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."

Comments

Re:Goodbye jobs

[crazyjj]

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.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[TheRaven64]

Someone has to drive the buses, sweep the streets, flip the burgers and operate the checkout at the supermarket et cetera, et cetera

I've been to several cities where busses have been replaced by automated trams. Street sweeping isn't done by guys with brooms anymore, it's done by guys driving around (slow-moving) vehicles. They're no harder to automate than a roomba. Most supermarkets have self-service checkouts and just one security guard to watch half a dozen or more of them, and even that wouldn't be required with RFID on the product tags. Burger flipping is probably around for a little while longer - it's not hard to design a machine that would cook and assemble fast food burger (it's simpler than many automated factory tasks), but the human is so cheap in comparison to the machine that it would take a good few years to break even and the human is more flexible when you want to change the menu.

If these people had been stakeholders in the businesses introducing automation, then it would have been fine: as they were replaced by robots they'd have just had more free time and less work. Unfortunately, we've concentrated ownership in a small subset of the population and are trying to fudge the gap with welfare payments, paid out of a general fund and not by the people making profits from the trend.