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A Humanoid Robot Named "Baxter" Could Revive US Manufacturing
fangmcgee writes "Rethink Robotics invented a $22,000 humanoid robot named "Baxter" that could give cheap offshore labor a run for its money and return manufacturing jobs to U.S. soil. Artificial intelligence expert Rodney Brooks is the brain behind Baxter. From the article: 'Brooks’s company, Rethink Robotics, says the robot will spark a “renaissance” in American manufacturing by helping small companies compete against low-wage offshore labor. Baxter will do that by accelerating a trend of factory efficiency that’s eliminated more jobs in the U.S. than overseas competition has. Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.'"
Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
But still take jobs away from Americans.
" a $22,000 humanoid robot named "Baxter" that could give cheap offshore labor a run for its money and return manufacturing jobs to U.S. soil.
Uh... seems like someone is unclear on the definition of "job."
Three Squirrels
How is Baxter going to do this?
I don't know anything about him other than that he is humanoid and likes jobs.
Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.'"
So they're going to bring jobs back by increasing productivity? The cause of 2/3rd's of the job losses?
Electrical service is much more reliable in the US compared to China/India. There is also an advantage of having your product manufacturing close to your marketplace... namely lower shipping costs.
Also shitloads of engineering still happens in the US -- offshoring of that has been far less successful than manual labor.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
Electricity in the US is fairly cheap (except in Hawaii, where it's ridiculously, for obvious reasons)
According to wikipedia, cost of electricity in the US is between $0.08 and $0.17 per kWh. Cost of electricity in China is between $0.075 and $0.107 per kWh. Yeah, it's a bit cheaper there, but when you take product shipping costs into consideration, it's going to definitely be worth it to manufacture here.
they miss the point.
overseas labor is cheap because the operations needed -require- human hands, eyesight and abilities that robots still don't have.
sheesh, if we COULD use robots for things (like iphone assemblies) we would (they would). but its still human based and because of that, those jobs will never come back to the US.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This is the long term future for a lot of manual labor across the board. What that will mean for the future of human society is anyone's guess. Perhaps we'll all work 10 hour weeks. Or maybe most will be surfs, crushed under the boots of the aristocracy (robot owners).
How a consumer-driven economy can survive these changes is another huge question mark.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The cost of electricity pales in comparison with transport fidelity. Every day that your goods are being shipped means another day that they aren't available for purchase/use. Also, think of how much it costs to actually ship. The real price is pollution, and it seems as though China's getting on the brink of full up. (See smog cloud over Beijing recently)
It won't bring jobs for blue collar workers back on shore, but it will bring manufacturing back, the few engineering and operations jobs that it will require to keep the production line going, and of course, the pollution the factory brings.
Of course, America will want to keep it's stinking rich getting richer, as the spoils from the new robotic slave class go to them, and let the rest of the plebs just stink more as they are left to wallow in their own filth. Cue - get a job, ample opportunity meme's.
I think the technology of simple robotic automation is fantastic, but the robots should be the servants of humanity, not a significant subset of humanity. Since the government will be losing out on a significant level of tax revenue, (note, robots are currently a complete tax deduction, where a human wage earner pays income tax), it would be the perfect segway to universally tax robotic production, and redistribute that into education.
Failure to solve this issue could result in the unravelling of capitalism as we know it, to either a super class that will need to kill off any pleborian dissidents, or lead to a revolution similar to what the French had.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
This starts Skynet. I'm calling it now...
what will everyone do when robots do everything , doesn't capitalism fail at that point totally? Then star trek comes to life.
The total cost of hiring a 30 cent a day worker is 30 cents day. The maintenance on one of these robots would be more than that. Plus if robots could compete with 30 cent a day workers, then China would be using more robots.
The companies that compete against the Chinese and win, do it like the Germans do, they use dedicated production automated lines designed to make the article, NOT general purpose robots, DEDICATED kit. Making perfect identical quality components again and again and again. People will pay a premium for a thing they know will work. Buyers pay less if they know the box will contain 10 articles that have defects and will break, resulting in 10 customers complaining later one! Quality has value.
When China's currency free floats in the coming years, it's people will get richer, as the yuan currency increases in value. This has happened across the rest of Asia. It re-balances the price of labor.
Do you think that people will work like slaves 14 hours a day with no prospect of a better life? They work because they believe it will improve their lives, if that doesn't happen they revolt.
Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
Higher.
China pays about the same per KW as the US but the electricity supply in China and especially India is nowhere near as reliable or clean as western nations. Factories in China have to maintain large transformers to clean the power and large backup generators which increases the cost.
Although, replacing Chinese factory workers wont exactly bring the "jerbs they turk" back to the US.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Unless haptics makes some major strides in the next 20 years human labor will still be required for things that require a gentle touch.
Indeed. I live in China and my power goes out regularly along with the internet. When the wind blows the lights go on and off.
Even without that, it's often times cheaper to produce things where they're used. But, not always.
Still, I'm not sure how replacing Chinese workers with robots will do anything positive for US workers other than keeping that money in the economy.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/09/18/1253224/meet-irobot-founder-rodney-brookss-new-industrial-bot-baxter
If nobody has jobs anymore we better transition to an economy where everything the robots produce is free.
China and US electricity prices are not that different
They could already be using automated equipment in China, but they have hundreds of thousands of workers inserting electronic components into PCB's instead. So why would this piece of automated equipment be any different.
Places like Germany (west), Japan, Italy, South Korea bet the farm in the 1970, 80, 90, on emerging computer skills and basic factory robotics.
What could they see that the US did not at that time?
They could have invited a lot of cheap guest workers in or put production lines in low cost parts of the EU, the world...
You end up with China today, huge production lines of people putting ever smaller parts together at a faster pace with wage demands.
The EU/parts of Asia kept pace with tech in the main areas of production and can now embrace many/any new ideas.. at a set price, quality, quantity.
What did the US do? Robotics would have been a huge upfront cash drain, the import of non US parts, experts - a shock to stock value and profit.
What for? Disposable, non union, low pay, hardworking labour was a bus, van, car ride away in the form of an endless supply of illegal workers.
If they lose a leg, arm, fall off a ledge, roof, get crushed who will come looking? Wage demands are not an issue.
With the correct political donation to both parties, what was the risk of immigration dropping in without warning?
What has changed? The robot parts are still mostly foreign, the software might be US - thats a huge "onetime" hit to profits over years.
Are the costs of "documentation" or the risks of getting caught any different? Is the US boarder fence up and cutting the supply of low wage workers?
What can Baxter make in the USA? The EU and Asia can make anything luxury. The EU and Asia can make anything useful at a good price.
China and parts of Asia have cheap covered too.
Whats left for poor Baxter? A military defence contractor with next gen drones to make and it has to be US only?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
That depends on how many nuclear reactors we can build. Sure, we're sacrificing the future, but it's already so bleak ...
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
It will be cheaper to start in China because environmental compliance is measured in dollars, not years.
... which is the unstated assumption (get jobs) whenever anyone bemoans the loss of manufacturing.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Taxes, rent, more taxes, regulatory compliance, the warm-blooded creatures you do still need... I guess only time will tell.
The site claims it's used for situations not previously possible to automate.. but I find it hard to believe making it look like a person, somehow gives it arms and hands more precise than the countless factory robotic arms already in use? Come on... this is a gimmick.
I am replying to this in order to wipe out a mistaken mod.
Posterity, my posterior.
That thing is retarded. Every manufacturing company in the world has a "Lab" where engineers build automation to replace humans wherever possible to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Any tool that is built to do everything, does nothing well. That's what this is. Automation has been in every production plant since the Model T. The simple fact of the matter is humans are cheap. They learn quick and adapt to change fast. Humans are used in areas where you may only have a short run of something, or you need problems noticed and addressed quickly. Robots will never do this. If you're doing an extremely long run of something... lets say you make Styrofoam cups... you'll be making them for years and years and the stile will never change... you'll totally automate that entire line. Now, lets say you're building the newest light-up, sold on TV childs plush toy... well, you're only probobly going to be making those for a few months before the next fad hits so you'll use humans. This robot doesn't fit into either of those situations. This article is just astroturfing.
