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US Regaining Manufacturing Might With Robots and 3D Printing
For years, the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, several different technologies have ripened to the point where U.S. companies are bringing some operations back home. 3D printing, robotics, AI, and nanotechnology are all expected to dramatically change the manufacturing landscape over the next several years. From the article:
"The factory assembly that the Chinese are performing is child’s play for the next generation of robots—which will soon become cheaper than human labor. Indeed, one of China’s largest manufacturers, Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, announced last August that it plans to install one million robots within three years to do the work that its workers in China presently do. It found Chinese labor to be too expensive and demanding. The world’s most advanced car, the Tesla Roadster, is also being manufactured in Silicon Valley, which is one of the most expensive places in the country. Tesla can afford this because it is using robots to do the assembly. ... 3D printers can already create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. The cheapest 3D printers, which print rudimentary objects, currently sell for between $500 and $1000. Soon, we will have printers for this price that can print toys and household goods. By the end of this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. It is entirely conceivable that in the next decade we start 3D-printing buildings and electronics."
Imagine the size and strength of the nets Foxconn will have to install to keep their industrial robots from leaping to the streets!
Too soon?
John
Say goodbye to a whole lot more mid-level jobs. This is the path we are going down, labor is expensive.
But what is the cost of a large unemployed population ?
I wonder what will happen to all those Chinese hoping to get into the middle class when their jobs are being replaced by robots. It could be very bad news for the ones in power.
or years, the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, several different technologies have ripened to the point where U.S. companies are bringing some operations back home.
These two sentences don't mesh in the way I think you meant them to. The new technologies may allow companies to bring the OPERATIONS back home, but not the JOBS. If anything, they will allow many manufacturing operations still in the U.S. to cut even more jobs (though not send them overseas).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
question mark and more question marks
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Shut me down! Machines making machines?
(Please forgive my quoting of one of the prequels.)
At least those people working in China might spend some of their hard earned money over here. Robots won't earn any income.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
What an irony when politicians are talking about creating jobs. Economy is not about creating jobs, but about eliminating the need to work and rising the quality of life. This is the way to the future.
Yeah. After outsourcing internationally, we'll now have outsourcing out of the human race altogether.
Moreover, why move your operations back to the US, in such a case? Freed from the need for workers, manufacturing can take place anywhere. Like, say, the place with the lowest local taxation and weakest safety regulations. I can't see much reason for optimism here.
All this automation is great and everything but when does it actually translate into a benefit for humanity in general?
I'm so glad some business can now churn out more crap to purchase at cheaper prices. When are we going to focus on shortening the work week or making housing more affordable? What about investing more time in expanding humanity's presence in the solar system? Or reducing our environmental foot print?
We should use humans only in the jobs that robots refuse to do.
Didn't you see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
so we put some robots in your robots to make robots
Korma: Good
Having really cheap (relative to world prices) natural gas is a huge factor in domestic manufacturing. If you have any energy intensive operations, you are immediately given a big advantage. Natural gas is also used as a feedstock for the chemical industry in America, so you get a huge advantage there as well.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Patents and copyright will take care of that.
We've already had a jobless recovery from the recession.
Why did anyone expect anything other than a future of jobless economic growth?
Worker productivity has been going up for so long, the only way to really get more profit/dollar is with robots.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano comes to mind, with all of its meanings and implications.
Are you saying we should become Oompa Loompas? Because they don't look very happy to me.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
*inserts Linux LiveUSB, downloads schematics from PirateBay physibles
"Now printing "Apple MacBook Pro - By 1337 Warez Group." Approximate cost: materials only.
Except dropping your robot manufacturing plant into Somalia means you will have to employ a very vast security force to make sure it isn't blown up, taken hostage, etc. There are still advantages to locating in modern, industrialized states.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The US along with Canada and other major countries creates rules and regulation regarding the safety and quality of their products. Lots of organisation and magazines talk about chinese products shipped in Canada and US that are simply not safe to use....or even very dangerous. The list of product is so big but on top of my head, tops made in China comes to mind. They break very easily and most of those can either kill a child very easily because of the material they use are not great quality. Having those regulations would stop the import and thus creating more jobs here since the people would buy the products inside their own country (the US or canada) instead of importing them... just in idea
also, creating a rule for certain events that prohibits the manufacturing of products outside the country would certainly help. I mean, I saw vancouver olympic games products that said "made in China"... WTF IS THAT ??? I'm pretty sure the same situation applies in the us. What a shame
To me it appears to be a straightforward application of the idea: "Why isn't anyone trying to make a desirable electric car? Why don't we make an electric sports car? Fuck the people who say it can't be done, let's do it and see what happens!"
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So you are telling me that we are getting back our manufacturing plants, but are not going to see any more jobs or other benefits, just the negatives?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Currently manufacturing is done in China by untrained workers. They are cheaper than U.S. workers. Robots don't maintain themselves, they need a lot of infrastructure. So you basically need more skilled workers. If this skilled robot-factory-maintaining working class will be in China or in the U.S. remains to be seen.
Well, true. But nevertheless, I'd expect that the more mobile companies will be in a position of advantage in the years ahead, being able to demand increasingly favourable deals from countries in return for siting there, to everyone else's cost.
Moreover, why move your operations back to the US, in such a case? Freed from the need for workers, manufacturing can take place anywhere. Like, say, the place with the lowest local taxation and weakest safety regulations. I can't see much reason for optimism here.
