SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Khalil Shabazz had 18 points in San Francisco’s 60-48 victory against Cal Poly on Thursday night.

Shabazz also contributed seven rebounds for the Dons (2-0). Tyrell Roberts scored 12 points and added six rebounds and three steals. Josh Kunen recorded eight points and was 3 of 7 shooting and 2 of 3 from the free throw line.

The Mustangs (1-1) were led by Alimamy Koroma, who recorded 15 points and eight rebounds. Chance Hunter added eight points for Cal Poly. In addition, Trevon Taylor finished with seven points, six rebounds and two blocks.

Shabazz scored nine points in the first half and San Francisco went into halftime trailing 27-24. San Francisco outscored Cal Poly by 15 points in the second half. Shabazz led the way with nine second-half points.

NEXT UP

San Francisco’s next game is Sunday against UC Merced at home, while Cal Poly visits Stanford on Friday.

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The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar.

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LOS ANGELES (CBS / AP) – Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby’s drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you might be talking to Tori – an artificially intelligent voice assistant who takes your order and sends it to the chefs.

“It doesn’t make you sick,” says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI ​​voice at Arby’s Franchise in Ontario, California this year. “It doesn’t get a corona. And the reliability is great. “

Not only did the pandemic threaten the health of Americans when it struck the US in 2020 – it could also pose a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with labor shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate jobs in the service sector that economists once considered safe, on the assumption that machines couldn’t simply make the human contact they believed customers required .

Past experience suggests that such waves of automation ultimately create more jobs than they destroy, but also disproportionately destroy less qualified jobs, on which many low-income workers are dependent. The resulting growing pains for the US economy could be severe.

Without the pandemic, Siddiqi likely would not have bothered to invest in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it went smoothly, he says: “Basically fewer people are needed, but these people now work in the kitchen and other areas.”

Ideally, automation can convert workers into better and more interesting jobs, as long as they get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But while that’s happening now, it’s not going fast enough, he says.

Worse, a whole class of service jobs that were created when manufacturing began to use more automation can now be at risk. “The robots have fled the manufacturing sector and immigrated to the much larger service sector,” he says. “I thought contact jobs were safe. I was completely surprised. “

Improvements in robotic technology are allowing machines to do many tasks that used to require humans – throwing pizza dough, moving hospital linen, inspecting gauges, sorting goods. The pandemic accelerated its rollout. After all, robots cannot get sick or spread disease. They also do not require any leave of absence to deal with unexpected childcare emergencies.

CONTINUE READING: The demand for robotic chefs from companies in the Bay Area is increasing with the COVID pandemic

As KPIX reported last year, robotic food service was a trend even before the coronavirus pandemic as hospitals, campus cafeterias, and others tried to meet demand for fresh, bespoke options around the clock while keeping labor costs in To keep check. Robot chefs have performed in places like Creator, a burger joint in San Francisco, and Dal.komm coffee outlets in South Korea.

Prior to 2020, Hayward-based tech company Chowbotics had sold around 125 of its $ 35,000 robots, mostly to hospitals and colleges. Shortly after the coronavirus outbreak, sales rose more than 60%, CEO Rick Wilmer said, with growing interest from grocery stores, senior housing communities and even the U.S. Department of Defense.

International Monetary Fund economists found that past pandemics had encouraged companies to invest in machines that could increase productivity – but could also kill low-skilled jobs. “Our results suggest that concerns about the rise of robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified,” they wrote in a January newspaper.

The consequences could hit the less educated women who disproportionately fill the low- and middle-wage jobs most exposed to automation – and viral infections. These professions include salespeople, administrative assistants, cashiers and helpers in hospitals, as well as nurses and geriatric nurses.

Employers seem eager to introduce the machines. A survey by the not-for-profit World Economic Forum last year found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce due to new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, corporate investment in equipment has increased 26%, more than twice the rate of the economy as a whole.

The fastest growth is expected in roving machines that clean the floors of supermarkets, hospitals and warehouses, according to the International Federation of Robotics, a trading group. The same group also expects increased sales of robots that provide information to shoppers or deliver room service orders in hotels.

Restaurants are among the most visible robot users. At the end of August, for example, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced that it was buying the kitchen robot startup Spyce, which makes a machine that cooks vegetables and grains and pours them into bowls.

It’s not just robots either – software and AI-supported services are also on the rise. Starbucks has automated the work behind the scenes to keep track of a store’s inventory. More shops have moved to self-checkout.

Scott Lawton, CEO of the Arlington, Virginia-based restaurant chain Bartaco, struggled to get waiters to return to his restaurants last fall when they reopened during the pandemic.

So he decided to give it up. With the help of a software company, his company developed an online ordering and payment system that customers could use over their phones. Guests now simply scan a barcode in the center of each table to access a menu and order their food without having to wait for a waiter. Workers bring food and drinks to their tables. And when they finish eating, customers pay on their phone and leave.