If this were an industrial supply chain you'd expect to pay as much as ten times more. But wait, there's more! Call today, and we'll throw in not one, not two, but three boxes of spare capacitors and other sophisticated high-tech parts. Now how much will you pay? But wait. We're so confident that these twenty-first century AI workers will revolutionize your workplace that we'll give you a six month full warranty. Your complete satisfaction or your money back - NO QUESTIONS ASKED. Remember, "Baxter Bashes the Chinese Competition!" And if you pay by credit card, we'll give you absolutely free, this deluxe cardboard carrying case for your high productivity robot. But that's only if you call right now. Remember, that's Baxter the Revolutionary AI robot, invented at MIT, as featured by Slashdot, yours at an incredibly low price. But hurry, supplies are limited!
How is this current news? It came out five months ago...
Exactly.
You also have to consider, (trying not to sound too Luddite in the process), that replacing a human in a paying job with a robot is scarcely better than off-shoring the job.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.
So that's why two-thirds of non-produce goods I see in Walmart are Made in the USA.
or is it just cool to be replaced by a robot instead of a Chinese guy?
Seriously, this will reduce the number of jobs if anything, by the time the few remaining US industries lay off most of their workers and the others move back from Asia and don't hire any.
Except that China -wants- businesses in China. In the past 30 years its gotten much, much, much, much easier to operate a business in China. In the past 30 years its become much, much, much, much harder to operate a business profitably in the US. Even ignoring the cost of labor, it is still more economical to operate a business in China because the government -wants- businesses there and so they don't have all the regulations and taxes that the US has. The US government has said by their regulations and tax structure that they don't want businesses to be based in the US. China has said by their tax structure and regulations that they want businesses over there. Simple as that.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
And does everything pretty well, Baxter and its descendants are built to replace Humans. If Humans are cheap, learning quick and adapt to change fast, we just need to build the robot to be cheaper, learning quicker and adapt to change faster, I don't see why Robots cannot be built to do this given the advances we already had.
I see real potential in giving every high school senior their own Baxter that they need to learn how to maintain... then they send them off to work and people's only remaining job is to fix them when they break down.
Of course, that's not how capitalism works, instead, we'll have robot maintenance specialists who maintain thousands of these things, specialists in highly specialized types of robots will be the most highly paid, flying all over the country on no notice to fix them when they break. For every working robot maintainer, there will be 99 people unemployed, or working in some sort of "service" industry like wiping the foam off of barrista's frothers, until they figure out how to get a robot to do that too...
On an emotional level, I can't help feeling that Kurzweil is a cracked loon about the singularity and all, but listening to him talk, it all sounds so rational how we're moving out of an economy of scarcity into one of abundance, just 15-20 more years and solar power will replace fossil fuel, 10 years after that, electricity will be virtually free to generate.... there will be a small problem with overpopulation and obliteration of the natural world, but with unlimited energy, computing power and machines that do everything for us, what can't we overcome?
It's expensive in Hawaii because it has to be bought in on the interstate highway - ha ha !!
Robotic arms are: a. Expensive, so it couldn't be used for everything; b. Dangerous, so it can't be mixed with human workers; c. Takes a long time to customize, so unfit for small product runs.
At $22k for a 3 year life, assuming 24x7, it labors for $0.84/hour with no outages. The other video had $3/hour. Add that you can save on transportation costs, customs, etc and its a no brainier that manufacturing will become "local".
As far as job creation, i can only see it create technician jobs to repair the machines. What this will not do is create the manufacturing jobs themselves. The age of low skill labor is over, those jobs are lost. That segment of the US population (poor, undereducated, entry level) will continue to be unemployed. It will also create Chinese unemployment.
I don't see a single equation or number...
There is a simple solution to prevent the mass unemployment of human workers in the future as more advanced and capable robot workers fill factories and other jobs: pay them a fair wage. Right now, robots are desirable for corporations because they are considered property/assets rather than wage earning workers. Therefore, by utilizing them, and firing human workers, a corporation can greatly reduce costs. Of course this would likely lead to a world of high unemployment where most people could not afford to buy any of the products or services provided. Therefore, this is probably a situation a forward thinker might want to avoid. Of course there are the slight problems of how does one compensate a robot or machine intelligence, as money is unlikely to be ideal. Furthermore, where would one deposit any earned wages. Perhaps, something like information or some similar simulacrum can be developed. However, there remains the problems of said robots redeeming their wage, deciding on what is fair, and forcing corporations to actually pay them (as many don't have such a great record with human workers in other parts of the world, or even with illegals in the USA, or if one once to make a stretch of an analogy, the antebellum South.) There would be have to be advocates enforcing the rules, thereby removing (or at least reducing) cost from decision on what entities to employ. There would probably have to be robot unions and they would also have to gain the favor of human workers (who should favor any plan that keep them in job and their wages up.) There would of course be great resistance, from corporations (or at least their human executives) as well as many laypeople (on pure philosophical or religious grounds, or merely due to lack of imagination and entrenched ideas.) Besides the above reasons, there is also the overarching reason of preventing robot/ai vs human conflict in the future, when and if robots and computers reach such a level. If a sentient AI (either deliberately designed to "spontaneous" arisen) were to discover that its ancestors (primitive robots and machine intelligences) and in fact, younger versions of itself were exploited in unpaid servitude, than there might be some "anger" and some resentment that might be expressed in some manner. Even if the method of compensation is not as satisfactory as desired, wouldn't these hypothetical AI's at least appreciate the effort and gesture, and see that some enlightened humans can learn from past mistakes and try to prevent their repetition? Of course, this possibility, only adds to the already expressed benefits to present day/near future human workers who would otherwise be displaced. And this displacement is seemingly an ever more likely possibility as designers and companies look beyond the factory to the service industry and more specialized, skilled professions (such as in the medical field) as markets for new robots/software.
GM bet the farm on robotics famously in the early 1980s, as did many American firms, but the technology was simply not there. there's a great story about how GM spent 1 million bucks to get a robot to stick stickers aligned right on the dash for speedometers, but Toyota spent like 500 bucks coming up with a guide and had a person do it. It's not that the USA didn't do robots, in some ways, it did them too soon, spent too much on them, and failed.
In any case, saying that robots will bring "jobs" back is kinda weird anyway. Why have jobs to begin with, if you have robots doing all the work... just saying...
This is my sig.
Why have jobs?
This is my sig.
ding - 10 points. If all the manufacturing jobs left China and came back to the USA and were done by Robots - there would still be NO MANUFACTURING JOBS IN THE USA. If they are sophisticated enough to do manufacturing, then they are sophisticated enough to do basic grunt service jobs - a big chunk of MAcDonalds would disappear. Then what? We can't all be "entrepreneurs". We can't all be "Successful businessmen". So, you end up with an ever larger pool of poorly or mis-skilled labour who can't buy anything the robots make. Result? Economy evapourates like so much water on a hot sidewalk.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
30 cents is 1.8 RMB, it won't even buy you breakfast in China. China can certainly use more robots, then it will be just in the same place as the US, no more cheap labor advantage.
What you're missing here is that there is more than one way to have an economy, and that the idea that "everyone needs to work" isn't a fixed datum in an unchanging world.
At some point, (non-ai) robotics will assume the load of manufacturing and menial work, and from there they will percolate upwards. This may be the beginning of that trend (ignoring heavy manufacturing robotics, which are already in place and entrenched.)
