Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

http://www.computerworld.com/article...s-by-2025.html

We need better education to create new industries to keep ahead of automation. We are woefully unprepared for the future.

I took a tour of the BMW factory last week in Munich; 95% of the assembly process is done by robots, which I saw at most steps of the process

You almost wonder if robots can take away more jobs than they already have. That is very true in assembly line types of industries, such as electronics. But I wonder if the "unpreparedness" isn't more genetic than educational.

In this country we seem to launch an education reform every 5 years. And how many actually work?

This woman wrote a book comparing schools systems across countries. She thinks some work better than others.

One of her recommendations was to make teaching more of an elite profession. Make it hard to become a teacher.

Teachers would gain prestige from this, if not pay raises.

I think this approach might be more effective for public employee areas. There is no concerted attempt to make it more difficult to become an engineer, yet most companies are able to find competent engineers. The companies select employees based on in depth interviews and evaluations of the person's experience. The weeding is done by the corporations.

The author thinks that the school principals cannot do the weeding, and maybe they can't.

[don]

Airports Show the Way

Airport officials on Thursday rolled out a customer-service robot to help answer passenger questions. The bot will complement its guest services desk but not replace it.
The airport is the first in the nation to use the system, and officials say it solidifies the airport's reputation as one of the most user-friendly.
Called Double Robot, it will allow airport agents to interact with passengers through an iPad, propped on top of a roller wearing a customer-service shirt — sort of a Segway with a video-screen head.
The robot costs $2,500, plus the price of the head, er ... iPad. It is made by Double Robotics.

[don]

OSHbot

OSHbot

Goodbye Retail Associates, Hello Robots

The future of shopping has arrived, and it's not human.

Not only do robots cost less than humans, they don't complain, they speak multiple languages, and most importantly, by scanning aisles they know where every item is in the store and can take you straight to it.

Meet "OSHbot"



OSHbot is the newest member of the "Fellow Robots" family, and developed in partnership with Lowes Innovation Labs.

The future of shopping has arrived

Retail Robotics is an exciting and fast growing new market and Fellow Robots is at the forefront. Advances in sensors, wireless networking, voice recognition and design prototyping are enabling us to build the smart retail robots that can autonomously navigate through stores, help communicate with customers to understand what they need and locate it quickly.

OSHbot incorporates the latest of these advanced technologies. For example, a customer may bring in a spare part and scan the object using OSHbot’s 3D sensing camera. After scanning and identifying the object, OSHbot will provide product information to the customer and guide them to its location on store shelves.

OSHbot Specs

• [*=left]Front Screen: 19.5 inches
  [*=left]Back Screen: 29 inches
  [*=left]Height: 5 ft
  [*=left]Weight: 85 pounds

OSHbot Technologies

• [*=left]Voice recognition
  [*=left]Advanced sensors
  [*=left]Autonomous navigation
  [*=left]Scanning
  [*=left]Obstacle avoidance

Making Science Fiction a Reality

The robot will come up to you and say in a pleasant tone "Hello I am OSHBot, your store robot helper. What can I help you with."

Show OSHbot a screw, and OSHbot will scan the item and take you to the exact match, or tell you if it's out of stock. Not even the most knowledgeable human clerk can do that.

OSHbot Articles

The Wall Street Journal reports Newest Workers for Lowe’s: Robots

The LA Times says Robot sales clerk? 'OSHbot' to debut in San Jose


OSHbot Experience

Would you rather deal with an associate who may be unfriendly and typically does not know where things are, or OSHbot?

I would take OSHbot 7 days a week.

I suspect so would most. And even if you wouldn't, it's guaranteed to happen anyway.

Robots do not complain, they show up on time, they want to help, they don't ask for overtime, and they do not need medical insurance, Social Security, or pensions.

All of the greeters and helpers at WalMart, Lowes, Home Depot, Target, and retailers in general will give way to "Fellow Robots". And that will happen sooner than anyone realizes.

Deflationary Forces

OSHbot, competition, and technology in general are inherently price-deflationary.

With that thought, I suggest that the Fed, Central Banks, and Governments are on a failed mission. Sure, they can raise the minimum wage and engage in inflationary policies, but they cannot halt the march of technology and create jobs at the same time.