Transportation. I buy electronic stuff direct from China (think like seeed studios but also PCB mfg houses, etc). Lets say they make my hobby custom microwave RF amplifier PCB $10 cheaper than local, but fedex 3-day costs $15. Right now the ratio is in their favor, but decreasing rapidly. I'm probably going to switch to US pretty soon. As for long term trends, I don't think oil is going to get cheaper. I don't think aircraft are going to get less capital intensive. I don't think postage and handling ever decreases. In the very long run I think PCB houses in China are inherently going away for US customers... there will always be Chinese customers of Chinese PCB houses...
Doesn't mean someone in my hometown will get a job feeding rolls of SMD devices into a pick-n-place machine or cleaning the filthy wave soldering tank for ancient thru-hole designs, but maybe someone just over the border in .mx might get their job back. Remember the jobs did not go from US to China. They went from US done by citizens, to US done by illegal aliens, to just over the .mx border, to Taiwan, to China. We've got a lot of steps along the way, the return path is unlikely to be China directly back to USA. Look for more "made in taiwan" and "made in mexico" stickers at Walmart to build up and peak before you start seeing "made in the USA" stickers again.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If all manufacturing came back to the US and there was no labor to needed to produce it as well as a shortened supply chain. The price would plummet for everyday goods. In which case you could work considerably less and still afford every day items.
that is why health insurance should NOT be tied to a job
Shipping costs and time-to-market/revision turnaround times, I would imagine.
Yes, and the funny thing is that the US manufacturing sector has never really shrunk in terms of dollar output, only jobs and some market share to China. In fact, the number of manufacturing jobs worldwide, not just in the US, has been consistently declining for the past 30 years due to increased automation. We will never get more manufacturing jobs, ever, no matter what policies the government puts in place.
If your market is the US, producing in the US nearly eliminates the cost of transportation and simplifies the logistics. You can have products in stores 2 weeks after you start making them. Try doing that from an undeveloped country.
Most safety regulations are focused on workers. No workers = no problem.
or years, the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, several different technologies have ripened to the point where U.S. companies are bringing some operations back home.
These two sentences don't mesh in the way I think you meant them to. The new technologies may allow companies to bring the OPERATIONS back home, but not the JOBS. If anything, they will allow many manufacturing operations still in the U.S. to cut even more jobs (though not send them overseas).
It'll result in the last great outsourcing wave - the outsourcing of consumers overseas.
> These two sentences don't mesh in the way I think you meant them to. The new technologies
> may allow companies to bring the OPERATIONS back home, but not the JOBS.
Not as many jobs, granted, but someone's going to be doing maintenance on those robots. Someone needs to drop off raw materials. Someone needs to pick up finished product. Someone needs to be there to pull a tangled mess out of the feed rollers do the entire line doesn't shut down. Heck, someone needs to sweep the floor, mow the lawn, and patch the roof.
We're not talking about as many jobs, nor necessarily as high quality, but it's better than the big nothing you get when not just the factory but the entire supply chain goes to another country.
Log in or piss off.
46% of people in the US do not accept the science behind The Theory of Evolution which means they do not accept the sciences of chemistry or physics. They believe that God moves all those electrons etc. himself.
With all these advances in 3D printing, Robotics and AI, would it be possible or even profitable to have a web enabled service where you submit a 3D model to a service like Shapeways, you see your 3D object printed, picked up by the robot and packed in a box to be shipped to you?
I watched some stuff getting 3D printed at the DC hackerspace and its really slow right now. So maybe they can time lapse that part of the job.
Also who has a $500-600 3D printer kit, I never seem to find these, always $900 or more.
...outsourcing out of the human race altogether.
Human: Spare some change?
Robot: Get a job meat bag!
Who cares buy stock in the company and live off the dividends.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
When I start to see a significant number of items on the shelves of the Mega-Lo-Mart with "Made In U.S.A." labels, I'll agree. Until then, "increase in domestic manufacturing" is just useless spin.
Who makes the robots?
www.itjerk.com
Or in whatever location minimizes logistical costs of moving the raw material and finished product.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Set full time to 30-40 hours with some kind of sliding OT scale and full OT after 40 and crack down on employee misclassification.
That will get rid of the 39.5 hour part times
"For years, the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, several different technologies have ripened to the point where U.S. companies are bringing some operations back home. 3D printing, robotics, AI, and nanotechnology are all expected to dramatically change the manufacturing landscape over the next several years."
So now we can have manufacturing without jobs. Sweet! (But thanks for the disingenuous reference to "jobs" in the first sentence to try and trick people into thinking that this development provides a solution for that.)
Frankly, the only answer to advancing intellectual property and automation is socialism.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
And what are the non-creative idiots going to do for a living?... it's easy to forget that they're still the majority, you know.
That's false, it's simply that so many have had the creativity stamped out of them by modern education. If you have any interaction with kids you'll find that in fact most people are creative.
So what has to change is how we educate children, and fast.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Didn't you see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!?
Are you saying we should become Oompa Loompas? Because they don't look very happy to me.
No. GP means that when your father, the sole bread-earner for his family that supports four disabled seniors, loses his job putting the cap on toothpaste tubes to a robot, that you merely need to win the lottery , then a strangely eccentric man (not a pedophile, mind you...) will give you a candy factory.
Pure Reaganomics 101.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"to everyone else's cost." ... Or do you start out with the basic assumption that the state should own all resources of society and "allow" its citizens to retain a "fair" amount (aka Communism) ?
- How do you reckon that mobile companies would incur a net cost for "everyone else" ?