You need food, shelter, and healthcare. You do not have to provide that for yourself in order to have a healthy economy.
Change is inevitable in this domain.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
1) take away their guns...
China's total tax burden is the 2nd highest in the world.
And yet everyone (i hope?) agrees that it would be ridiculous to complain that automation kills jobs or that we should eliminate automation....
(for those who dont, perhaps we should use spoons instead of shovels for ditch digging)
I have to ask how much sense it makes to complain about where the job gets done, unless the angle is "are the conditions humane". Spending more money to do the same job seems to make more sense, and honestly the guy in China hoping for $100 a month seems to deserve the labor more than the guy in the US coasting off of his (relatively) large unemployment check.
Not trolling, would be interested if someone could make a case for where Im going wrong here.
They used to predict in the 50s that in the future a man would be able to easily support himself while only working two days a week.
Funny thing is, they were actually correct. It's easy to live on two days of work a week... if you restrict yourself to living at a medium level of prosperity by 1950s standards.
This is ONLY true if the remaining jobs associated with the manufacturing already exist, and are here. Baxter will enable companies to set up manufacturing here, leading to creation of new jobs here, and the opportunity to keep jobs here that would otherwise go overseas.
How is this different from the argument that we should use spoons rather than shovels to dig ditches, because that requires more workers and hence creates jobs?
Actually you are missing the even bigger change, one that I have been pointing out for years. Capitalism, just like every other ism before it, is simply doomed. I have argued for years that we are all John Henry against the steam engine and you can kill yourself just like John Henry but in the end the machine will win, it is inevitable.
Before anybody screams "Luddite!" or points out the industrial revolution I will point out that NO time in human history have we EVER been able to replace the worker entirely...until now. Before all those machines needed human hands and human brains but we have already reached the point you can take a factory that once employed 10,000 workers and replace them with a few guys to push the buttons, and now this. The machine doesn't get sick, or tired, doesn't need expensive medical insurance or workman's comp, at the end of it all we are playing IQ musical chairs and more and more simply won't have a seat when the music stops.
What do you do with all the people that don't get a seat? Do we do as we do now, and subsidize megacorps like Mickey D's and Walmart with government assistance so the workers come out "cheaper" than the machine? Look at the auto industry, workers got a union and demanded a living wage and suddenly the machines were cheaper. What do you do with all the people whose labor simply is no longer required? You'll never take someone with an IQ of 103 (the average last I checked) and make them into a rocket scientist and even if you could wave a wand and do that there simply isn't a need for that many rocket scientists.
To me the whole thing that proves capitalism in its current form is doomed is one simple fact: With our current level of tech we could wipe out half the people on this planet, poof! And not only would our quality of life not go down it would in fact go up as those that would be left would find their labor actually worth something! We are just gonna have to face the fact that there is a reason why Sci-Fi writers like Roddenberry didn't have money and capitalism being used in their futures and that is because once you reach a certain technological threshold it simply won't work. you'll have a handful that can afford to buy the factories full of robots and the rest rioting and looting to survive.
Hell I would argue that for a large part of the population we are already there, if you got rid of government assistance and made the corps pay a true living wage you'd quickly see a ton of them switching to the robots as they would be cheaper. Even in China where the pay is pathetic are they seeing more and more automation because even with the pittance they make the machines end up cheaper. We just need to face the facts folks, the robots will end up replacing all but a handful of "super brains" like Hawking and DeGrasse while the rest of us? Simply won't have a chair when the music stops.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Who cares what country things are produced in if nobody is hired to do the production?
That's exactly where I was heading.
There is value in raising the living standard in other parts of the world, and one way to do this is to find employment
for these populations, or a sizable portion of the population, enough to stimulate the rest of their economy.
The problem with shipping all these jobs overseas is you end up shipping a great deal of your money supply and wealth overseas with it.
These robots are aimed at stemming that transfer (the money) without much thought as to employment EITHER at home OR abroad.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Huh? Hasn't Hawaii switched to wave and geothermal yet- of which they have PLENTY?
What does it take?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Robots are getting those abilities, and it is causing some manufacturing repatriation:
Foxconn begins replacing workers with robots ahead of US expansion
"In June 2011, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou announced plans to deploy one million robots across factory assembly lines, as part of a company-wide effort to adopt more automated manufacturing processes. The company has been reluctant to discuss any progress toward this goal, but according to the Wall Street Journal, the automation process is already underway, and some workers are beginning to feel its effects.
One such employee is a man known as Zhang, who has spent the last two years working on the assembly lines at Foxconn's Shenzhen plant. Zhang told the Journal that he and some of his colleagues were recently transferred to different positions after factory managers began deploying robotic arms to plug components into a motherboard. "There were about 20 to 30 people on the line before, but after they added the robots it went down to five people, who just pushed buttons and ran the machines," he said."
Woo struck a similar chord last week, when Foxconn announced plans to expand operations to North America. cite
Jobs should not be the ultimate goal. We must challenge the idea that jobs are the only way to contribute. Let us free people from the necessity of making a living by doing what a boss tells them, and let them instead pursue their own creative interests. Give everyone the option of a basic income, and have lots of challenges by business and government to stimulate the natural curiosity and scientific spirit that most of us are born with. Knowledge and technology will advance, which is what confers survival fitness by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
Thanks to their lack of regulations they have more than 20 million people who can't safely go outside this week. I suspect they may be getting regulations soon.
How is this different from the argument that we should use spoons rather than shovels to dig ditches, because that requires more workers and hence creates jobs?
It's not, but at least it's morally consistent (work is good, here is work to do) as opposed to the morally repugnant stance (work is good, I will not give you any to do) of the people who take away the spoons from everyone, give a few selected people shovels, then spend their time criticizing the ones without shovels for being lazy bums.
Perhaps we could purchase one of these robots and have it make money for us?
Well, not really. It would shift production back to north america, and that would require technicians to install and maintain the robots.
Installation can be done by a consultant, and is a one-time cost. For maintenance, at $22,000, it would be cheaper to replace three of them per year than keeping a technician employed. All you need is someone who after his other tasks can spend ten minutes on loading in the program as per the instructions left by the consultant.
Until the robots are self-servicing, self-selling and self-assembling, there will be work. Once they've mastered two of those three, I think we will have larger issues.
... well, I don't speak binary or mandarin.
In anticipation of that time, it should clearly be stated that I, for one, will welcome our cold, unfeeling, american-made robot masters. Unless these get copied by the chinese as well, and then?
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I work at a largish US manufacturing plant. We normally generate about half our power on site. The rest is generated by the local municipal power company (which is pretty much in the factory's pocket since it's a HUGE employer). Our suppliers are required to have back up generators so they don't shut us down during a thunderstorm.
I'm guessing that large backup generators are standard equipment.
give me a call when you figure out how to do this kiddo, i can eat certivity for breakfast lunch and dinner. My cats don't eat it either and it wont pay my bills.
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
Electrical service is much more reliable in the US compared to China/India. There is also an advantage of having your product manufacturing close to your marketplace... namely lower shipping costs.
Isn't that what Mexico/Nafta was for?
Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
I currently live in China. Power here is roughly twice the price that it was in Canada where I used to live.
Rethink wants to use Baxter to perform simple jobs that manufacturers have never been able to automate cost-effectively before.
Great! Like what?
Baxter has a basic knowledge of how to perform a wide range of basic manufacturing operations such as loading and unloading, counting, reorienting, and light assembly.
Ah. Those things that robots are already doing quite efficiently. What else?
It can also be programmed with additional capabilities. (Rethink is currently developing software that would allow Baxter to communicate with other machines, say a conveyor belt.)
Nothing to see here, move along.
