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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?
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.
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.
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.
Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano comes to mind, with all of its meanings and implications.
*inserts Linux LiveUSB, downloads schematics from PirateBay physibles
"Now printing "Apple MacBook Pro - By 1337 Warez Group." Approximate cost: materials only.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
Great post, though I'm not sure I agree with your point about 3D printers. I foresee local community and neighborhood 3D printers installed and serviced by that you can just send your 3D model to, and walk over to pick it up in a couple hours. Costs will be automatically charged to your CC. A large part of retail cost is in shipping/fuel costs. Consider the enormous amount of fuel/labor required to get a $.50 plastic widget transported across the world to your local Walmart, plus the fuel cost of you driving to the local store to buy it.
Next time I need a couple wall hangers, instead of getting in my V8 Chevy, spending $5 on gas to drive to walmart, I could just pick from "top reviewed" models on the internet, select one, send it to my local printer, and walk/ride by bike over to pick it up, saying hi to my neighbors on the way, and my total cost isn't much higher than the raw cost of plastic feed. This seem pretty Utopian to me, and I don't think we're too far away from it, honestly.
This will cause a massive reduction in the low-price widget sales of the big box stores, which will then need to focus on larger more complex items that can't be easily fabricated, which is a good thing.
As to all the folks on here who are screaming that the sky is falling and the middle class will be destroyed along with all those precious manufacturing jobs - pfft. Nonsense. People cry tearfully and dramatically about this same old thing every time a disruptive technology emerges. Strangely, it never happens, and the end result is a dramatically increased standard of living.
Just as the guys who worked on the assembly line of the buggy-whip manufacturers could have never conceived of the current job pool (Imagine trying to explain job reqs for a social media analyst to this person) we're equally limited in our ability to conceive of what the future will look like.
This, I think, it my primary problem with (for lack of a better term) "liberal" thought. I don't fault the motivation, I think that these sorts of ideas come from people who have a strong sense of justice and compassion. My problem is that it seems like "liberals" tend to take an extremely simplistic view of possible solutions, and have little comprehension for the unintended consequences of their proposals.
For example, we have rich people, and we have poor people. The "liberal" sense of justice is very simple: let's take stuff from the rich folks and give it to the poor folks. That solves the problem, right? What could possibly go wrong?
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
well there needs to be a high tech training system like todays trades without the liberal arts part.
Its called a community college granting an associates degree and the market has spoken and they're utterly worthless. I have one, I know all about this. All corporations treat them as about equivalent to a high school diploma, and entrepreneurs don't need someone to hold their hand to learn anyway. The training is exactly as you describe, no educational courses, all training in the field and related subjects. So I sat thru calculus at the CC, but not sculpting class.
This is not to say community colleges are worthless... the best way to look at it is I paid about 1/10th as much for my first 64 credits as I paid for my last 70 or so credits. And, frankly, the instructors at the CC are universally better than the TAs at university, having experienced both. The one or two university classes I had that were taught by full professors were the best of all, but the key words are one or two, the rest all being taught by outside consultants or TAs.
Some, key word some, apprenticeships are pretty high tech. Your average slashdotter would probably be floored if they knew what a modern tool and die maker knows...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"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.
... 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.
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."