No matter where they choose to locate, their contribution to the local economy will be net-positive.
well it looks like the robots are taking over the humans work force, will the robots be buying the robot made products....Humans wont be buying the products they'll have no money..... No work = No money..
Shipping costs. If manufacturing gets cheap enough, the ideal situation would be a manufacturing shop in the back of every WalMart.
The manufacturing jobs might not be returning but brining back manufacturing to the US will lead to added investment in infrastructure and construction of new manufacturing plants. The construction industry and large infrastructure projects rely heavily on manual labour.
Up until recently I never really worried about artificial intelligence, because we haven't yet figured out how to make computers really think. But when I read that IBM's Watson could process 1 million books a second I was blown away. Research continues in this field, and I have this feeling that we will be able to teach machines to learn. And when they do learn, they may become infinitely smarter than humans. There really will be no use for humans to work at this point. I have to hope that our economic systems can shift to deal with this. I also am becoming fearful of Terminators taking over. All our computer systems are vulnerable to hacking. Given one single smart computer on a network, and it just might hack into every computer on the planet.
Are you saying we should become Oompa Loompas? Because they don't look very happy to me.
That's bullshit. They're just working. Do you have a smile on all the time while you are working?
If you wanted to see their facial expressions we should just put those inward facing helmet cams on them and throw them back in the jungle with the snozwangers, hornswaggelers, and vermicious knids.
It's not like Charlie is buggin them all the time about their flair. I'd love to work at that factory but I don't meet the height requirements and I can't sing. *sigh*
The company I just started working at is a huge retailer of clothing. Interestingly enough we are working on an automated warehouse due to be finished within a few months and then expanded over the next couple of years. The execs just don't like telling the industry what we are doing. I imagine other companies are doing the same thing.
It seems pretty apparent to me that sooner than most people realize capitalism as its been practiced for essentially all of human history won't be sustainable any more. Technological improvements create wealth out of thin air, but the economic system can easily turn this windfall into a negative for humanity. As technology makes stuff steadily cheaper the value of labor steadily drops while the value of capital increases as it requires less labor to generate more wealth. You've essentially end up with the people who own the robots that make the wealth (capital) on one side and on the other all the people who lack capital and need a "job" to support themselves. There's a lot of handwringing about a 10% unemployment rate in the US, what happens when we have 20% of the population that is *unemployable* at a wage which they can support themselves? 30%? 40%? What's the breaking point? Robots/computers/self driving cars don't need to replace all the engineers and doctors, our entire economic system will collapse once you can't earn a living in retail/food/manufacturing or anything else that doesn't require you to be above averagely smart. Its tragic that this seems like such a likely outcome of us generating more wealth than we ever have before. We just need to come up with a paradigm shift in how we distribute wealth, and good luck doing that without a hell of a lot of bloodshed. :/
the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, se
- this is false.
There are always people who can sell their labour cheaper, but this does not at all mean that factories will just appear there, it's not only about wages.
It's about taxes, and taxes are not only the rate, taxes are the size of gov't spending and debt, which by definition is the future tax + interest that will have to be paid on it.
The real reason that people move their productivity out to other locations is the destruction of their savings via inflation and growing gov't, which is the real tax. It's the inflation, the gov't regulations, taxation of income.
The lower wages are only the icing on the cake and they don't last, the wages will go up as the labour force becomes more productive as it becomes more experienced and more specialised.
It is a huge lie that the motivator behind outsourcing is wages. Labour costs are much broader than wages. Labour costs include all of the regulations that deal with labour, it's all the potential liabillity lawsuits. Every time gov't says: you must hire this way and you cannot hire this way, you cannot fire this way, you must have this ratio of whites to blacks or you must do provide this minimum wage to all people, regardless of the job, you must, you must, you must, you must.
Every 'must' costs money. In the free market wages purchasing power of the worker rises either with higher wages OR with lower consumer prices. In 19th century USA (and in the early 20th century, before the Fed was introduced), the prices for consumer goods in USA were constantly falling.
Prices for energy (oil, coal, etc.) were falling. Prices for all things were falling, dollar was gaining strength. Nobody needed higher wages to become gradually more affluent and have gradually increasing standard of living, and it did increase gradually.
Nobody needed to tell Henry Ford to start paying 2 times as much to his assembly line workers as any other factory did at the time, he did it because the market made him do it. He cut the working week to 5 days and working hours to 8 and he still doubled productivity that year and pushed prices for his cars DOWN.
Gov't can't do that, gov't doesn't do that, that's not what it does by definition. Every regulation pushes prices up, sure sure, they can pretend to help you to hold wages above some silly minimum, but it's done to cover the gov't inflation (money printing) and the fact that the growing gov't causes shrinking private sector, it takes away the savings that are the investment pool.
Savings are used as the investment capital that is used to create new businesses. Savings is what creates new businesses, people take risks to try and make much more money than by being an employee.
But all employees WANT high level of investment, it makes them more productive, like the Ford assembly line made his workers productive (and he started hiring some disabled people on his own, he could use them, while nobody else could).
Employees want a lot of choice of businesses when they are looking for jobs, because that's competition for their product - labour, and they are competing with each other in that labour market.
Labour market gains from high level of savings that can be used as investment capital, instead the gov't destroys the savings with inflation and growth of gov't offices and regulations, and thus size and debt and thus taxes.
Will USA regain manufacturing? Of-course it will. Eventually it won't have a choice, but it's not going to be with 3D printers and robots, those are niche applications. There are plenty of jobs that could be done with peoples' minds and hands, but the people are prevented because of gov't inflation and regulations.