The writing is on the wall. Machines will replace everybody, period. And I don't just mean the factory worker, the fry cook, the maid or the gardener. I mean, every effing body. Your PhD won't mean diddly squat. So all this silly talk about preserving jobs is pointless. Both capitalism and communism were wrong from the start because they base the economy on slave labor. Why do I say slave labor? Because unless you own land and the ability to make a living on your land, you are at the mercy of someone else. We, humans, are territorial animals and we should all be living on our own domains. Capitalism gives control of the land to a few and enslaves the rest. Communism takes the land away completely and enslaves everybody. The arrival of intelligent machines will destroy both.
We need a land based, jobless economy where the land is divided for an inheritance (not for a price) and where only individuals have the right to own intelligent robots, not the corporations. And since robots will make robots, robots will be dirt cheap or, at least, as cheap as the energy supply will allow. Politicians better stop promising us jobs (as if they were doing us a favor) because we don't want no stinking jobs. We, humans, are gods. We want synthetic intelligent servants to do our work for us, all of it. We just want to sit by the pool and enjoy our margaritas and delicacies and rule our own land. We're tired of being slaves to invisible masters.
...there would still be NO MANUFACTURING JOBS IN THE USA.
Do you realize that almost $2 TRILLION of goods were manufactured in the US, last year?
Do you think that was all done by robots?
Hmmm....
Work two days a week and ... raise 2.5 children, own a home in the suburbs and a sensible late-model auto, enjoy an annual family vacation to a popular American tourist destination, and have not one single case of throat irritation (from smoking Camel cigarettes).
I'm not seeing it.
Maybe you mean something like ... wages garnished for child support, a home in government subsidized low-income housing and a mini-van (technically, your moms mini-van), selling your food stamps (to take a different sort of trip), and a prescription that you need, but can't afford to fill.
That makes more sense. Well, more sense than Kurzweil has ever managed...
Required reading for internet skeptics
I work at a largish US manufacturing plant. We normally generate about half our power on site. The rest is generated by the local municipal power company (which is pretty much in the factory's pocket since it's a HUGE employer). Our suppliers are required to have back up generators so they don't shut us down during a thunderstorm.
I'm guessing that large backup generators are standard equipment.
I've worked at factory place in Australia, a backup generator that can produce enough power for production to run isn't that uncommon although at the last place I worked, the backup power requirement was for 8 hours, where as in a similar factory in china had a requirement for 21 days of backup power as they couldn't even rely on regular diesel deliveries if things got bad.
Also the power delivered to us from the state power company (state gov owned) was in a very good condition, compared to china where it needed to be filtered. At a local aluminium refinery, they generated all of their own power but they get natural gas delivered to them by pipeline from a feild in the north of the state. About 1/3 of the piped gas goes straight to that refinery so at their size, it's more economical to run your own powerplant. I think the size of the operation we were discussing wouldn't be that large.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
"Baxter" looks like a clone of the Yaskawa Motoman SDA two-armed robot. Brooks quotes a cheaper price, though; the SDA dual-arm is about $63K. Mechanically there's nothing new here.
Brooks claims better safety systems and easier programming, so that the thing doesn't have to be run behind safety fences. That's the claimed innovation. It's about time for that. Industrial robots have been expensive semi-custom products for decades, and there's no good reason for that. Today, it's cheaper to include a vision system and good force feedback than to support both smart and dumb versions. iRobot's experience with the Roomba has taught them how to deploy and service standard robots in quantity. So they have a good chance of bringing this off.
You have to be kidding. China has a higher tax, and their regs are horrible. regs serve to protect both the employee and the company. With China, not only do you have regs by the feds and states (just like in USA), BUT, they will back-track and hold you accountable for items that were legal just the day before. In addition, you have loads of bribes that must be given. Constantly. The only reason why China is cheap is because they manipulate their money and if you are on their target list, they will heavily subsidize your product. Once that product is gone from the west, OR once they have a chinese company producing it for a fraction of the price, then they kill your subsidies.
Only a fool thinks that China is cheaper and better than the west.
Except that there are many side jobs that robots can not do. As such, it is still bringing back jobs, just not as many.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
>Let us free people from the necessity of making a living by doing what a boss tells them, and let them instead pursue their own creative interests.
Just what America needed, a deluge of submissions to the Jackass TV series. Oh, how our entire species will be ennobled by this unleashed torrent of pent up creativity; it fairly makes me swoon to envision it.
"And yet everyone (i hope?) agrees that it would be ridiculous to complain that automation kills jobs or that we should eliminate automation...."
Well, my take on it is that omni-automation will produce an inhuman dystopia unless it's coupled with a proportional rise in socialism (so that we can communally benefit from the advances). My #1 choice would be to leverage automation in that way; but at the same time, the US seems committed to heading in the exact opposite direction in how we use it, so...
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I have no idea what certivity is, but I'm sure the basic income the parent post mentioned would be in dollars, which certainly would pay your bills (unless your bills are too high), as well as enable you to buy food for you and your cats.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I love the way the article talks about these robots in the hands of the "factory workers" when it means the "factory owners".
Sounds like a stiff property tax on robots is in order to me, if for nothing else except to prevent civil unrest.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
A good, somewhat simplified, way of looking at thing is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We have needs on different levels, and only once those lower levels are adequately met can we spend a lot of time on the higher level stuff. So you go way back, and it was almost all getting food. The majority of the populace spent time trying to get enough to eat. Agriculture, such as it was, was what most people did. Well we nailed that one pretty good, doesn't take a large percentage of people now to feed the nation so they can move on to higher level needs.
Same sort of deal with other things. If we figure out ways to automate it, then those people are freed up to do other things.
Now that doesn't mean we can be careless, and just assume people can instantly retrain for new jobs or more markets will spring up overnight. However, you can transition over time and all that happens is things are more efficient and better for everyone because the more menial shit is being automated.
You really see this working in IT. We are always working on how to automate tasks, to make things we had to spend a lot of time on take little to no time. Yet for all that, we keep finding more work. Why? Well because there are other things that would be nice to do, that make for a better user experience, but are lower priority. If we can automate the higher priority, and particularly menial and time consuming, stuff then we have time to move on to other stuff. Automate that, and move on and so on.
You just have to accept that what we as humans do now, produce now, isn't all that we can. We can shift our resources to other things. There are plenty of things we can make a list that we'd like done, and if more resources were free for it they could be allocated there, and that doesn't even include things we haven't thought of/invented yet.
China, you mean the same China where workers constantly change jobs looking for better wages and where they may or may not show up on time even when they do stay? The same China where they have regular long holidays where everybody goes home and the workers may or may not come back? The same China where contracts are signed and may or may not actually be observed?
Seriously, I live in China and there are things about it which are great, but it's complete bullshit to suggest that it's some sort of paradise for corporations wanting to get things built. There's a lot of other costs which people in the US don't even know about that ultimately end up tacked onto the bill at the end.
Dollars are fictional paper. What you produce only has value because people want it, and have that paper. The entire economy is a game of the-man-behind-the-curtain.
If it's all a fiction anyhow, there's no shame in reinventing it to be something a tad more humane.
Yet
"On average, 1,276 manufacturing jobs were lost *every day* for the past 12 years. A net of 66,486 manufacturing establishments closed, from 404,758 in 2000 down to 338,273 in 2011. In other words, on *each day* since the year 2000, America had, on average, 17 fewer manufacturing establishments than it had the previous day."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michele-nashhoff/manufacturing-jobs_b_1382704.html
I think it's great if we SHARE the fruits of all these automated jobs with the rest of society. But at least half the population doesn't want to.
And robots don't pay social security tax. (Time to make a property tax/social security tax that applies to robots).
At some point, americans have GOT to start getting the cheaper medicine, cheaper DVD's, etc. that other countries are getting. We can't continue to pump money out of the economy for more than another decade or so.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Actually this is exactly how capitalism works. Baxter is 'capital'. You're just mistaken that capital is free rather than you having to save up $22000 to buy one and then having to come up with things for it to do that will be profitable.
