Afghans settling in Western Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County have moved in alongside some 2,154 other refugees who’ve arrived between 2009 and 2014. A recent study of the impact on the foreign-born population in Lancaster found that they contributed $1.3 billion to the county’s GDP in 2014 and increased the total value of housing by $178 million in 2014 compared to home values in 2000.
→ Despite their best efforts to resume classes with a mix of in-person instruction and remote-learning options this fall, colleges of all sizes saw a major drop in enrollment, with a total loss of 1 million students compared to class numbers from before the pandemic. The decline in student admissions during the pandemic only accelerates what were already ongoing trends in higher education. According to the recent numbers in a new survey from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, some of the most severe decreases occurred in programs offering associate’s degrees, where enrollment was down more than 14% over the past two school years. The director of the Clearinghouse Research Center, Doug Shapiro, wrote in a statement about the new data that without a radical uptick in enrollment, “the potential loss to these students’ earnings and futures is significant, which will greatly impact the nation as a whole in years to come.”
Read more: https://nscresearchcenter.org/current-term-enrollment-estimates/
→ Medicare announced last week that it will not provide coverage for Aduhelm, the first new drug treatment for Alzheimer’s in two decades. Questions have been raised about its price ($28,200 a year) and safety after patients in clinical trials suffered from brain swelling and bleeding, leading to the death of at least one trial participant. The Scroll readers will remember our coverage last year of the debate over how the FDA had approved the drug in June despite three members of an outside advisory committee resigning in protest against endorsing a medication with such serious side effects. Pharmaceutical companies have waged a public relations campaign against Medicare in response to its decision, emphasizing that lack of coverage will severely limit options for low-income patients and people of color. “This is just not a tolerable situation,” said George Vradenburg, a patient group advocate, who has taken to lobbying Congress for help. “There will be letters. There’ll be meetings. There’ll be everything we can muster to turn that decision around.”
→ With Roger Federer recovering from an injury, The Scroll favorite Diego Schwartzman knocked out in the second round by a wild-card challenger, and Novak Djokovic kicked out of Australia after the country’s health minister decided “a high profile unvaccinated individual … [could] foster anti-vaccination sentiment,” the Australian Open is wide open for worthy challengers looking to break the grip the Big Three of Federer, Djokovic, and Rafael Nadal have had over major tournaments on the men’s side since 2003. Though Nadal is still in and one of the favorites, the draw is looking great for Daniil Medvedev, the savvy 25-year-old Russian who won this year’s U.S. Open and has a reputation for riling up a crowd. During the interview on court after his dismantling of the mercurial Australian Nick Kyrgios in the second round today, he chided spectators for shouting “siuuu” while he was serving. The phrase has been popularized by soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, but it irked Medvedev, who drew “boos” and “siuuus” during the interview with tennis legend and former Australian Open champ Jim Courier. “Show some respect for Jim Courier,” Medvedev said. “Let him speak, please. If you respect somebody, at least respect Jim Courier.”
The Slow Delivery of the Robot Revolution
There’s a popular sentiment that robots and artificial intelligence are poised to revolutionize much of our modern infrastructure. Though self-driving trucks and robotic warehouse pickers are championed for their capacity to increase efficiency and productivity, politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle warn that a wide-scale displacement of human workers will lead to a great deal of hostility on behalf of those who are put out of work by an army of machines. It would appear that, at least for the foreseeable future, this is only half correct.
A recent study in the journal Economic Letters found that the so-called “automated revolution” thus far hasn’t been all that successful. Examining the volume and rate of automatization in the United States from 1999 to 2019, the researchers found “no change whatsoever in the kinds of jobs more likely to be automated,” one of the authors wrote in a blog post about the study. Even jobs that were affected by automation and machine assistance didn’t result in “changes in [their] pay or employment.” If anything, the main effect has been that “job tasks have gradually become more suitable for automation, because nearby tasks have become automated.” Which is to say, workers now increasingly work alongside robots, who have changed the type of work humans are still needed to do.
The great displacement isn’t so much a takeover by machines as it is an acceleration of integrating more computer-based technology into a day’s work. Transforming previously human-centric tasks with more technology means whole industries and categories of employment will now depend in part on a system of surveillance and the tracking of human behavior of both employees and the public to ensure the robots and machines are being put to good use. Such artificial intelligence has already transformed delivery and distribution infrastructure used by Amazon and others, who aggressively track drivers’ performances on the road and in warehouses. And it’s been deployed in so-called “just walk out” smart stores and supermarkets where shoppers swipe in with their phones and, thanks to a bevy of cameras and motion sensors, are charged for the items they take away in the bag without having to worry about a check-out counter.
As one frequent shopper at one of these new walk-out stores in London told the Financial Times in December, the intense surveillance was a bit unnerving, though the convenience was a benefit. “Apart from the general creepiness with the constant surveillance stuff, it’s pretty good,” they said. The workers who might have once been behind the register are now tasked with deterring theft of items that aren’t tracked by the sensors or helping people use the very technology that has not replaced but rather altered the check-out process.
The wide-scale implementation of robotics in labor categories with even repetitive tasks like warehouse picking and distribution has been slowed by the intense upfront costs and an existing workforce ill prepared to suddenly know how to collaborate alongside a throng of new technologies. As the World Economic Forum found in its 2020 job report, some 40% of workers will need to learn how to do their jobs differently because of automation.
For some industries, the need to work with the technology will be a mild disruption. A restaurant host might now be a technology manager of the roving robot that seats guests and of the software that interacts with delivery drivers. Other industries will have a more invasive engagement with machine technology, and as of right now, there’s a real failure to prepare the existing and future workforce in the United States for this reality. If the workforce isn’t properly trained for these new jobs, there will be technology that can’t be properly used, and breakdowns in the supply chain could be worse than those that arose during the pandemic. “It’s going to be a real drag on the economy … and mean a lot of suffering for a lot of individuals,” Neil Bradley, the executive vice president at the Chamber of Commerce, recently told Politico. President Biden’s administration has tried to implement some job training into his infrastructure bill, but the investment is small, and the legislation continues to stall out because of congressional malaise. The resentment toward robots that’s bubbling below the surface, then, isn’t one of man versus machine but rather tension over how to properly work with the technology in the first place.