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The Rise of Robotic Labor
kkleiner wrote in with a link to a singularityhub story about the increase of automated manufacturing world-wide. The article reads: "The accelerating rise in robot labor of the past decade, and its expansion into all areas of production, have led many to worry about the future of human workers. Yet how extensive is the robotic take over of labor? Our friends at Mezzmer Eyeglasses did some impressive research and created an even more impressive infographic explaining the present and future of robots in the workplace."
I just wonder who is going to buy all those goods and services when we are all replaced by robots.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
We are at the end of the age of cheap oil and cheap energy. The robots will go away once it becomes cheaper to hire humans than it is to make and power robots. It's really that simple.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I've built many pieces of automation for manufacturing. The truth is this automation is very costly and only worth it if there is an expected payback. One of the first things I did was to help do an analysis to see what level of automation if any is worth it based on the expected demand, labor costs, expected length of production, how often the product changes and the associated tooling change costs, power costs, maintenance costs, ect.
Full automation was very rarely needed to meet the demand.
Most of the time we built some tools to help automate. Things like pallet systems that held parts down while the operator assembled them with powered screwdrivers and then had automated inspections. These systems were good because if demand increased you could replace the more difficult or time consuming stations as needed.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Q: How come all our labor got outsourced to 3rd world countries despite our significantly higher levels of modernization, efficiency, infrastructure, and technology?
A: Because it's cheaper to throw a thousand people at a problem that'll work for peanuts than purchase, install, and maintain a robot. ... In short, there's no "rise" of robotic labor going on guys. On the contrary: The robots aren't competitive in a market where people work for cheap, no benefits, and there's (literally) billions of them that would jump at the chance to have the job of repetitive labor.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Earlier this year, Toyota opened their first new factory in Japan in 18 years. There are very few robots in the factory; they even have humans doing the welding work. Toyota claims that all of the savings gained by robots is lost due to building the factory to accommodate automation and buying and maintaining the robots. In fact, Toyota has been moving away from heavy automation for the last 10 years.
It's not about making everyone poor, it's about making everyone equal.
Right, because a neurologist should receive the same compensation as the guy scraping lard off the floor of a greasy spoon.
Maybe while we're at it, we can just put all the smart kids in the same classes as all the developmentally disabled kids. That should level the playing field a bit.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
So there was only one thing that I could do. Was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There are liars, damned liars, and robotics engineers.
Robotics has progressed painfully slowly. If you all remember, during the 1960's and 1970's it was a common belief that robots would soon replace most humans. Supposedly, robots would soon be doing all the tedious, boring labor. There were cartoons like "The Jetsons" which showed a home robot that did all the housework, cleaning, cooking, chores, etc. There was also the endless banter about how cars would drive themselves. Now, 35 years later, I am still doing my own laundry, cleaning my own bathroom, driving my own car, cooking my own food (or paying another human to cook it), and so on, despite huge research being piled into driverless cars and various kinds of robots. Yet this article has the gall to claim:
What utter BS. I will bet my entire life savings (which is considerable) that that won't happen. After all, it's already 2011, leaving only 4 years until "I, Robot" is supposedly driving me around.
Obviously robots are good at certain highly repetitive tasks which do not depend on image recognition. Robots already took over those few jobs, decades ago. (Perhaps even centuries ago; you could argue that machines like a combine harvester or a power tiller are "robots" if they have any kind of self-guiding machinery). However robots have gotten no better at image recognition, and still have great difficulty at simple tasks like folding towels, if the towels are arranged randomly and have different shapes.
Robotics which rely upon sophisticated image recognition are no more prevalent today than they were 30 years ago and are making no obvious progress. Probably there will eventually be some kind of breakthrough which makes those kinds of robots (versatile ones with image recognition) common; but that breakthrough hasn't happened yet.
The future economy will be quite simple, at a macro scale, though complex beyond human comprehension at a microscale:
There will be two segments within the economy:
The first segment will be automated computronium manufacture and managed service corprosentiences.
The second segment will be financial services corprosentiences, consisting of lumps of computronium arranged in a tightly packed sphere around the NYSE, each jockeying for space a few light-microseconds closer to the trading area.
The computronium manufacturers will manufacture and repair high frequency trading computronium. The high frequency trading computronium will buy and sell unbelievably elaborate derivatives and financial instruments of baroque opacity to one another.
Because humans are extinct, the GDP per capita will be infinite.
I tend to agree. The article says there are only 8.7 million robots in the world. (I'm not sure about their definition. Do they count Roombas. Hard automation driven by cams?) That's an incredibly small number. It's one year of production for Toyota or GM, for example.
The big problem is that the cost of the mechanics hasn't declined much. That's mostly a lack of volume issue. However, the control electronics keeps getting cheaper, since it's computer technology.
Robot vision systems have improved a lot. Many pick and place robots now have at least a basic vision system for fine alignment. This is cheaper than trying to make the robot and the fixture so rigid that the job can be done blind. The biggest headache in industrial robotics is simply getting everything lined up so precisely that a dumb machine can do the job. Adding enough smarts to allow for some misalignment makes things work much better.
There's been progress on unstructured vision. Towel folding now works. The software is really slow. That can probably be fixed.
