From the Editor's Desk

Longshoremen’s Fight Against Automation Confronts an AI Future

A strike by dockworkers across the U.S. threatens to close ports on the East and Gulf coasts and seriously impact thousands, if not millions, of business supply chains, causing retailers to brace for potential shortages of some products and disappointed customers. This kind of disruption is the goal of strikes, of course, but the longshoremen's major demand, beyond higher wages, is quite startling. As the New York Post put it, the workers' union is demanding a "total ban on automation," and is holding the industry hostage for what analysis firm J.P. Morgan estimates as a $5 billion a day impact to the economy.

Specifically, the International Longshoremen's Association says 85,000 U.S. workers and "tens of thousands" more around the world are demanding a ban on all kinds of automation at cargo ports. That prohibition would apply to cranes, gates, and moving shipping containers around the busy, sometimes chaotic scenes at commercial dockyards, according to the Post. What this means is that when a giant container ship arrives at a dock, every one of those multi-ton shipping containers would be shackled to a crane's cable, lifted off the ship, moved ashore, stacked, organized, and moved around by trucks and hoists, each with a human at the controls.


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