Every hike in minimum wages or healthcare subsidies is an extra added incentive for corporations to use hardware and software robots.

Inept Central Bank Policies

Asset bubbles of increasing magnitude over time coupled with rising income inequality is a direct consequence of inept central bank deflation-fighting exercises.

For further discussion please consider Challenge to Keynesians "Prove Rising Prices Provide an Overall Economic Benefit".

Inquiring minds may also wish to consider James Grant Conference Video: Inflation Expectations, Growth, Policy Problems; Europe Has Become Japan.

The next asset bust, as well as the Fed's response to it, are likely to be spectacular.

Addendum

A few interesting comments came within minutes. Here are a couple of them.

Gordon writes "This is great for the mom and pops of the world but ask the robot about the hammer and what actually works instead of just trying to sell someone a hammer and it cannot tell you."

Jon responds: "Good catch. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to Lowe's or Home Depot with a DYI project and the guy walked me around and told me how to do the same thing at half the cost that I budgeted. All at the expense to the company's margins of course. But those dudes are the best."

My reply: Robots will never replace everyone, just a huge portion of such workers. Moreover, and over time, these robots will get smarter and smarter, complete with how-to videos.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

[Polish_Silver]

Europe after the war

But didn't per capita gdp go up in Europe (where most of the death and desruction occured) right after the WWII?

No it did not. Most countries involved in the war were plunged into poverty for years. The US and Canada were exceptions because the war was fought elsewhere.

The war destroyed the productive capacity, probably including agricultural capacity.

Germans were on the brink of starvation, and raised rabbits in the yard as a source of meat.
German boys gathered cigarettes dropped by allied soldiers to gather the tobacco for barter.
Many Germans moved to North America at this time.

Italy was no better off. Watch "The bicycle thief".

Britain complained for years that it had won the war but lost the peace.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: OSHbot

Very impressive if the Robot can actually recognize parts.

However, I fail to see the advantage over a stationary help kiosk with voice recognition.

Suppose I walk up to it and say "Sliding door roller bearing". The kiosk says "sliding door rollers are on aisle 5, section 3". I don't need a robot to walk me there. As for the "how to video", how can that compete with google on my desk top? You usually need help with the unusual aspects of the problem, which the little robot will not be able to show you.

[don]

Re: OSHbot

Perhaps accepting their stated goal too literally is a mistake. Eliminating labor while dazzling customers with new technology in the transition to less service may be closer to the mark. That would be consistent with many of the the big box store's no-employeees phenomenon.

[don]

The Death of Capitalism (Again)

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

by Jeremy Rifkin
Palgrave Macmillan, 356 pp., $28.00

Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things

by David Rose
Scribner, 304 pp., $28.00

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy

by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, with a foreword by Marc Benioff
Patrick Brewster, 225 pp., $14.45 (paper)

More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook

by Jim Dwyer
Viking, 374 pp., $27.95

Sue Halpern (NYRB)

Every day a piece of computer code is sent to me by e-mail from a website to which I subscribe called IFTTT. Those letters stand for the phrase “if this then that,” and the code is in the form of a “recipe” that has the power to animate it. Recently, for instance, I chose to enable an IFTTT recipe that read, “if the temperature in my house falls below 45 degrees Fahrenheit, then send me a text message.” It’s a simple command that heralds a significant change in how we will be living our lives when much of the material world is connected—like my thermostat—to the Internet.

It is already possible to buy Internet-enabled light bulbs that turn on when your car signals your home that you are a certain distance away and coffeemakers that sync to the alarm on your phone, as well as WiFi washer-dryers that know you are away and periodically fluff your clothes until you return, and Internet-connected slow cookers, vacuums, and refrigerators. “Check the morning weather, browse the web for recipes, explore your social networks or leave notes for your family—all from the refrigerator door,” reads the ad for one.