But eventually this will end, as the gov't won't be able to borrow, it will print into oblivion and there will be a serious crash, which will force the gov't to shrink, regulations will go away, eventually the labour will become competitive in USA again, even against robots and 3D printers.
You can't handle the truth.
These two sentences don't mesh in the way I think you meant them to. The new technologies may allow companies to bring the OPERATIONS back home, but not the JOBS. If anything, they will allow many manufacturing operations still in the U.S. to cut even more jobs (though not send them overseas).
True. It isn't going to do much to bring back jobs for assembly line workers. However, we have also been losing the jobs related to establishing and optimizing manufacturing processes. We've been losing the ecosystem of vendors and part suppliers and their associated jobs. It has become more difficult to justify doing higher level work here that is closely tied directly or indirectly to manufacturing over there. Even if we can't bring the factory floor jobs back home, it would help to at least stop the bleeding before we become a nation that no longer knows how to build anything of value.
Why is there a need for safety regulations if everything is done by robots? As far as moving manufacturing back to the US, the closer a product is to its final destination, the less shipping costs there are. Automated manufacturing enables companies to avoid shipping products overseas.
The US never lost its "Manufacturing Might", we just lost jobs by becoming more efficient.
I haven't found any data more recent than 2009, but it clearly shows we never lost "Manufacturing Might".
China was projected to out-manufacture the US in 2011 or 2012, but that's questionable now given the slow down in the global economy and rising cost of manufacturing in China. I can't tell without more recent data.
All this "3D printing, robotics, AI, and nanotechnology" means is that manufacturing in the US will become all that more efficient. Not that it will bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.
As robots becomes more advanced, all the jobs you mentioned could be done by robots.
well there needs to be a high tech training system like todays trades without the liberal arts part.
Let's say we go to a big robots based manufacturing system people will need to know how to fix and upgrade them and that is some thing that a liberal arts school can not do as well as a trades based one and still you need trades system to install the robots and to run the power cables to power them.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
With any luck, the future will look like this:
Unless status and aesthetics are suddenly no longer a part of human nature, quality hand-made items will retain or increase their value - everything from artwork to enchiladas.
We can hope, at least...
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Feicháng ganxiè Mr Roboto (Domo arigato Mr Roboto) Thank you very much Mr Roboto
Wo xiang zhidào ni de mìmì (Himitsu wo shiri tai) I want to know your secret
Thank you very much, Mr Roboto
For doing the job nobody wants to
Thank you very much, Mr Roboto
For helping me escape just when I needed to.
I thought this was a serious tech article but it's only from Forbes. Some CEO's wet dream fantasy of a sea of endless cheap labour.
Right, on to the bubble popping:
Why bother to install the robots in China instead of in North America then? Wouldn't that reduce shipping costs?
A lot of "robots" are not robots, they are remote controlled devices. Example drones aren't robots, they do some tasks autonomously but they still need someone to push buttons and make decisions for them, program them, and they require maintenance (it's like healthcare without the ability to fuck people over and not pay for it).
3D printers are awesome for prototyping and making your own bust of a favourite cartoon character, not so good for mass production. Expensive, slow, etc.
AI so far has been a bust, frankly unless there is a major shake up in technology it's always going to be that way. Even a virtual intelligence (a la Mass Effect) would be a major step forward. I don't think Watson's English parser->Google I'm Feeling Lucky counts though.
Nanotech might be the one thing that's interesting here but who wants a toxic landfill next to their home? Oh right, the Chinese.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
<quote><p>or years, the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, several different technologies have ripened to the point where U.S. companies are bringing some operations back home.</p></quote>
<p>These two sentences don't mesh in the way I think you meant them to. The new technologies may allow companies to bring the OPERATIONS back home, but not the JOBS. If anything, they will allow many manufacturing operations still in the U.S. to cut even more jobs (though not send them overseas).</p></quote>
That's a great point. However it's not the end of civilization. Just the end of purely conservative capitalism and the solidification of social capitalism.
The model is Qatar and Kuwait (and I suppose Alaska) - governments that pay their citizens simply for being citizens. There are no income taxes - just corporate taxes (or state-owned industry). Education, health, etc is paid for by the state. Most labor is performed by immigrant labor (and hypothetically robots). The economy is capitalistic, but tied closely with the government.
In the US we try to squeeze our money out of individuals and let the corporations ride free. This model will need to flip-flop once desk-top manufacturing is the norm. Corporations will need to pay based on revenue - not net-income.
Yes we will all be on welfare. If that means we get to live the life of a Saudi Prince, maybe it won't be so bad?
-CF
If you want to get an idea of what this looks like in practice, just look at Brazil. The rich live in heavily-secured opulence, the poor live in abysmal poverty.
I live in Brazil and do not understand what you are trying to say.
Where do you put the 54% of Brazilians that are middle class?
And how did the 230,000 Brazilians (same link as above) that moved from the middle class to the upper class in 2011 get to heavily-secure their opulence? Surely, there must be a lot of trickle down jobs in security...
> As robots becomes more advanced, all the jobs you mentioned could be done by robots.
The ones that don't rely on analytical problem solving, sure. Theoretically, even those jobs could be done by a cheaper human with a remote. Or AI will get good enough that robots can analyze and fix their own problems.
Quite frankly, when/if we reach that point, I'm not sure the whole concept of "having a job" and "working for a living" will still exist in a form we recognize.
Log in or piss off.
