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

Just imagine

[plover]

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?

Goodbye jobs

[RichMan]

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 ?

Re:Goodbye jobs

[crazyjj]

But what is the cost of a large unemployed population ?

Historically, this has led to political instability and social unrest.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

People will be freed up for creative jobs, jobs that involve human intelligence which can't be done by machines. It's not robots writing Diablo III, inventing costumes for the Hobbit movie, writing screenplays, and so on. It will enable so much more human productivity, if we don't have to use valuable human minds on robot-like labour any more.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[crazyjj]

People will be freed up for creative jobs, jobs that involve human intelligence which can't be done by machines.

And what are the non-creative idiots going to do for a living? Working in the environments that most of us /.ers work in, it's easy to forget that they're still the majority, you know.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[Belial6]

This is why at some point we need to accept that as some point in the future most of the population is going to be permanently unemployed. This can either be the dream of a paradise where everyone can live a life of leisure and self fulfillment, or it can be a horror where where the wealthy live in leisure while the teaming masses live in a perpetual state of starvation and poverty. We need to decide which way we will go, and move in that direction.

We are not there yet for the general population, but we are far enough along that we would likely be better off if we accepted that some segments of our society have reached that point.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[mhajicek]

The creative jobs already tend to have far more applicants than positions. In order to be gainfully employed you have to be able to do something better than a robot of comparable expense, which is beyond a growing sector of the population. We're entering an ugly phase of economic reform, between scarcity and abundance. In the old way, the default state was lack, and if you could provide something it had value, and so could be traded for something else of value. In the future there could be abundance, in which case everyone can just take what they want. In between there's the point where there is enough for everyone, but those who have it won't share because (instinctively if not consciously) they're concerned about not having enough in the future. They also won't trade with you because you don't have anything that's of value to them.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But what is the cost of a large unemployed population ?

Historically, this has led to political instability and social unrest.

Conveniently, we are currently beta-testing robots to deal with those pesky problems...

Re:Goodbye jobs

[Githaron]

At first, there will be hardship. Eventually, no one will be doing the jobs that robots can easily do. Unless we find more stuff to do, eventually, the work weeks will shorten while the standard of living will either remain the same or get higher. Of course, 1984 could just happen where all the excess goes into perpetual war rather than the economy.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

And what are the non-creative idiots going to do for a living?

They'll do what they've always done: Management.

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

[MiniMike]

Don't agree with the use of the term 'idiot' for all non-creative people, but there's plenty of people working now who are in mostly "non-creative" jobs which are not on an assembly line. The entire service industry, the legal industry (i.e. not just lawyers, but all the other affiliated jobs), honest accountants, education, medical industries, etc. Many of those jobs also require some degree of creativity, even if that's not the primary focus.

As for the actual idiots, who knows what they will do. Maybe we'll have to be creative to think of something for them...

Re:Goodbye jobs

[alen]

100 years ago 90% of the people in the US were employed on farms. today its 4%. why isn't 90% of the USA unemployed?

new jobs open up and are created

Re:Goodbye jobs

[dcollins]

"People will be freed up for creative jobs, jobs that involve human intelligence which can't be done by machines."

This dogma over the last two decades or so has led us right to the edge of record-setting long unemployment and poverty.

What if there are no paying jobs that can't be done by machines? Because current trends seem to point to this being the case.

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.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[v1]

People will be freed up for creative jobs, jobs that involve human intelligence which can't be done by machines.

I believe you're severely over-estimating the number of such jobs in china. If you put every line worker in china out of a job and tried to get them something else higher-end to do, I don't think you could find enough employment in the world.

But I think that's one of the reasons China is trying to slow down their population explosion. They know there's simply not going to be as many jobs in the future as there are now. All those people either have to have work or have to be state-supported. Communist governments like China are supposed to, in theory, spread the wealth, but there's usually not enough to take good care of everyone.

This only works in the middle east, and only for a limited time, due to the vast amount the countries there are raking in from the world for their oil. A lot of their people don't have to work, or don't have to work hard. China's main export is "cheap stuff for the rest of the world" So although they have very high volume, the actual amount is a lot lower than you might think just due to the low cost demanded by the wholesalers like wallymart. (and they are sooo screwed when that oil runs out, although if they have half a brain and save a lot and invest seriously in their country as we're seeing them do now, they'll at least have a golden parachute)

THIS is the only reasonable explanation for why manufacturers in China are saying that labor is expensive there. It's not. It's dirt cheap. But so is the product they are selling. The bottom line is that China as a country isn't bringing in enough money to provide good quality of living for its huge population. As long as they continue to specialize in supercheap export products and have a large population, this just can't change.