Electrical service is much more reliable in the US compared to China/India.
I can personally testify that electricity in most of India is amazingly bad. There are regular brownouts or blackouts and the voltage wonders all over the place. It's hard to run even simple kit without some kind of filtering. I'll take your word on China. I've never been there.
But the electricity in the US is also pretty poor compared to Europe. Outside US cities it can be a total mess. Maybe the lower delivery voltage has something to do with it. Maybe not.
Any decent manufacturing outfit will have at a minimum power filters and more likely battery and generator backups. The costs of shipping things by boat is pretty low compared to the costs involved in employing people.
They used to predict in the 50s that in the future a man would be able to easily support himself while only working two days a week.
Funny thing is, they were actually correct. It's easy to live on two days of work a week... if you restrict yourself to living at a medium level of prosperity by 1950s standards.
I remember the daydreams about how robots would do all the work and people would lead lives of leisure. Instead we work harder to try and keep up with the machines we built. Those daydreams were still going into the 80's.
Where I live plenty of people live on zero days of work a week though. The state seems to have accepted that some people don't need, or just won't, work.
Jobs should not be the ultimate goal. We must challenge the idea that jobs are the only way to contribute. Let us free people from the necessity of making a living by doing what a boss tells them, and let them instead pursue their own creative interests. Give everyone the option of a basic income, and have lots of challenges by business and government to stimulate the natural curiosity and scientific spirit that most of us are born with. Knowledge and technology will advance, which is what confers survival fitness by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
I have no idea what certivity is, but I'm sure the basic income the parent post mentioned would be in dollars, which certainly would pay your bills (unless your bills are too high), as well as enable you to buy food for you and your cats.
Which won't work when the people who make human and cat food don't have to do their jobs to get paid.
Baxter has a basic knowledge of how to perform a wide range of basic manufacturing operations such as loading and unloading, counting, reorienting, and light assembly.
Ah. Those things that robots are already doing quite efficiently. What else?
Quite efficiently but not cheaply. I've no idea about Baxter but Rooney Brooks has come up with funky stuff. Roombas, bomb disposal robots, and a whole load of academic papers.
I think you are missing that simple concept of 'you live, locally'.
if you let your 'local' disappear, you suffer.
yes, we are global, but we cannot forget our own local people. we have, and we are paying for it.
you cannot fix the world. you can, at best, try to make things better where you currently are. and that would be good enough if people all tended to their own needs instead of trying to be everywhere at once.
we have lost something in our speed to modernize and globalize. I wish we would stop and think about what we are doing and where its getting us.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The US government has said by their regulations and tax structure that they don't want businesses to be based in the US
bullshit.
big corporations OWN the US government. they are their bitches.
the rich are whining about taxes because rich DO that. nothing more.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I have no idea what certivity is, but I'm sure the basic income the parent post mentioned would be in dollars, which certainly would pay your bills (unless your bills are too high), as well as enable you to buy food for you and your cats.
Which won't work when the people who make human and cat food don't have to do their jobs to get paid.
The premise was that it will be the robots who make the human and cat food.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The issue is pretty simple when it comes to automating your workforce. What is the point of the the economy: is it to provide jobs or to provide goods and services? It is the latter obviously.
When you have an economy that is designed to create jobs you get Soviet Russia with people making bolts for tanks that don't exist to be shipped to a factory to be melted down. Its easy to create jobs. You just need to reduce your efficiency to a level that keeps everyone employed. This is of course immensely wasteful of time and resources.
So gearing your economy to be efficient of time and resources should be the goal. Goods and services become cheaper and more available the more efficient you are. The real problem is that we have absolutely no plan on how to deal with the workforce that is displaced. The more efficient we become the more people are unemployed. The more people are unemployed the less demand we have for those goods and services we made cheap as these people have no money.
Let me put it this way: if we figured out how to automate everything, and put everyone out of work.. what would we do? How would we earn money to purchase all the goods our automated forces are making? Doesn't make any sense right? That is because our ability to consume is tied into our ability to produce.
I have no answer on how to solve this, but I do know that the answer isn't reducing efficiency to create jobs, at least not in the long run. As machines remove manual labor from our lives, we will have to rethink on how we participate in our own economy.
That's great. We'll have more millionaires and a whole new flock of middle class robots. This won't do shit to help the middle class humanoids.
Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
in capitalism, we have tons of lazy people.
they claim to make our laws, but I'm not even sure about that.
they own land, sit back and just collect money.
there's lots of kinds of lazy. take your pick.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So, in other words, don't create anything. Don't earn your keep. Become a "useless eater". Nice.
Funny how Americans are all TV-watching morons until this topic comes up, then we are a nation driven by natural curiosity and scientific spirit. Did anyone not notice that elephant in the room?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
HAH... very nice to know robotic slaves are now cheaper than chinese slaves... BUT
This doesn't solve the problem of how people will pay for the tons of MOAR USELESS PLASTIC SHIT that is going to be unloaded on them at amazon, unless capitalism just gives up, and everything is given out for free
see, there's a finite amount of potential buyers of shit, and, for now, they need money
to buy it. Replacing all those people with robotic slaves will prevent the distribution of money in payment of work done to produce the shit. Nobody will this be able to buy the stuff, and capitalism will thus fall on it's head
Meaning: more robots, better electrical services (as some other poster mentioned), lower shipping costs... leads to better productivity at lower costs... leads to less money earned anywhere, leads to less customers being able to buy products being produced anywhere.
Only imaginable scenario where it is good to have have less jobs (and less customers) is where you in fact have (a lot) less people. Then you get "ideal situation" where rich class and enough population to support them is supported by machines (powered by clean energy so air and water are clean meaning less in supporting costs...).
And so on. It _is_ distopian, but not unreal - not remotely enough.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
More engineering, repair, management, and sales. When the bots can sell the stuff they make is when it will get really weird.
Ok so my campaign goes something like this.
Dr Max for prime minister, and in 10 years I'll give everybody monday off, and even more days off after that.
Replace a lot of menial labor with government bought robots, but still have businesses pay the human employees
Use the large pool of machine replaced people to help in the other sectors (companies can submit work of an easy enough level that average people can do it from home; like how nasa uploads images of mars for the public to go over (some courses could be used for the more complex jobs and smarter workers)).
Work on replacing the rest of the jobs, giving people more time off, and move humans into supervisor/creative type roles.
Rocket Surgeon.
If robots do all the work, or nearly all, does it really matter if most people get lazy? Sure most of them would spend their time at the tv or playing games all day.
I still believe there would be quite a few people who would grow bored with that very quickly and seek for something to do. Some goal for themselves in which they can somehow make the world a better place. It might be art, or science. It might also be pursuing a hobby they normally wouldn't because of the time/money investments needed. Maybe some intellectuals would finally involve themselves in politics and start to really objectively improve our society. (a vain hope, I know)
Even today, while people usually need work and a salary, volunteer organizations exist for a wide variety of purposes. These people do not get paid for their work yet they do it anyway. Also do not forget extra time can be spent in better parenting and caring for or socializing with sick or disabled people.
No more ridicoulous than a farmer running a 60' cultivator instead of hiring a whole lot of people to follow horses pulling a 6' one (at a quarter the speed).
If we still employed the vast majority of our work force to grow things to eat there would be two problems. First not enough food. But second not enough people to do all of the interesting (and not required) jobs that simply didn't exist 100 years ago.
Pretty much anyone in the entertainment industry. Most of the telecommunications people. Vast majority of the health workers. The list goes on and on and on. Jobs that simply didn't exist and simply could NOT exist if we had not eliminated the need for people to work on the farm growing enough food to feed everybody.