3D printing, robotics, AI, and nanotechnology are all expected to dramatically change the manufacturing landscape over the next several years
I suspect the impact will be considerably less than expected
But now, several different technologies have ripened to the point where U.S. companies are bringing some operations back home.
It's not technology that is bringing the operations back home. It's logistics and economics. Shipping is expensive. Long lead times are expensive. Long distance management is VERY expensive. China's labor rates are rising. Manufacturing is like water, it tends to go where the costs are lowest. There is no new technology available in the US to give it an advantage over China. It's merely that costs are rising for production in China and so some production is moving back to the US because it is now viable.
The factory assembly that the Chinese are performing is child’s play for the next generation of robots—which will soon become cheaper than human labor.
Robots are not and will NOT be cheaper than human labor for a wide variety of tasks any time soon. Anything that happens in small volumes and requires significant material handling is difficult to automate economically. Much factory assembly handled by people is ALREADY possible to automate - but to do so economically requires either high volumes or an expensive product or both. This is nothing new and there is no near term technology that is going to change this.
The world’s most advanced car, the Tesla Roadster, is also being manufactured in Silicon Valley, which is one of the most expensive places in the country. Tesla can afford this because it is using robots to do the assembly.
Tesla is selling a luxury good where the price of the product is relatively high. This is one of the normal uses of robotics. High volume and/or high value. All the other auto manufacturers use robots for exactly the same reason. It's not like labor costs in Detroit are low compared with China. Foxconn is looking into robotics because they deal in high volumes so it become economical. You can amortize the high up front capital expenditure over lots of units.
Well, you can pirate the designs for the stuff you want to make but the ink, or powdered solids and bonding solution in this case, will be as expensive as unicorn tears.
You're absolutely right. The 3 laws of robotics must be ammended! Law #4: Spend! Spend! Spend!
"AI, and nanotechnology are all expected to dramatically change the manufacturing landscape..."
AI, eh? Does that mean I can take my Lisp out of the attic and put it to work?
True. More likely through is that manufacturing would become so cheap that it would be cheaper to melt down the broken robot and replace it with a new one.
Does anyone else remember the novel Invitation to the Game? Every time I hear about how much more advanced robots are becoming and how they will begin to displace regular workers en mass, I always remember this book.
And who will be buying the products that produce the profits that in turn is payed out as said dividends?
There is one absolutely unavoidable consequence of this -- for most people it will be absolutely pointless to do any work they don't want to do. Better yet, any attempt to "motivate" people to do anything would result in damage to the economy because their work will be unneeded, unwanted and worse than anything done without them.
What means, Capitalism as an economic system will be over. Sure, there will be "capitalists" eager to enforce their "property rights" over things made by robots, but wide availability of robots would strip those people of any power to dictate who can build and control more robots, so society will eventually acknolwedge that it does not matter who owns what when anyone can build a device that will build devices that eventually will build a kingdom. Preservation of natural resources will be a much more fundamental problem, and solutions will have to deal with that -- obviously not through distributing "ownership" of natural resources to random assholes.
And you know what? It does not matter what you will try to do. It does not matter what kind of society you, or your masters will try to build. What I have described is the inevitable result. And I welcome it.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The word "cost" is meaningless without scarcity. Who cares if you unemployed if the cost of living is close to zero? It just means we won't have to work so much. But we'll have to restructure the way society works on a very fundamental level before that can realistically happen.
Up until recently I never really worried about artificial intelligence, because we haven't yet figured out how to make computers really think.
You know, for just as long as we've been trying to figure out how to make computers really think, computers have been trying to figure out how to make people really think. Think about it.
I SEE what you did there...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Yes, new jobs won't be created at home but on the plus side, jobs in China will be displaced by the machines here at home. We've been wary of China's growth at our expense over the past few decades and this would stunt it. Maybe it will even reverse our debt situation.
Humanity will always need a currency as all things will need a value equivalent that is created by those who want such things. However, in a world where jobs will be disappearing at an alarming rate and the population will continue grow just as fast if not faster then the only possibility is a welfare state wherein the majority of the people will be owing their existence to the few. This will lead to in a best case scenario"Widespread depression and suicide as well as a significant amount of debauchery including the usual self destructive human behaviors. This will increase the size of the population even further." The only thing that would help this would be significant advances in space travel and planetary colonization. If this doesn't occur then humanity will follow down the path to a mass death event due to environmental destruction.
Essentially, the robots work and the humans fuck themselves into oblivion.
I know it's probably wishful thinking, but I do wish that we may someday start in off-planet colonization efforts.
If most manual jobs are handled by machine, then perhaps somewhat more risky, labour-intense jobs will become more attractive. If they're augmented by machines, so much the better (you'll need intellectually-oriented people too, but plain old hard work and rough lifestyle would play a generous part).
I read it the same way. It almost sounds like the point of all this is to say "Well, if we can't have jobs, you can't either!" which obviously doesn't solve any problems. Even if you Manufacture 3D printers & other mfg machines, they will either be built by other 3D printers & mfg machines or they will be built overseas.
Kind of ridiculous, isn't it?
Perhaps I'll believe it when I see products that say "Made in USA" on the bottom. For now, i'll keep my weary cynicism.
Taking that a step further, replicators in every home, with raw materials recycled from trash/waste automatically, and occasional deliveries of new raw materials as needed. Why bother with the overhead of a store?
What about Lisp?
77.8% of the population are middlemen.
Capital is mobile. Why wouldn't these international companies relocate somewhere that they don't pay taxes? This model works in Qatar and Kuwait because the resources are stuck in the ground.