All that's going to happen through automation is that walmart's prices might fall a nickel and a cityfull of people in china will hit the unemployment list. And it's hard to say who's to blame. Do you blame the consumer for not "buying responsibly", when they're just trying to stretch their paycheck and provide the best life possible for their family? Do you blame the retailer for not carrying only higher quality products, when they are better able to fulfill their responsibility to their shareholders by maximizing profit and volume? Do you blame the manufacturer in China for automating so they can shave a little off the cost of manufacture because their wholesaler is threatening to buy from another source? Or do you blame China for having a large enough population to allow manufacturers there to lowball the salary because they will still get all the warm bodies they need?

China realizes all this. They can't control the world's consumers. They can't control the world's retailers. If they try to interfere with their local manufacturing it will cause them to fail. So they do the only thing they can, and encourage the population to have only one child. China's doing the only thing that really anyone in this entire process can to try to improve it. Increased automation is just going to make matters worse for China IMHO. It's going to drive the price of labor even further down just when the country is trying to prop it UP. This isn't a simple little issue, it's a part of a tightly interwoven issues, and is impossible to fix by looking at only one part of it.

The immediate effect of increased automation will be a drop in the cost of labor in China, resulting in higher unemployment, heavier burden on state social services, and a drop in prices from OTHER manufacturers that didn't automate, because now labor is cheaper. The people of China are the first losers. We over here in Europe and America probably won't notice much of a difference for awhile, and I don't see any clear idea of how it will affect us in the long term. Prices in world markets are based on supply-and-demand when supply is low. But

Re:Goodbye jobs

[DM9290]

With any luck it will also lead to automatic education systems that will allow all those people learn new skills to better deal with the new world.

Gosh.. I sure hope we get lucky! Because if we don't get lucky we're looking forward to the collapse of the economy and major violent civil unrest.

No doubt it will be hard, and impossible for some, but such are any major shifts in economy and production.

You are envisioning the economy is going to shift to something that robots can not do but people can? shift to what? Poetry? Erotic massage? Surrogate motherhood for the ultra wealthy? Sperm donation? Organ sales?

All the signs point to the economy shifting towards ever more automation, and ever more accumulation of wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer owners, and there are no signs or reason to suspect this trend is ever going to stop until there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do that a robot can't do better, at which point on what side of the fence are you going to be on when surgical robots show up to harvest your organs at age 18 to pay back all the money you've been borrowing to survive through your childhood but can not possibly repay?

Re:Goodbye jobs

[shutdown -p now]

This dogma over the last two decades or so has led us right to the edge of record-setting long unemployment and poverty.

That's because we refuse to let go of the ancient idea that only those who work should be well-off, and those who don't deserve to be poor, and consequently consider unemployment as a temporary state that should necessarily involve hardship. This is not necessary in a society which can be sustained with only a few people working solely as much as they want for their own self-fulfillment.

What if there are no paying jobs that can't be done by machines?

Then there are no paying jobs, and we ditch the current economic system (which, to remind, is ultimately just a way of distributing generated wealth) and move on to the next one.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[HornWumpus]

The guard is there to keep me from kicking the POS self serve POS machine to pieces.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[steveg]

- you think you are telling me something that I don't know? Something that I didn't say dozens of times here? Eventually these programs will all go away, and it's a great thing, people will have to work again and will be free of gov't again.

Doing what? Did you miss the part about most jobs being automated away?

Do you think we want JOBS? NO!

We want productivity, we want THINGS. We want LEISURE.

You're absolutely right. If business gets efficient enough, the prices of all these things will plummet. All these shiny things will be incredibly cheap.

But since most of us will have zero income (since none of these efficient businesses *need* our labor) these incredibly cheap things will be too expensive for anyone except the very rich who own these wonderfully efficient businesses.

Which will soon collapse because they won't have anyone to sell to.

Depending on what sort of economic religion you believe in, driving wages down might actually work out if you drive prices down faster. Driving wages to zero (which is what looks like we may be headed for) is not just an extreme version of this, it is qualitatively different. Even if you worship at the alter of the Free Market (as you evidently do) driving income to zero removes the market part -- you have to have someone to sell to.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[GodInHell]

This dogma over the last two decades or so has led us right to the edge of record-setting long unemployment and poverty.

Its hard to unbundle the damage done by off-shoring and automation from the damage done by making markets more "efficient" by buying out and cutting down profitable companies to make them perform better.

Since we started cutting taxes on investment income and income over $1,000,000 there is less and less incentive to make long-term investments (which defer income, and thus taxation) in favor of short-term high-risk high-yield gambles that get taxed at 15-20%. In the 1950s, the owner of a corporation wouldn't take a $5,000,000 buyout for his company, because that single sale event would be taxed at an effective rate in the high 80-percentile -- thus encourage owners and innovators to retain control, to treat their company itself as the source of wealth through operation, rather than treating the company as a commodity to be liquidated as soon as that made economic sense.