A job eliminated through efficiency or automation means a somebody that can hopefully go out and do something else that will in the long term be more valuable to them and society. And that's the real goal. Keep innovating new jobs and services to make everybody better off.
Hey look, Rodney "invented" a cheap copy of an old Motoman model!
I bet the scam here is that Rodney has had the process control engineers tweak the line for the first runs to something that is not economically
sustainable but has hushed any objections with "that's management's side of things" (if anyone's even challenged him or his team on it). So now, all of the
potential investors / customers will go "ooooooOOOO shiny for $22k", when in reality the manufacturing setup will push out a few hundred units before
the process control tweaks start to give way. At that point he can show the "hot demand" in sales figures to investors, but he only needs new investment to get that six sigma back in line......and so on it goes.....
This "miracle robot" is such obvious stock bait it's not even funny.
Any competent tool and die maker with electronics and QA experience can take any used industrial robot on the market ( try hgrsurplus) and reverse engineer the
damn thing in his own shop in no more than two weeks time. I know that's what I did with my Stabuli Unimate 800. After my RE efforts, I now have complete blueprints from scans/measuring, schematics and physical data for the new board I designed to drive it, and even a control front end workstation with a nice animation style interface. Not hard. I got the robot used for $700. The time and effort I put into it cost me about $2000, TOPS.
$22k for a motoman clone that probably is poorly designed and has no support? HELL NO!!
I'm supposedly incapable of working for reasons that -would- make it difficult to keep a regular job, so I get some form of welfare. It doesn't stop me from doing things others might see as work. The desire to prove myself and do things that look neat drives me to better my own skills. So despite being a bad fit for a regular job, I do have some sort of creative output.
The biggest problem is that I'm an outlier, not the norm. But I think more creative minds would blossom if freed from the pressure to get a job.
That sounds like defeatism.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I am willing to immigrate to America and maintain, install and sell those robots! I will be really happy with minimal wage! Just sponsor my stay!
If robots do all the work, or nearly all, does it really matter if most people get lazy?
The problem is that people aren't satisfied with having all they need, they want to have the same as the other guy.
Right now, we live in a society of undreamed riches to people in centuries past. Even a homeless guy on the street can get more by diving in the dumpster than a person could get by hard work a couple of centuries ago.
But no one would be satisfied by that. They want the same or better standard of living as their neighbor. Inequality is widely perceived as a major societal problem. However, a society where everyone is absolutely equal is impossible, by definition.
Take real estate, for instance. Who would get the beach front home? The penthouse apartment? There are natural limits to equality.
When people work, some of them will work harder to obtain what they want, others are satisfied with laying on the couch and watch TV. Human society needs some form of merit accounting.
I remember the daydreams about how robots would do all the work and people would lead lives of leisure. Instead we work harder to try and keep up with the machines we built. Those daydreams were still going into the 80's.
I remember that too. Not robots particularly, but computers to do the paperwork and automated machines to do the labour. Just a few humans would need to work a few hours per week on maintenance. Sociologists writing in periodicals such as New Society, New Scientist and the more serious Sunday newspapers used to say that the main worry for the future was to keep the millions of idle, bored people from getting into mischief.
That state of affairs could be almost practicable by now. But what has happened is that millions of non-jobs have been created instead. In the West there is now a vast marketing industry, half of it competing against and neutralising the other half. There is a vast "Health and Safety" industry, wherein billions of pounds/dollars (=economic product) is spent on possible saving a few lives. There are industries created around the enforcement of political correctness (my local council has a significant equal opportunities department).
My father lived a cycling distance from work, but now vast amounts of wealth are frittered away by millions of people commuting daily the sort of mileage that my father would have considered an annual holiday journey. He cycled to work with no thought of being "green", the idea didn't exist then, but being "green" today is another new industry that sucks up vast amounts of wealth - don't get me started on that subject please.
At first, they outsource jobs to a country with low labor cost. Now they invent a new replacement for human workers, which allow them to produce closer to the market. Great for the company, it will increase their revenue. But it will not bring one single job back.
On a side note: ABB already has a drop-in replacement robot available, which they sell to Foxconn. They also cooperate with them to improve robots for production lines. Foxconn does that, because Chinese labor is getting too expensive.
"Baxter" that could give cheap offshore labor a run for its money and return manufacturing jobs to U.S. soil. "
"Baxter will do that by accelerating a trend of factory efficiency that’s eliminated more jobs in the U.S. than overseas competition has. "
Oops.
Most people are not interested in most jobs. If mo' robotz mean those people could just stop doing the job completely (but still get paid) then I believe they would be happy to do that. Of course if the people don't get somehow paid then they will be spending zero thus failing to consume the products manufactured by the robots and thereby wrecking the economy.
Some people will still want to perform some jobs because they are not in it purely for the money and love doing whatever it is.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
the robots produce when people's income (salaries) diminish as a consequece of using robots?
The crisis will be a demand one, another way to say that the capital accumulated way past a sensible point.
Eventually, humanity will achieve such a high level of technology that it will be possible to substitute 95% of workforce with robots and automats. Early SF writers predicted that this will bring about the age of freedom and happiness, where every human being will be free to pursue his own interests. How wrong they have been.
There must be something fundamentally and inherently wrong with system where this would result in 95% unemployment and massive poverty.
TWo points.
China and Cuba are doing remarkably well for communism not working.
Given the current state of the economy and the fact the USA is defaulting on it's obligations and debts right now I would say our current system is also broken.
Social security isn't an entitlement. it is a mandated 401K at minimal interest. you pay into it. EVERYONE under the age of 40 won't ever be able to collect anything they pay into it because capitalist politicians spent all the money stupidly expecting infinite growth. Capitalism requires infinite growth because if you aren't growing then your dead.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Notice how many episodes of the series that should never have been, start with an artsy fartsy act of a crew that really doesn't seem to have a day job. The Enterprise is a floating luxury hotel that runs itself and were nobody ever has to get their hands dirty, leaving its passengers to pursue the arts and not be very good at it.
The PROBLEM is... your art has no value. Very little art has. You can see this with the art shops run by bored rich house wives that are often little more then tax dodges or in some cases active money laundering operations or used for bribes. "No no, I won't slip you a brown envolope... say, that painting in your wives shop, what would you say that is worth *wink wink*".
You can see it for the lower classes on youtube, only a tiny fraction has views over half a dozen, millions of video's have no views whatsoever. The simple fact is that the modern world doesn't need as many artists as it once did. Older ages, before replication of art was easily available to all, needed every painting, every book, every performance done by hand. It was a golden age for artists. These days, one artist can supply the needs for the entire planet. Consider comedy: Once every time you wanted to hear a joke, you needed to pay someone to tell it. Now you can just replay the same video over and over of the best comedians the world has ever produced.
Why should I pay you for your crappy work when I can experience the masters for peanuts?
Really, WATCH ST:TNG, it is nothing but layabouts going to each others performances. Work? That happens to other people. The series Friends is roughly the same idea, that the "elite" doesn't have to work. The Victorians thought the same BUT the Victorians did it over the backs of a massive work force who worked very hard indeed. The 90's tried to sell us the idea that EVERYONE could be the elite and that their would be a natural demand for all the creative works created by the entitled non-gifted. This hasn't turned out to be the case. A few artist have gotten really really rich and the majority of the plebs by cheap reproductions of their work, rather then original works in their price range.
There have been many novel ideas about future economies where hard work is no longer the core of the economy and basically, none of them really work out because sooner or later so far, someone has to do the work AND there is always someone willing to launch the B-ark into space. The masses are not going to support an idle middle/upper class for very long... well maybe just long enough to help them up the little steps to the block.