Nevertheless I look forward to your bright future where I lounge in my palatial estate surrounded by beautiful concubines and receive monthly checks.
What kind of disrespect is this? The Great Kingdom of Slashdot requires you plebes to up mod anyone with a user ID that is sufficiently lower than yours. ...and I should know as I was here first. See my user ID.
Reminds me of this GM superbowl ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3NGN4t4hm4
But what is the cost of a large unemployed population ?
Should be about the same as a large population that does useless work. Anyway, it's time to upgrade the global financial system, as the current one crashes all the time. (Not that I have a better proposal)
What no one seems to get is that the rich are rich because they're satisfying the demand of all the non-rich. They're manufacturing stuff, entertaining, etc.
What happens to the rich when no one has any money to buy what they're selling because no one has a job?
The rich are rich on everyone else's shoulders. Weaken the middle class, and you weaken the rich, too.
--PM
The US has the largest manufacturing output of any nation on planet Earth.
http://www.shopfloor.org/2011/03/u-s-manufacturing-remains-worlds-largest/18756
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/10/us-still-worlds-largest-manufacturer.html
The reason that US has been losing manufacturing jobs has almost nothing to do with offshoring. It's due to improved efficiency; fewer people are needed because of automation and other improvements.
First of all, Communism is "State" owns EVERYTHING, and citizen gets what the state gives them. What China is doing today has no more to do with Marxist Communism, than what Reagan was doing in 1980. Communism died with Mao.
The cost he refers to, is the fact that as more and more resource, wealth and power get's tied up in corporate systems, what remains for the rest of humanity diminishes by orders of magnitude and the access to the essentials of life will ultimately come at the whim of corporations, ultimately oppressing humanity. That would in fact be a cost. If you've been sleeping since 2008, you might have noticed a little bit of of that already going around.
How about leaving some of the necessary resources of life accessible to human beings vs the commodity bots trading and selling our futures half a globe away... what ISM is that? How about Localism? or Humanism? or maybe even Moralism? You seem to have a red hot poker stuck someplace dark about having some clod in government say what you can and can't do, but put that same Bozo in a three piece suit and make him a CEO and now all that black is white. By all means, share with me your logic?
This only works if you get sufficient raw atomic stock to manufacture the necessities of life for free. Otherwise, No jobs, No economy, and no way to sustain yourself. As we divide everything by '0' we get stranger and stranger answers.
Like, say, the place with the lowest local taxation and weakest safety regulations.
That would be international waters.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Now if its cheaper to melt down a robot, and he's actually doing useful work, imagine what's going to happen to all those jobless folk.
It just means we won't have to do jobs that can be done by robots, and those are tedious and repetitive jobs anyway so no biggie.
It means that instead of somebody paying you $100/day to carry 50 lb. bags of sand up and down a ramp, you will pay somebody $30/month to rent equipment that simulates the physical labor of carrying 50 lb. bags of sand up and down a... oh... wait. Nevermind.
Coincidentally, new jobs like "life coach", "dietician", and "diabetic testing equipment salesman" will also come into exista.... oh... nevermind.
Um, yeah. We'll be saved from the drudgery of common labor. La, lah, lah (fingers in ears) carrry on my good, man. Carry on. No wait.... a robot does the carrrying. How many robots can you bench press?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"The world’s most advanced car, the Tesla Roadster,..." .... really? I guess you both understand bugger all about cars and never left the USA.
To begin with, most of the Tesla is based on the European Lotus Elise, only the electrical drive train comes from the USA. Admittedly a very good one, but the car as a whole is nowhere near as advanced as let's say the BMW 750 LI compared to which the Tesla looks a bit primitive, and yet they are even in the same price class. Throw more money at your car, and the Europeans and Japanese both have even far more advanced options to that. The US has remain a backwater of car development for the past 2 decades, and is only getting worse.
It is entirely conceivable that in the next decade we start 3D-printing buildings [...]"
We're going to need a larger 3D printer...
Repeat after me: "Ye Olde Infernal Steam Engine Machination is not able to harvest wheat and cotton without crushing/destroying the grains. It is extremely unlikely they will ever be able to. The atom is, as its Greek origin indicates, the fundamental building block of all matter in the universe and is indivisible. It is extremely unlikely it will ever be able to be divided, and if it did, the power unleashed is uncontrollable and it is extremely unlikely they will ever be able to control it".
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
If you want to get an idea of what this looks like in practice, just look at Brazil. The rich live in heavily-secured opulence, the poor live in abysmal poverty.
. . . .but look at the OTHER end of the spectrum. Read Peter Diamandis' "Abundance". Or explore a abundance-based society (and the path to get there) in Marshall Brain's "Manna"
I have read most of the comments on this so far, and while I initially would have sided with the "gloom and doomers". I now find myself in the middle. I agree that the article is at best incomplete. As there are many reason for the current state of the job market in the US.
That said, I do not quite understand why some of you believe new jobs will appear just because history has examples of it happening in similar situations. I would like to consider myself a scientist at heart and just because something has happened doesn't automatically mean it will happen. Does the likely hood of it increase, yes. But one cannot say with 100% certainty that it will.
Now let me be clear, I do agree that some new jobs will appear. But for me and I am sure a lot of the people that disagree we do not believe the rate of these new jobs will keep pace with the rate at which they are needed (population growth). In order for me to accept that idea I would have to assume that AI will fail to deliver on its promise, as reflected in science fiction writing and television shows. And since I see no fundamental reason why the AI can never deliver on its promise, I must assume that at some point be it in the short, mid or long term our society will have to deal with the fact that it now possesses the ability to use automation on a scale it has not imagined, not even in this day and age.