Its been a long and brutal slide down to a 30% tax rate (easily avoidable down to 15% or lower) and the results speak for themselves. Tax policy and unemployment are inexorably linked.

Re:Goodbye jobs

[Smidge204]

No point in repeating what is actually wrong in one way or another.

Want a solid "full strength" metal part from a 3D printer? Either use a 3D printed substrate and infuse it with molten metal as a post-process (sintering method) or use the 3D printed object as a lost-material positive mold blank. Besides, if you want monolithic metal objects 3D printing is not the way to go.

As for full strength plastic parts? 3D printers can actually produce parts stronger than injection molded parts in some situations, since printed parts from an extrusion machine have a "grain" structure not completely unlike wood. Sintering methods can produce parts as strong as any molded resin part since that's what they use as binder and/or filler.

As for the machine fucking up - humans fuck up far more often. A machine fucking up is usually due to a faulty human in the process chain somewhere. It's also a lot harder to repair a damaged human...
=Smidge=

A lose-lose situation(unless you make 3D printers)

[crazyjj]

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).

And how does this benefit the working class?

[na1led]

At least those people working in China might spend some of their hard earned money over here. Robots won't earn any income.

Re:And how does this benefit the working class?

[MozeeToby]

By increasing manufacturing efficiency, lowering prices for everyone (including products that aren't produced with automation by increasing the available labor pool for other industries). If you care about giving people jobs more than you care about making products efficiently, why not just have everyone build a giant brick pyramid in the middle of Nebraska. Oh, and make sure they do it by hand, wouldn't want any pesky earth moving equipment costing people their jobs.

Re:And how does this benefit the working class?

[DM9290]

By increasing manufacturing efficiency, lowering prices for everyone (including products that aren't produced with automation by increasing the available labor pool for other industries). If you care about giving people jobs more than you care about making products efficiently, why not just have everyone build a giant brick pyramid in the middle of Nebraska. Oh, and make sure they do it by hand, wouldn't want any pesky earth moving equipment costing people their jobs.

Why pay them to build useless brick pyramids? I could just as easily pay them to learn how to draw, eat nutritiously, write poetry, appreciate the wonders of the universe, and socialize with their friends. I could pay them to have a happy life. Oh wait.. that would be socialism.

fuck it. let them starve to death.

The irony of "creating jobs"

[ACluk90]

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.

Re:The irony of "creating jobs"

[na1led]

People who don't work, are not happy.

Re:The irony of "creating jobs"

[Anonymous Coward]

eliminating the need to work and rising the quality of life

To get that, you would need a permanent state-provided income for the entire population. And that's very unlikely to happen in the U.S.

I believe similar concerns were voiced upon the invention of the cotton gin and various farming tractors. And yet, with those inventions, the cost of food has fallen. Even when food is supposed to be expensive, it's not (at least not in the United States). If you can make everything automated enough where it costs pennies to provide food, shelter, water, electricity, etc. Then, no, it does not require "a permanent state-provided income for the entire population." This is progress and any comment otherwise will focus on temporary restructural unemployment. In a single generation that problem will fix itself. Nobody is born today dreaming of the job of picking cotton and separating the seeds from it. Long gone are the fears that the cotton gin will destroy every single job and the entire economy. Soon, your fears will be laughed at in a similar fashion.

Re:The irony of "creating jobs"

[vlm]

People would need new things to strive toward. Like the saying goes, An idle mind is the devil's workshop.

Sports, "Hollywood celebrity news", pr0n, video games, social networking ... wait am I supposed to be talking about now, or in the future?

Education might help. The original point of higher ed was to give the kids of the idle rich something interesting to think about for the rest of their lives ... Give them "good taste" and hobbies and lifetime interests worthy of a man of wealth and leisure. Hence the intense focus on the liberal arts at ancient universities, not so much focus on cooking classes or barrel making classes. The educational-industrial complex could abandon their wanna-be training role of mass producing identical cubical proles for middle class jobs that will never exist again anyway and go back to their roots. Would it really be so bad of a society if one quarter of the population were "into" the fine arts and liberal arts in general, another quarter "into" science and math, another quarter "into" not-so-fine arts like manual labor crafts, and the final quarter too stupid and/or unmotivated to do any of the above hang out on facebook and 4chan all day and play xbox and watch TV and use drugs?

4 day work week?

[Piata]

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?

Need for humans?

[bytestorm]

We should use humans only in the jobs that robots refuse to do.

Yay? All of the pollution and none of the jobs

[wisnoskij]

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?

Re:A lose-lose situation(unless you make 3D printe

[vlm]

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.

Yeah, right.

[Jawnn]

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.

Manufacturing Without Jobs

[dcollins]

"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.

Actually not

[SuperKendall]

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.

It's simple.

[Alex Belits]

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!

"The world’s most advanced car"

[hherb]

"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.