Welcome to the beginning of what is being touted as the Internet’s next wave by technologists, investment bankers, research organizations, and the companies that stand to rake in some of an estimated $14.4 trillion by 2022—what they call the Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco Systems, which is one of those companies, and whose CEO came up with that multitrillion-dollar figure, takes it a step further and calls this wave “the Internet of Everything,” which is both aspirational and telling. The writer and social thinker Jeremy Rifkin, whose consulting firm is working with businesses and governments to hurry this new wave along, describes it like this:

The Internet of Things will connect every thing with everyone in an integrated global network. People, machines, natural resources, production lines, logistics networks, consumption habits, recycling flows, and virtually every other aspect of economic and social life will be linked via sensors and software to the IoT platform, continually feeding Big Data to every node—businesses, homes, vehicles—moment to moment, in real time. Big Data, in turn, will be processed with advanced analytics, transformed into predictive algorithms, and programmed into automated systems to improve thermodynamic efficiencies, dramatically increase productivity, and reduce the marginal cost of producing and delivering a full range of goods and services to near zero across the entire economy.

In Rifkin’s estimation, all this connectivity will bring on the “Third Industrial Revolution,” poised as he believes it is to not merely redefine our relationship to machines and their relationship to one another, but to overtake and overthrow capitalism once the efficiencies of the Internet of Things undermine the market system, dropping the cost of producing goods to, basically, nothing. His recent book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, is a paean to this coming epoch.

And the fact is, the Internet of Things is happening, and happening quickly. Rifkin notes that in 2007 there were ten million sensors of all kinds connected to the Internet, a number he says will increase to 100 trillion by 2030. A lot of these are small radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchips attached to goods as they crisscross the globe, but there are also sensors on vending machines, delivery trucks, cattle and other farm animals, cell phones, cars, weather-monitoring equipment, NFL football helmets, jet engines, and running shoes, among other things, generating data meant to streamline, inform, and increase productivity, often by bypassing human intervention. Additionally, the number of autonomous Internet-connected devices such as cell phones—devices that communicate directly with one another—now doubles every five years, growing from 12.5 billion in 2010 to an estimated 25 billion next year and 50 billion by 2020.

For years, a cohort of technologists, most notably Ray Kurzweil, the writer, inventor, and director of engineering at Google, have been predicting the day when computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence and merges with it in what they call the Singularity. We are not there yet, but a kind of singularity is already upon us as we swallow pills embedded with microscopic computer chips, activated by stomach acids, that will be able to report compliance with our doctor’s orders (or not) directly to our electronic medical records. Then there is the singularity that occurs when we outfit our bodies with “wearable technology” that sends data about our physical activity, heart rate, respiration, and sleep patterns to a database in the cloud as well as to our mobile phones and computers (and to Facebook and our insurance company and our employer).

Cisco Systems, for instance, which is already deep into wearable technology, is working on a platform called “the Connected Athlete” that “turns the athlete’s body into a distributed system of sensors and network intelligence…[so] the athlete becomes more than just a competitor—he or she becomes a Wireless Body Area Network, or WBAN.” Wearable technology, which generated $800 million in 2013, is expected to make nearly twice that this year. These are numbers that not only represent sales, but the public’s acceptance of, and habituation to, becoming one of the things connected to and through the Internet.

Recent revelations from the journalist Glenn Greenwald put the number of Americans under government surveillance at a colossal 1.2 million people. Once the Internet of Things is in place, that number might easily expand to include everyone else, because a system that can remind you to stop at the market for dessert is a system that knows who you are and where you are and what you’ve been doing and with whom you’ve been doing it. And this is information we give out freely, or unwittingly, and largely without question or complaint, trading it for convenience, or what passes for convenience.

In other words, as human behavior is tracked and merchandized on a massive scale, the Internet of Things creates the perfect conditions to bolster and expand the surveillance state. In the world of the Internet of Things, your car, your heating system, your refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window shades, your scale, your medications, your camera, your heart rate monitor, your electric toothbrush, and your washing machine—to say nothing of your phone—generate a continuous stream of data that resides largely out of reach of the individual but not of those willing to pay for it or in other ways commandeer it.

