Artificial intelligence and robotics as a threat to human employment has been discussed before, but now workers at Deutsche Bank are feeling this as eighteen thousand people are going to be replaced by robots.
Deutsche Bank is using robots to replace some of the 18,000 staff it plans to cut, according to Financial News.
Mark Matthews, head of operations for Deutsche’s corporate and investment bank, told Financial News that machine learning algorithms “massively increased productivity” and “redistribute capacity.”
The London-based news organization said that Deutsche is pushing to “automate large parts of its back-office” via a new strategy called “Operations 4.0,” as part of its $6.6 billion savings initiative over the next three years.
Deutsche Bank is having a torrid year. In July, it announced that it will cut 18,000 jobs over the next three years as well as dropping its equity sales and trading unit. In its October earnings report, the bank posted €315 million in “severance and transformation-related charges,” while net revenues fell 15%.
Matthews told FN that the machine learning tools helped to save “680,000 hours of manual work” and that it “so far used bots to process 5 million transactions in its corporate bank and perform 3.4 million checks within its investment bank.”
In what insiders called a surprising move, the bank this summer said it will keep the bulk of its equity research department despite eliminating the bulk of its stocks sales and trading division.
A spokesperson for the German bank confirmed the Financial News report, adding that it has cut 4,700 jobs in the last year, with about 1,000 of those since the announcement. (source)
People spoke of the “migration crisis” that started in late 2015 and early 2016 as a major social issue, and it certainly was, but as we have pointed out, this was also manufactured for political purposes. What people are failing to see right now is that another major crisis is in formation right now, and this is going to be an “unemployment crisis” that will strike the entire world and will likely define life in the 21st century.
The reason for why this is happening is simple. Robots are being employed in many more place and applications, and the rise of robotics will directly result in the replacement of humans with robots to perform the same tasks. Since a great number of these tasks will be “low skill”, the fact is that people who would have trouble or are unable for a variety of reasons (education, time, age, etc.) will be forced out of work with no way to find another job. This will eventually spread to “higher level” jobs such as doctors and scientists as robots integrated with AI are introduced into those environments for the same reasons.
There is already a manufactured employment crisis taking place due to the unnatural expansion of the labor pool. It is well-known that people are more productive today than ever before. However, they are not adequately compensated because those in finance and major corporations have forced the expansion of the labor pool by subsidizing the mass employment of women outside of the home and then to this refusing to hire local people and instead saying, with the excuse of “diversity” (even thought it has nothing to do with diversity or race) to import people from around the world to serve in the same jobs yet pay them a significantly lower rate, the result has been a more than doubling of the labor pool without the appropriate amount of work to accompany it. This has created a situation where there is an growing surplus of humanity fighting over a dwindling supply of jobs that encourages the worst of corporate politics, aggressive behavior, and with that a “justification” from the upper management of these companies to slash wages and justify further automation that perpetuates the same cycle.
“Human capital” is the greatest asset of any society, and it has been known that the rulers of major companies who control the governments hate the majority of people because they view them as an “expense” and would rather do away with people in favor of robots, as the latter can be abused, work longer, do not complain, and can be replaced when they break. This eugenic mindset inherent in modern corporatist philosophy does not even believe in “mining” people any more for work, as though they were a kind of “ore” that can be extracted, but just to get rid of them, and robots are the way to do this, because the owners will not blame themselves, but will say, “well it was the change of technology, we cannot be blamed for this”.
This is the next major “social” revolution, which is that as the robots start to destroy the “lower classes”, they will then be put against the positions of work in “middle management” and permanently wipe out the middle class. This is happening very fast, and could be realized in two decades or less at current rates. Thus by 2039, people may reminisce about life in 2019 and how it was the “good old days” when one could actually find a job.
There will be another “migration crisis” that will take place, except this will be different. Rather than migration but rather and extension of it, the hordes of displaced worker- call it the “displaced worker crisis” -will become a major, if not the defining social crisis of the 21st century as people struggle to find work, moving about just like the migrant workers of the 1930s so famously captured in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes Of Wrath”, but they will likely not be able to find work, as it will have all been turned over to machines.
This is being manufactured for reason, for with large numbers of people out of work and unable to find work, it will be a justification for the “leaders” of society to say, ever so conveniently and just happening to alight with their eugenic philosophies, that given the vast numbers of poor and destitute people, that many are needed to serve as soldiers in a war, or can just be wiped out completely, but not by direct action. A series of nuclear bombs, mass starvation, or other forms of destruction are frequently used as excuses to realize the perverted and genocidal desires of men who want to have power over life and death and, making themselves the “standards” of morality, desire to commit the sin of Eden again.