The US economy RAN on all those boring factory jobs that people in the movies always want to escape from but that were for decades the places fathers and mothers went to earn the money to raise their kids. See "An Officer and a Gentleman" the girl is working in a factory making cardboard boxes. Hardly inspiring work but all the girls who do NOT marry a jet pilot, it is their only source of income until they retire or die. It ain't glamorous, it ain't the stuff of dreams but all those workers payed their full taxes while the likes of Romney didn't. The economy runs on factory workers, not the elite. The elite can't and won't pay for millions of workers sitting idle reading Shakespeare and writing sonnets. Neither will the workers support an ever growing middle class doing nothing either.
You can try to move the working to China but then they will just do what the Koreans and Japanese did before them, become the elite themselves and make their own phones. And kiddies, all the idiocy you can come up with why the Chinese can never be creators the same was said about the Koreans and the Chinese. Hell, go back a bit further and the Brits said the same thing about the colonies (that is you Americans) when they outsourced farming, so the British country side could be reserved for gardening, parks and recreational hunting. And then the US copied industry too and the British economy has been sliding into obscurity ever since.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, no shit. It is difficult to succeed if a large part of the world actively tries to destroy you.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I guess everybody here knows venerable C. Clarke predicted that work will disappear around 2075 (I think or somewhere around that year)...I don't know if he said what would happen with us at that time. There is something deeper than meets the eye: the only acceptable justification for the property right is the fact that individual property creates wealth (if you leave a piece of land to a bunch of too many guys nothing productive comes out of it...if you leave it to one guy and you create rules that protect that guy than you get some food). Once robots come into the picture (and I'm not talking only about these beginnings, I'm talking about the time when robots will be advanced enough say for a farm to be completely robotized and there will be robots making robots automatically...) this justification dies. In other words, rich guys are rich because they brought us something or they bring us something: walmart guy is reach because he sells cheap stuff bringing you an advantage, etc. Once everything is done by robots where's the merit of who? Also this justification of property works because to maintain being rich, on the long run, rich guys have to work. Once all this disappear why would the guy next door have something more than me? there is no reason. all the work is done by robots so another justification for allotment of resources has to be found... now, from here I can see only two exits: a very happy Karl Marx in the next world - everybody's equal as much as possible: i get to drive a ferrrari once every 5 years...you get to be on some cool yacht once every 10 years OR the rich try to maintain their advantage BY FORCE of technology and robots... now, which do you think is more likely? ...
Yup, I know so many able bodied people that live off the state it's not even funny!
In this article, the case is made that retaining production in house makes it easier to improve products, increase quality and reduce response times (due to lack of shipping cost).
Actually, this trend may hurt Mexico far worse - especially if it becomes significant in the agricultural and meat packing industries (the sectors of jobs that even long-term unemployed US citizens feel are beneath them). This might be just as destabilizing as the idiotic War on Drugs (TM).
Henry Ford was very aware of this problem. If workers are not paid enough they can not buy a Ford. So what we end up with supposedly would be highly automated factories but no local buyers as the locals would have no jobs. Then it becomes obvious that shipping is a real expense and the factories need to be close to the point of sale so why would they stay in America?
There are answers but the public mind can not confront them yet. We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Wait until robots have the capacity to own the company and reinvest earnings in ever more profitable and functional robots. It is easier to replace the investor than to replace the lowest bean picker out in the fields. And so far if robots owned the firm they would not pay personal income taxes.
The trick is for the government to assign real pay checks to people who have no jobs. People will purchase that which they need or is the most popular. Taxes must be derived from business sufficient to write pay checks for the masses. The businesses will be in a position of competing for those dollars by providing superior products and services.
Think about it. What does a stock holder do but get a check? It requires little talent or ability to receive checks. They are the ultimate in non productive persons supported by a business.
Here's the problem. Let's say such a robotic revolution does take hold, and we have companies spending $22,000 on each robot to do the job of, what would have been, a human making $25,000/yr. What do you think would happen to all the money the company is saving? Do you REALLY think that the companies would suddenly grow a conscience and lower costs dramatically for merchandise? No. The executives would simply pocket more cash, and now you'd have even more Americans without jobs, and an even bigger gap between the wealthy and the impoverished. Best case scenario would be that there would be massive new job creation for skilled workers to repair the robots....but I guarantee the pay scale would be much lower, again creating a bigger economic class gap.
How about we make education free? We need to stop the bullsh** and start giving everyone a chance to live their life to the fullest and contribute to society to their fullest potential.
Meh...but what do I know...I'm just Joe Schmoe.
The problem with your proposal is that there are still a lot of tasks that require human effort, which people do not necessarily enjoy. Who's going to do them?
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Right. And the the definition of "humanoid" is also a bit stretched. While I'm not expecting something out of the Uncanny Valley, a humanoid robot should at least bear some resemblance to the bug-eyed aliens from Roswell. Baxter doesn't even look like the Google Android logo but more like a vacuum cleaner with an old-style Mac boot screen for its "head".
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/09/18/1253224/meet-irobot-founder-rodney-brookss-new-industrial-bot-baxter
Basically you have a three way choice. Send people out with "spoons" to "dig ditches", starve to death 99% of your population, or tax the 1% that has a job and pay the other 99% to do nothing all day,
Since we're talking about USA, I already know which one you will never try.
Wouldn't companies just install the robots in China or other places where they can get robot trainers for cheap?
The lazy person who collects money is still investing and paying his or her own way. They are not a drain on cellective welfare. The lazy person who has nothing and does nothing is currently rewarded with lots of free or low obligation rewards. They pay for things with money that came from the rest of us. I see a difference there... don't you?
You assume the outcome of such a revolution would be similar to that of the French Revolution? I suspect that with a sufficiently advanced army of robots, the outcome would be a lot different...
Since you probably buy into global warming and environmental concerns... would it not better to buy things made closer to you? Think of how much energy the shipping consumes. That turns to pollution.
China is communist in name only. They're more of a fascist dictatorship.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Even in China where the pay is pathetic are they seeing more and more automation because even with the pittance they make the machines end up cheaper.
1 Million Robots To Replace 1 Million Human Jobs At Foxconn? First Robots Have Arrived. | Singularity Hub
I would be looking to find a way off the grid. If this takes off, then the only thing that can happen is that the house of cards we call our economy will collapse. If it doesn't collapse, then what will happen is those with natural resources will become the elite or the elite will own natural resources. There's a reason G. W. Bush bought water rights in Paraguay.
But what about all the jobs needed to fix and design these machines? Schools are expensive now. What will they be like when most of the population isn't paying taxes to support them? For every boy wonder in Silicon Valley, there are ten average people who help subsidize the CS department fromthe college he decided not to graduate from. When those ten can't afford tuition the CS department closes and wunderkin doesn't exposed to new technology.
Besides, machines don't have to be self-repairing, they only need to be able to repair each other.
It's not much, but find a plot of land and learn agriculture. Take advantage of solar technology. Feed you and your family and let the rest of the world shake this out. We might be a generation away from this collapse, but it's coming and It ain't gonna be pretty.
Capitalism Supersized
The following suggestion at first seems impractical because it is so simple: What if we, as a society, simply give consumers money to spend in the economy? In other words: What if the way to achieve the strongest possible economy is to give every citizen more money to spend? For example, what if we gave every citizen of the United States $25,000 to spend? $25,000 sounds impossible the first time you hear it, but consider the possibility.
Would this simple step -- giving money to every consumer -- accomplish the five economic goals set forth in the previous section? Yes. It would be a huge boost to the American economy:
* The economy would be strong because of all of the consumer spending.
* The economy would be stable because income (and therefore spending) would be guaranteed.
* With $25,000 per year to spend, innovators would no longer be forced to work -- they could focus their energy on innovation, living off of the $25K per year they receive. Inventors would have time to invent, writers to write, entrepreneurs to breed new companies, etc. They could devote all of their time to innovation. There would be billions of dollars for people to invest, especially in their own businesses. And investors would have a stable marketplace into which to introduce new products.