That is the point: the Internet of Things is about the “dataization” of our bodies, ourselves, and our environment. As a post on the tech website Gigaom put it, “The Internet of Things isn’t about things. It’s about cheap data.” Lots and lots of it. “The more you tell the world about yourself, the more the world can give you what you want,” says Sam Lessin, the head of Facebook’s Identity Product Group. It’s a sentiment shared by Scoble and Israel, who write:

The more the technology knows about you, the more benefits you will receive. That can leave you with the chilling sensation that big data is watching you. In the vast majority of cases, we believe the coming benefits are worth that trade-off.

So, too, does Jeremy Rifkin, who dismisses our legal, social, and cultural affinity for privacy as, essentially, a bourgeois affectation—a remnant of the enclosure laws that spawned capitalism:

Connecting everyone and everything in a neural network brings the human race out of the age of privacy, a defining characteristic of modernity, and into the era of transparency. While privacy has long been considered a fundamental right, it has never been an inherent right. Indeed, for all of human history, until the modern era, life was lived more or less publicly….

In virtually every society that we know of before the modern era, people bathed together in public, often urinated and defecated in public, ate at communal tables, frequently engaged in sexual intimacy in public, and slept huddled together en masse. It wasn’t until the early capitalist era that people began to retreat behind locked doors.

As anyone who has spent any time on Facebook knows, transparency is a fiction—literally.Social media is about presenting a curated self; it is opacity masquerading as transparency. In a sense, then, it is about preserving privacy. So when Rifkin claims that for young people, “privacy has lost much of its appeal,” he is either confusing sharing (as in sharing pictures of a vacation in Spain) with openness, or he is acknowledging that young people, especially, have become inured to the trade-offs they are making to use services like Facebook. (But they are not completely inured to it, as demonstrated by both Jim Dwyer’s painstaking book More Awesome Than Money, about the failed race to build a noncommercial social media site called Diaspora in 2010, as well as the overwhelming response—as many as 31,000 requests an hour for invitations—to the recent announcement that there soon will be a Facebook alternative, Ello, that does not collect or sell users’ data.)

These trade-offs will only increase as the quotidian becomes digitized, leaving fewer and fewer opportunities to opt out. It’s one thing to edit the self that is broadcast on Facebook and Twitter, but the Internet of Things, which knows our viewing habits, grooming rituals, medical histories, and more, allows no such interventions—unless it is our behaviors and curiosities and idiosyncracies themselves that end up on the cutting room floor.

Even so, no matter what we do, the ubiquity of the Internet of Things is putting us squarely in the path of hackers, who will have almost unlimited portals into our digital lives. When, last winter, cybercriminals broke into more than 100,000 Internet-enabled appliances including refrigerators and sent out 750,000 spam e-mails to their users, they demonstrated just how vulnerable Internet-connected machines are.

Not long after that, Forbes reported that security researchers had come up with a $20 tool that was able to remotely control a car’s steering, brakes, acceleration, locks, and lights. It was an experiment that, again, showed how simple it is to manipulate and sabotage the smartest of machines, even though—but really because—a car is now, in the words of a Ford executive, a “cognitive device.”

More recently, a study of ten popular IoT devices by the computer company Hewlett-Packard uncovered a total of 250 security flaws among them. As Jerry Michalski, a former tech industry analyst and founder of the REX think tank, observed in a recent Pew study: “Most of the devices exposed on the internet will be vulnerable. They will also be prone to unintended consequences: they will do things nobody designed for beforehand, most of which will be undesirable.”

For many of us, it is difficult to imagine smart watches and WiFi-enabled light bulbs leading to a new world order, whether that new world order is a surveillance state that knows more about us than we do about ourselves or the techno-utopia envisioned by Jeremy Rifkin, where people can make much of what they need on 3-D printers powered by solar panels and unleashed human creativity. Because home automation is likely to be expensive—it will take a lot of eggs before the egg minder pays for itself—it is unlikely that those watches and light bulbs will be the primary driver of the Internet of Things, though they will be its showcase.

Rather, the Internet’s third wave will be propelled by businesses that are able to rationalize their operations by replacing people with machines, using sensors to simplify distribution patterns and reduce inventories, deploying algorithms that eliminate human error, and so on. Those business savings are crucial to Rifkin’s vision of the Third Industrial Revolution, not simply because they have the potential to bring down the price of consumer goods, but because, for the first time, a central tenet of capitalism—that increased productivity requires increased human labor—will no longer hold. And once productivity is unmoored from labor, he argues, capitalism will not be able to support itself, either ideologically or practically.