From my perspective I agree that the Firm/Corporation/Business (use which ever you like) will increasingly leverage new technologies like AI, nano-tech and 3D printing to optimize their profit. That said, there is no law be it man made or otherwise that states profit absolutely equals money. What constitutes Profit is determined by the decision makers of the company. In most cases especially the ones that get highlighted in the press most frequently, those firms have determined that profit for them means money. But you also have firms that buy and sell services who define profit to be something else. As a result I do not believe the distopian future I have seen hinted at in the previous comments is certain to come to pass. if I assumed this distopian future does arrive and the wealthy take it upon themselves to tightly control access to automation technology, they will quickly find that they will only have an economy comprised of only themselves. Since I can only fathom this occurring mostly because of greed( and some bad breaks for the rest of us). I would argue that a few very greedy wealthy people who want even more for themselves will find some way of re introducing the disenfranchised back into the economy.
In the end the future isn't set in stone, for the gloom and doomers, you can use the technology that is coming down the pipe for good, or you can watch the greed few use it for ill. Personally I think humanity spends about 51% of its time being good so I will bet that it all works out in the end. The part that will suck is the in-between.
Mod up, please.
I have to say--go to Walmart. Watch the people there for a while.
Yes, I have done so. They are the obvious end result of the current education system married with a government that wants to keep you fat, stupid, lazy and under control.
They are in summary the population our current system is designed to build, and they stamp many into that shape even if originally clever and creative.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"It found Chinese labor to be too expensive and demanding."
Are you fucking serious? Paying people wages to reflect the work performed is expensive and demanding? Fuck, why can't everything be free for everyone then? For fuck's sake, mates. Get your shit together and stop being evil assholes.
... structural unemployment and a basic income http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
"A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income.
The knol mentioned in the video has been moved here because Google Knol is shutting down: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
That parable and video was directly inspired by this:
"Structural Unemployment: The Economists Just Don't Get It"
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/#comment-254 "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Not necessarily. If people make a conscious choice to support regionally local companies that produce things in a way that provides decent employment without automation via robotics, the companies that automate and/or offshore will lose business.
Be prepared to pay a little more, but right now - today - is the time to act. Not a few years from now. Hell the time to act was 30-40 years ago, this shit could have been nipped in the bud.
The Robots *make* you soylent green.
Why does everyone have this "They took our jobs!" mentality? Someone has to build these printers and robots, and these are high tech jobs. And someone has to buy the Teslas and the Foxconn products to do something. They've been saying this since the horse and buggy vs model T days. There will be more jobs and plenty of things to do. The medical and energy industries are booming. Transportation is always needed with more and more people. And so is agriculture, mining and commodities. But maybe if we have a big gay orgy to protest these 3D printers and robots, it will all go away. Ok, back in the pile!
As everyone else in this thread is saying, the way we have society organized today, increases in automation are only going to amplify the gap between the rich and the poor, as the haves have more and the have-nots have nothing. We either have to radically reorganize the way we distribute the wealth generated by this automation (and make no mistake about it, automation is increasing wealth overall and is in and of itself unquestionably a good thing -- its the distribution of that good and the making "expendable" of many people that's a problem), giving us some utopian paradise where everybody works only on whatever they feel like and a paltry few people tend to the machines which provide for everybody's needs... or we end up with some dystopian nightmare where a tiny wealthy fraction of the people live that fabulous life while the rest are left to toil on the margins of the rich's personal empires, scampering insects under their boots.
Allow me to present a third, and I think probably most likely (but not most ideal), alternative. Even as the percentage of people who are relatively poor grows, the standard of living for the poorest of the poor continues to rise. That is, there are more and more "poorest of the poor", but they are no longer living in holes in the dirt eating non-nutritive leaves off trees just to feel something in their bellies. They are kept fat with cheap sugary and fatty foods, and distracted by heaps and heaps of ever-flashier entertainment. I predict that as automation makes more and more people "useless" and dumps them into the ever-growing vat of the "destitute", the standard for "destitute" will rise to something of a comfortable powerlessness, where people are unable to really do or accomplish anything of note with their lives, but where they can sit in idle squalor fat, stupid, and happy -- except those few wise enough to realize what's become of them -- until that entire segment of the population dies out of old age. Currently the poor reproduce at a higher rate than the rich, true, but all that's required to "solve" that "problem" is the invention of machines that provide better sex than their human counterparts -- why would you want to fuck another fat poor slob when you could fuck a sexy supermodel-bot? Eventually the poor just die of old age (and diseases associated with the idle lifestyle used to sedate them), and the surviving upper class are left in an underpopulated world serviced by their legions of robot minions, in an ironically egalitarian post-scarcity economy (now that everybody [who's left] has their own personal robot servants).
Of course, the first issue that comes to mind is: by that point, why wouldn't the rich also prefer to sleep with robots designed for that purpose instead of each other, but I imagine issues of "legacy" and "lineage" and other euphemisms for immortality-by-proxy would motivate enough of them to breed inheritors for their empires.
Then again, the second issue that comes to mind is: if you're rich and have a legion of robots servicing your every whim, of what use is money? Money is useful because you can buy stuff with it and get people to do stuff for you. When you can just have stuff made and done for you at your whim without having to pay someone else for it, why do you care about money? Give it a generation or two of such a post-scarcity economy, with the aforementioned bread-and-circuses keeping the "redundant" masses from tearing it all down meanwhile, and I see no reason why the grandchildren of the first robot-owner overlords would have any motive to withhold anything from the teeming masses, especially if it will make a world full of beautiful and interesting people to play with instead of a bunch of fat morons.