Innovation has reduced the number of employees, but employees are not necessarily worse off. Each Bartaco location – there are 21 – now has up to eight deputy managers, roughly double the pre-pandemic total. Many are former servers and they wander between the tables to make sure everyone has what they need. They receive annual salaries of $ 55,000 or more instead of hourly wages.

Tips are now shared among all other employees, including dishwashers, which now typically make $ 20 an hour or more, far more than their pre-pandemic salary. “We don’t have the labor shortage you read about on the news,” Lawton says.

The rise in automation has not stalled a breathtaking rebound in the US labor market – at least so far.

The US economy lost a staggering 22.4 million jobs in March and April 2020 when the pandemic storm hit the US. Attitudes have since recovered rapidly: employers have brought back 17 million jobs since April 2020. In June they posted a record 10.1 million vacancies and complain that they cannot find enough workers.

Behind the hiring boom is an increase in consumer spending, many of whom have come through the crisis unexpectedly financially – thanks to both federal relief checks and, in many cases, the accumulated savings from working from home and the elimination of the daily commute.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, assumes that employers will likely be looking for workers for a long time to come.

For one thing, many Americans are taking their time to get back to work – some because they are still concerned about the health risks and childcare issues posed by COVID-19, others because of the generous federal unemployment benefits that came out on September 6th nationwide expires.

In addition, many baby boom workers are retiring. “The job market will be very, very tight for the foreseeable future,” says Zandi.

Currently, the short-term benefits of economic snapback outweigh any job losses from automation, the effects of which are gradually becoming apparent over a period of years. That can’t last. Last year, researchers from the University of Zurich and the University of British Columbia found that the so-called unemployment rallies of the past 35 years, in which economic output recovered from the recession faster than employment, could be explained by the loss of automation-vulnerable jobs .

Despite strong hires since the middle of last year, the US economy is still missing 5.3 million jobs compared to February 2020. And Lydia Boussour, senior US economist at Oxford Economics, calculated last month that 40% of the missing jobs are vulnerable to automation, especially in food preparation, retail and manufacturing.

Some economists fear that automation will push workers into lower-paying positions. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University estimated in June that up to 70% of the stagnation in US wages between 1980 and 2016 could be explained by machines replacing humans in routine tasks.

“Many of the jobs that are being automated were in the middle of the skill distribution,” says Acemoglu. “They no longer exist and the workers who used to do them are now doing less skilled jobs.”

© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report

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SAN JOSE (KPIX) – Neighbors to San Jose’s first city-sanctioned homeless RV park are pushing for plans to open the facility, saying the decision was made behind closed doors with no public gatherings or community contributions.

“Why was silence kept? People put up a fence for a week and didn’t tell us what it was for, ”asked a neighbor at an emotional town hall meeting on Friday afternoon in the Vista Montaña Neighborhood Park, which was adjacent to the planned property. San Jose City Councilor David Cohen chaired the meeting, attended by staff from various departments in the city.

The RV park is located at 71 Vista Montaña, 4.2 hectares of undeveloped land owned by the city. The property, on which the now disused 62,000 square meter Supertex office building was located, offers space for up to 20 mobile homes. The Vista Montaña car park will only accommodate 8 to 9 residents with RVs evicted from the Apple homeless camp that was evacuated this week. Homeless motorhome owners often reject offers to move to a temporary apartment due to a lack of parking space for the motorhomes.

“We may not be the perfect bunch. We may not be the cleanest people, but we are still human, ”said Robert Carlson, who had been saving for four years to buy his trailer.

The car park will have 24-hour security, rubbish bins, toilets and a strict code of conduct. The mobile home residents are not allowed to have guests. Residents who break the rules will be removed from the site. The city will conduct regular reviews and shut down the website if it is deemed unsuccessful, Cohen said.

“While this is awkward for this particular neighborhood, I’m a little curious to see how this works as this could be a model for creating a safe location across the city,” said Cohen.

According to Cohen, Apple had sought help from the city for years to help relocate the campers. The company’s deadline for clearing the warehouse on September 2 forced the city to act quickly, with various departments accepting the Vista Montaña site within the last week. After Cohen received final approval, Cohen notified the neighbors on Wednesday with a publication on NextDoor.

“It forced us to actually get the city to test how this could work in ways that might not have happened if we hadn’t closed this other (Apple) site,” Cohen said.

“Yes, it was in a rush, yes, it was quick. We hope we can get this pilot up and running, ”Cohen said. “We’re moving quickly to make sure we don’t have a major problem with scattered people. That was my goal.”

Neighbors filed a change.org petition against the site that garnered more than 300 signatures.

Ofelia Hernandez had recently moved to nearby apartments to escape the growing camps in east San Jose. Hernandez found out about the secure parking lot on Friday morning from a notice posted on her front door and was “disappointed” and “upset”.

“They don’t know what’s going on in these RVs. Do you continue to use drugs in these RVs? Are you drug tested? They can easily pick up the phone and give their friends the address, which means their friends may start pitching tents in our parks and in our neighborhood, ”said Hernandez.

Apple will fund the relocation of the vehicles, but the city will cover the operating costs, Cohen said. The secure car park is slated to open on September 7th and the pilot project will last nine months.

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