What will rise in place of capitalism is what Rifkin calls the “collaborative commons,” where goods and property are shared, and the distinction between those who own the means of production and those who are beholden to those who own the means of production disappears. “The old paradigm of owners and workers, and of sellers and consumers, is beginning to break down,” he writes.

Consumers are becoming their own producers, eliminating the distinction. Prosumers will increasingly be able to produce, consume, and share their own goods…. The automation of work is already beginning to free up human labor to migrate to the evolving social economy…. The Internet of Things frees human beings from the market economy to pursue nonmaterial shared interests on the Collaborative Commons.

Rifkin’s vision that people will occupy themselves with more fulfilling activities like making music and self-publishing novels once they are freed from work, while machines do the heavy lifting, is offered at a moment when a new kind of structural unemployment born of robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence takes hold globally, and traditional ways of making a living disappear. Rifkin’s claims may be comforting, but they are illusory and misleading. (We’ve also heard this before, in 1845, when Marx wrote in The German Ideology that under communism people would be “free to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticize after dinner.”)

As an example, Rifkin points to Etsy, the online marketplace where thousands of “prosumers” sell their crafts, as a model for what he dubs the new creative economy. “Currently 900,000 small producers of goods advertise at no cost on the Etsy website,” he writes.

Nearly 60 million consumers per month from around the world browse the website, often interacting personally with suppliers…. This form of laterally scaled marketing puts the small enterprise on a level playing field with the big boys, allowing them to reach a worldwide user market at a fraction of the cost.

All that may be accurate and yet largely irrelevant if the goal is for those 900,000 small producers to make an actual living. As Amanda Hess wrote last year in Slate:

Etsy says its crafters are “thinking and acting like entrepreneurs,” but they’re not thinking or acting like very effective ones. Seventy-four percent of Etsy sellers consider their shop a “business,” including 65 percent of sellers who made less than $100 last year.

While it is true that a do-it-yourself subculture is thriving, and sharing cars, tools, houses, and other property is becoming more common, it is also true that much of this activity is happening under duress as steady employment disappears. As an article in The New York Times this past summer made clear, employment in the sharing economy, also known as the gig economy, where people piece together an income by driving for Uber and delivering groceries for Instacart, leaves them little time for hunting and fishing, unless it’s hunting for work and fishing under a shared couch for loose change.

So here comes the Internet’s Third Wave. In its wake jobs will disappear, work will morph, and a lot of money will be made by the companies, consultants, and investment banks that saw it coming. Privacy will disappear, too, and our intimate spaces will become advertising platforms—last December Google sent a letter to the SEC explaining how it might run ads on home appliances—and we may be too busy trying to get our toaster to communicate with our bathroom scale to notice.

[don]

Re: The Death of Capitalism (Again)

First, I apologize for the heavy italicizing - if one word in your copy/paste is in italics, all following copy will be as well, and as often as not, un-italiziable. Yes, it's a bitch.

This PR ploy has been around at least since the 50s. I guess Asimov (I, Robot series) could be excused on grounds of naivetι and having to publish, but that's long past. Who today, among the working stiffs, in the midst of the 2nd Great Depression, would buy a care-free digitalized life to come. Well, right, nobody, except perhaps a 14-year old somewhere at an internet cafe. Good grief. Prepare yourself, as the author notes, for fewer jobs, more unemployed warehousing (prisons, welfare schemes, etc.) and a commercial penetration of life undreamed of.

[vt]

Re: overstating the case

Could the ability to code help some, and inability hurt others?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...rite-code.html

[vt]

Re: overstating the case

Maybe technology will replace some high price jobs where creating even more moderate income ones:

http://theweek.com/article/index/273...ce-your-doctor

But workers will still have a problem:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/up...abt=0002&abg=1

[metalman]

Re: Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

Young Earth or Intelligent Design?

wow. there's whole sites devoted to this crapola... amusing is this one...