So maybe in the end, as we move toward a dystopian nightmare, my "dystopian paradise" might only be used to forestall the downfall of civilization, until such time as we realize we have a utopian paradise at our fingers just waiting to be unleashed on the world.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Everyone is so negative. If the U.S. can beat out China and Viey Nam.on factory work then do it and sell to China's customers.
Manufacturing is not just about welding you know. Let's see a quality U.S operation kick some ass.
A factory that automates does so by investing and growing. Its growth means more jobs not less. As the factory grows and income is generated and taxes are generated, the country's standard of living improves. It is an unintended consequence. A factory with workers does not fire workers as robot/automation is implemented. The factory grows as it becomes more and more efficient. Factories are built where you would not normally build one given automation allows it to exist. The invention of bearings, motors, electricity, lubrication, computers and so many more should have put people out or work but didn't. The exact opposite occurred.
The alternative is protectionism where inefficient companies are propped up by government and the tax payer pays twice, once on the shelf and once through taxation. Efficient factories can't compete, so you breed inefficient production and the government running around putting out fires with tax payer money.
On average disposable income has been consistently rinsing as automation has been introduced ... does it not look a tad weird that things have improved dramatically since the industrial revolution yet automation has dramatically increased and all those farmers have come to live in the city ?
I think contrary to what people think, robotics technology for parts assembly is very commonplace, even on high-end products.
For example, take a look at even a high-end car like a Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan. Anyone who's seen the assembly line notes much of the assembly work is done by robots, with human hands primarily involved in assembling the interior of the car and certain exterior trim pieces. For most lower-end models, a huge fraction of the assembly of the car itself is done by robots nowadays.
The USA has one gigantic advantage for manufacturing almost no other country has: a magnificent ground transportation infrastructure. Thanks to our railroads and the Interstate Highway System, good assembly can be done almost anywhere in the country.
Profoundly Ignorant of how and of what 99.999% of all manufactured goods are made. Ignorant of what and how the components of these technologies are the choke point and critical "secret sauce" of both manufacturing generally but of these two technologies specifically, and he who controls that secret sauce controls everything down the supply chain. You CAN NOT make an iPhone this way. You CAN make dime store trinkets and knick-knacks. Which has the margins and profits? Duh!
Basically it's a delusional "feel-good" fantasy made by a nation that has lost the recipe and likely can never get it back.
The one edge we don't ever want to lose (or can afford to lose) is our creative R&D edge. And we have to apply those skills now to figuring out what we're going to do with low skill, low intelligence workers as robotics and automation take over more and more mundane tasks. Technology has always moved faster than our abilities to adequately cope with it and these days it moves at lightening speed. Another new age dawns and we should have started preparing ourselves for it long before this. One of the first steps and one that can be accomplished quickly if we can find the political will to do it is a complete overhaul of immigration policy (no more mass immigration of the unskilled and uneducated needing jobs that won't exist anymore). Necessary also is a complete overhaul of the public education system which as it stands is inadequate to our needs today never mind our future needs. Accomplishing that one will require people who are in no way beholden to the education unions and able to withstand the assault such reforms will bring on them.
People could be learning how to be the one that designs, programs, and repairs the robots. And people not smart enough to do that should be training for blue collar jobs that cant be done by robots, and also cant be outsourced, like truck drivers, plumbers, electricians, air conditioner repairmen, etc.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
However, schooling is certainly effective in keeping young people out of the work force. What most of the comments here seem to ignore is that 200 years ago, children at age 4 or 5 were working on farms and in mines and in factories. Now, with automation and electric motors, children are out of the work force generally until they turn 21 (or longer if they go to grad school). Things have changed so much, and many people posting here seem unaware of that. At this point, most work is "make work" related to guarding or pointless zero-sum competition.
I agree with your point about decision makers being out-of-touch with emerging technological realities. See my site for more on that.
And see also:
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
http://anwot.org/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Marshall Brain and James P. Hogan are two authors worth reading on these topics.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
Martin Ford also has a great website in this area:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/
Lots more links and stuff on my site: http://www.pdfernhout.net/
And here are copies of some emails I sent to Ray Kurzweil over the years (someone else made a copy of them here) trying to get him to think more deeply about evolutionary and social issues related to the singularity:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
Basically, I tried to say much like what you are saying. Our trajectory coming out of any singularity may have a lot of influence on our path coming out of one. It just seems like common sense that more compassion, community, and cooperation now might make a big differnece later. See also Alfie Kohn's work:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm
"No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers."
My sig below sums up my years of thinking on all this.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I for one welcome our new Robot Overlords!
People will always NEED things, but if they've no money, they can't buy them, and if they've no means of production, nor any job to work at, they can't trade for them either. There're plenty of people on this planet who NEED things but don't get them.
When there's no more employment to be had, because all the jobs are automated, the masses will live at the sufferance of those who control the money, the means of production. Unless of course, society changes.
--PM
"It is entirely conceivable that in the next decade we start 3D-printing buildings and electronics."
Wheee, and let's 3D-print a planet in the decade after that!
3D-printing works because they use plastics that melt when heated. They are cool, but they are basically robotic glue guns with fast drying glue.
How would you 3D-print something that needs to withstand heat?
Or how would you go about 3D-printing reinforced concrete, or an economic and equally strong replacement?
You can't extrapolate a glue gun to that many materials/properties.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.