Having been in the field, I will say that we're now at the point where throwing money at the problem works. That wasn't true in the 1980s and 1990s. (See NASA's Flight Telerobotic Servicer, a $200 million flop.). The DARPA Grand Challenge was instructive in showing what money can do. The 2004 Grand Challenge was pathetic - nothing worked very well. At the 2005 Grand Challenge, the worst vehicles were better than anything from 2004, and the best ones were really good. It took NASCAR-sized budgets and the combined efforts of entire computer science departments and auto manufacturers, but it worked.
Well if TFA is to be believed, they both will be paid the same: nothing. Because both jobs will be done by robots.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
At the factory where I work we have hundreds of robots. We couldn't make semiconductors without them.
Can any human maneuver a silicon wafer within fractions of a micron of a target? Can they do this hundreds of times an hour, 24 hours a day?
No. This is what robots do, not humans.
When people complain about technology killing jobs, I like to point out that they are essentially arguing against EZpass and other electronic highway toll payment technologies. How would you like to go back to waiting in line so that a human can collect money from each car? That would certainly create a lot of jobs.
But that's not the end of the story. When technology kills less productive jobs, like telephone operators, it also creates new, higher-paying technology jobs. It may be painful in the short run for those who lose their job, but eventually those people can get other jobs that are more productive, with the benefit that the creative destruction of technology will continue to make life cheaper and easier. Ex-telephone operators will have cheaper cars built by robots, ex-car manufacturers will have cheaper phone calls, etc.
Yes, they will need to develop new skills, but it's just a fact of life that you have to bring something to the table. Why else would anyone trade with you?
Why does a banker who sits in an office 35 hours a week earn 100 more than someone who works in a construction site 50 hours a week?
Probably a combination of factors. He probably had parents who were more well-off, and he probably had an education. He's probably naturally pretty smart and more than a little politically savvy. The construction worker's parents were probably blue collar and either couldn't spend time with him or didn't want to. He probably went to public high school - may or may not have graduated. He probably isn't all the way up the hill on the IQ curve. And most of all, he probably "tells it how it is" and whistles at women as they go by.
But most of all, the banker has someone willing to pay him more money. Any able-bodied dumbass can shoot a 2x4 with a nail gun. It takes a real expensive dumbass to sink Too Large To Fail Bank.
The good news is that Mr. Banker pays for most of Mr. Construction Worker's public services - probably including the public works project that Mr. Construction worker uses to feed his family when the recession hits.
I tend to agree that we need to do something to help the middle class, and that wealth distribution is going the wrong way. But this class warfare talk is getting ridiculous. There will always be people living better than you - learn not to be so envious, and realize that you need them as much as they need you.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's supply and demand. I'm going to change the hypothetical banker to a programmer for this example. Computer programs can have huge economic benefits; that's why companies develop them or purchase them. Instead of calculating everything manually as they did in the old days, and having errors, a simple spreadsheet program makes this task much faster and easier. A business is willing to spend significant money for labor-saving and efficiency-improving products like this. However, not just anyone can write software. Do you really think you can just hire some joe off the street and put him to work writing advanced applications? No, it takes someone with significant education to do that. That education costs a lot of money, and takes a lot of time (when the student could be out earning money working in construction). That's called an "opportunity cost". To give people incentive to go to school and put off earning money so they can learn more advanced things, you pay them more when they're working. Also, the fact that not that many people are able to become proficient at various high-level tasks makes people who are more valuable.
This is all basic economics. Maybe you should take an econ class.
In less than that week, I could have new people collecting trash with no prior training.
Can you say the same about the striking neurologists?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
and use that influence to make sure they get their "share."
So let me get this straight - the owners of the bank have so much influence that they overpay their managers?
What did I miss?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And construction workers would also make what they are worth. I.e.: "almost nothing". Who'd need all those construction workers when there'll be no construction to do?
Banks and bankers have their uses. They just need to be used correctly, as it is with any other tool.
Well do computer programmers have a union?
WRT the size of the pool, if banking is so good, why not become one? Go get an MBA from Harvard and if you get a good result you will get a job in banking. Then work hard and with a little luck you will perform well you will get promoted and become one of the ruling elite.
I know why I don't do it, because I couldn't, I would be really bad at the social climbing I'd have to do, I couldn't stand the stress and I'm probably not clever enough anyway. But in that case i can't envy them getting well paid for a job that I cannot/choose not to do.
So if they have it so good why not go and become one? Or do you believe that the system is not merit based? I know there is likely a lot of nepotism, but I do believe that if someone was good enough they would rise as fast as anyone else.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
I tend to agree that we need to do something to help the middle class, and that wealth distribution is going the wrong way. But this class warfare talk is getting ridiculous. There will always be people living better than you - learn not to be so envious, and realize that you need them as much as they need you.
The secret to a happy life is to individualize your standards such that no one is living better than you by those standards. Life is a trade-off full of interesting optima. Find the one that suits you best and stop pretending that there's a single metric of success. Envy is the stuff of humanity, and we can't just turn it off. But we can pretty easily subvert it.
I agree that class warfare is spectacularly stupid, especially now that we have a deep and detailed understanding of both the economics and psychology of war. War-model responses to problems of scarcity always create more scarcity. Sometimes they result in an ultimately more equitable distribution of that scarcity, but solutions that reduce scarcity are the ones people not driven by out-of-control emotions prefer.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.