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/cr...st-t17784.html

Robert Byers, the mildly irritating creationist based in Canada, today tried to prove his theory that Polar Bears are white because they are scared of people. The photographer that accompanied Bob Byers, one Ray Comfort, took the picture below.



As one can see the encounter with the bears did not go well for Byers. However Byers learned, all be it very briefly, that evidence trumps superstition and speculation every time. He was heard to scream just before he died 'For fucks sake Ray throw the fooking bananas!' Why he said this is not known although there is some speculation that Byers believed that at some point Polar Bears were vegetarians that ate bananas. Comfort was said to be pleased that Bob was now in Heaven shearing bananas with Jesus. The Bears were heard to complain that Byers hadn't tasted very nice because; 'He was so full of shit.'

[lektrode]

Re: Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

.... The Bears were heard to complain that Byers hadn't tasted very nice because; 'He was so full of ....'

guess HE should've ett the 'nanas...

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

wow. there's whole sites devoted to this crapola... amusing is this one...

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/cr...st-t17784.html

Robert Byers, the mildly irritating creationist based in Canada, today tried to prove his theory that Polar Bears are white because they are scared of people. The photographer that accompanied Bob Byers, one Ray Comfort, took the picture below.



As one can see the encounter with the bears did not go well for Byers. However Byers learned, all be it very briefly, that evidence trumps superstition and speculation every time. He was heard to scream just before he died 'For fucks sake Ray throw the fooking bananas!' Why he said this is not known although there is some speculation that Byers believed that at some point Polar Bears were vegetarians that ate bananas. Comfort was said to be pleased that Bob was now in Heaven shearing bananas with Jesus. The Bears were heard to complain that Byers hadn't tasted very nice because; 'He was so full of shit.'

I have a few friends who've worked both Poles in the US Coast Guard.

One of them is still serving and might just have the record for Pole visits for current serving USGC.

He showed me a number of polar bear photos taken by him and his friends over the years(he says he's never seen more anecdotally than on a trip in recent years).

Apparently a polar bear feeding on a seal can be seen from QUITE a distance(as exemplified above).

He told me one of the most disturbing things he ever saw was a polar bear quite close(say 100m) covered in blood from the "waist" up just quietly sitting there and watching them as the icebreaker passed by.

[vt]

Re: Robots Will Create 'Permanently Unemployable Underclass'

Dominant life form in cosmos probably super intelligent robots:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the...lligent-robots

[don]

Yes Virginia, Those Are Robot Camel Jockeys

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Not long after sunrise one recent morning, a camel race here began, as they all do, with two starts. First, there was the expected opening: About a dozen camels pressed their noses against a dangling metal barrier, and when a man in a sparkling white robe gave the signal, the gate lifted and the herd surged forward, necks bobbing and humps hopping as spindly legs galloped off into the fog.

A beat later came the second wave. As the camels sprinted toward their first turn at Al-Wathba racetrack, a fleet of sport utility vehicles, five or six wide, shifted into gear and zoomed after them, tailing the animals on the paved roads that flanked both sides of the soft dirt track. To the uninitiated, it looked like a presidential motorcade locked in a low-speed chase with a pack of Bedouins. To the more familiar, it was simply camel racing, modernized.

Inside one of the vehicles, Hamad Mohammed watched the action from the passenger seat. Mohammed, who works for an Emirati sheikh and trains numerous camels, was tracking his entry, Miyan, while a friend navigated through the glut of semidistracted drivers circling the 3.7-mile track. Miyan broke from the starting line and quickly pulled away from the typical jumbling. She settled on an inside position and churned along, flanks heaving beneath green silks.

Christopher Furlong

The car was quiet, save for the thundering tones of the radio announcer calling the race from a van about 15 feet away, also following the camels. As the race neared its midpoint, Mohammed picked up a walkie-talkie, leaned his face against the window and began to make a clucking sound.

It was not a word — not in Arabic or any other language — but more of a murmur, a throaty noise like one might use to coax a hesitant dog. Mohammed made the sound over and over, and Miyan, who was at least 20 yards away, responded, surging forward a bit.

“Good,” Mohammed said softly to his friend. “The robot is working.”

The robots, which are made to look like tiny jockeys, weigh only a few pounds each.

Track Conditions May Vary . . .