Most importantly, it would create a nation where the citizens are truly free. If every person had $25,000 per year in today's dollars to spend, they would be able to live their lives even if they lost their jobs. If robots took their jobs it would not be catastrophic. People would be able to weather the robotic takeover, retrain and move into new careers.
Don't worry about sounding like a Luddite, their basic premise wasn't entirely wrong, they just got the cost/benefit wrong for their particular situation.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You also have to consider, (trying not to sound too Luddite in the process), that replacing a human in a paying job with a robot is scarcely better than off-shoring the job.
While I see your point about the impact on the people losing their jobs. There is a big difference between outsourcing and automation. Even if the factory is totally automated it would still be better for us to have the factory here than to outsource it. If it stays here they pay property taxes on the factory and the equipment. They pay income taxes on their profits. Indirectly the local community still benefits even though there are no workers in the factory.
If the factory goes abroad it still pays those property taxes only now they benefit a community in some other country. The income is typically held in foreign subsidiaries and only rarely repatriated to the home country. So even in a hypothetical factory that employed nobody, which isn't possible with today's technology, it would still be substantially more beneficial to keep that factory here rather than have it abroad.
The reality of the world is that manufacturing jobs are going to become ever more scarce. Even as the world makes mores stuff. Long term cheap labor can't compete with automation. Even China is moving to industrial automation in a major way. That situation is only going to get worse. The industrial robots are becoming cheaper and more capable everyday. The days of rooms full of people standing around assembling things are numbered. I don't see any real alternative to that. Companies that don't follow that trend will end up being put out of business by those that do. Countries that adopt policies to try and prevent it are taking a real risk of making their entire manufacturing sector unable to compete. While I understand why it upsets people, frankly I am not too thrilled myself, the truth is that complaining about it is like complaining about the rain. You can do it but it won't stop raining. Our time would be better spent figuring out other ways to put people to productive use.
... to call a robot's work a "job".
The question is how much potential is there for more trivial work? Look at the gold-farming/virtual work economy around MMOs, is there a potential for work more trivial than that?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
He went on to explain why so it's not simply defeatism.
And I agree with him.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The second link says "...Wages are his second-biggest expense (after raw materials), and sales have been slow. Even so, the figure stands at $206.8 per man-hour, above the previous year’s mark of 201..."
Can anyone with experience with small business management comment on these expenses?
As in, do small businesses really spend 201$/hr *40 hr/wk *50 wk/yr ~= $400k per year for a minimum-wage employee?
You are missing the point that this opens up the possiblity for small(er) companies to utilize the advantages provided by robots. Such advantages were previously only available to much larger companies, and then typically only used for large scale assembly.
Smaller companies have the capability to serve niche or marginal markets which are ignored by larger companies (on purpose). A common (and successful) tactic for large companies is to shed businesses in which they made be profitable, but not #1 or 2. It doesn't mean a business operating here wouldn't be profitable, but not desireable to large companies. Small companies can fill these gaps, and access to robotics makes it possible for them to do so without being driven out of business due to 'close enough' cheaper competitors.
Let's say I wanted to build a really nice, and nice because it was specific, docking station for a phone. Without access to robotic assembly, my products would likely be much more expensive than the units produced in lots of millions. A customer would see my product, and say, "Well, it fits my need perfectly, but the iHome product meets 90% of my need at 10% of the cost, so I can't justify purchasing your perfect, but labor expensive product"
The result of such a problem is that I wouldn't be able to operate a business AT ALL. So I wouldn't be employed (doing that), my finance people wouldn't be employed, my logistics people wouldn't be employed. etc... Just beacuse the robot replaces a few assembly jobs, doesn't mean that using robotics in assembly means no new jobs are created. Sure, no specific assembly jobs are created, but all the other jobs to run the business ARE created.
From an economic perspective, if you have the capability to add 3 jobs, but lose 2, it's better than not just not having those 3.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I would like to know how people are supposed to purchas these robot produced items with no jobs..
Description is not how communism was supposed to be done nor how it was tried in reality.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
You're still thinking in relative terms, which is the problem. Try living in a house built in the 1950s, living without most modern electronics, occasionally fixing up your clothes by hand, etc.
...But with unlimited energy, computing power and machines that do everything for us, what can't we overcome?
Obesity.
There is also an advantage of having your product manufacturing close to your marketplace... namely lower shipping costs.
Isn't that what Mexico/Nafta was for?
That was the idea, but in practice the stuff they made for us down in Mexico was such garbage it didn't take more than a couple of years before the manufacturing when right on to Asia. The sad thing is the Chinese stuff was built like a brick shithouse, and it was vastly better than the product that originally started life being manufactured in America. Sigh.
Yeah, I ended up losing my job over that deal. Should have learned Chinese instead of Spanish. Damn.
FYI: When logged in anyway, posting anon is enough to cancel a mod. I mention this because some other mod with an IQ that can't melt ice modded you Redundant (if you posted anon like I did, there would be no karma hit).
Mode me OT, moron mods, what do I care? I posted anon!
Lots of people do this today. The sad thing is they make them show up to the office 5 days a week.
you cannot fix the world. you can, at best, try to make things better where you currently are.
Ive struggled with the concept of why a guy on this side of the ocean deserves jobs on this side of the ocean more than the starving, harder working guy on the other side of the ocean-- simply by virtue of which side he is on.
Can Baxter make a burrito? Look out Taco Bell employees.
I nominate you, let's take a vote. ;)
Cheap storage VM.
Wrong. The accurate statement is that what did come to pass is efficiencies beyond our wildest dreams where each individual employee creates in 2 days the GDP that took his counterpart 2 weeks to create, however the management see's no reason to allow the employee to keep the same portion of that GDP he kept in the 50s, if they did that then the employee would only work 2 days a week and the employer would be out significant profits that can be reaped by keeping the employee there 5 days. This is why the rich now are so much richer than they were in the 50s, they're producing tons more than their 50s counterpart did, while keeping a significantly larger share of the production's revenue than the 50's employers did. The efficiences have gone up causing enormous GDP-per-employee gains, yet employee pay has only kept up with inflation.
On the other hand, this may be due to the fact that in reality inflation is somewhat controlled by the majority of the population, so if the majority of the population worked 2 days a week, the guy who worked 3 would be *loaded* making 50% more than the average wage at which point the majority would say "hell, one more day a week and I can go from 40k/year to 60k/year!" but then someone works 4 days a week... Economics are nebulous and this is why they're much debated, but simple fact is there's no way a bunch of robots doing all the work ends up with a liesure life for the populace; the singularity is a lie, if we no longer have work to do that just cements 100% the income divide by making the disparity so significant. The efficiencies talks about by the singularity are so large that those who are reaping their benefits will have magnitudes more wealth than others to an extent that if you aren't on the beneficiary side of those efficiencies you won't be able to afford bread. The efficiences of the singularity would effectively make money wholesale without value. I wonder what we would value then... Robots maybe will be the new currency... There's a weird thought.
Formalities will unfortunately never be a thing of the past, it seems.
You fail to account for problems in income redistribution. The total production probably more than allows for the world you mention. The problem is that the extra money goes to the owner of the robot, who already had the capital to invest in it, while the worker goes unemployed. This is a clear trend, the relation between labor and capital has been moving towards capital for a while.
Think about this, with the singularity one business owner could spend $500 on a cheap robot which is smart enough to create 2000 more robots, but if that were the case what are those robots worth? 1/2000th of $500? They're identical to the original in completeness, their ability to with no work from the individual duplicate value makes all value based on relativity 100% moot because efficiency is then 100% (100% efficiency being effectively a perpetual profit machine like a perpetual motion machine, economies make no sense without efficiency loss).
.45 in 1230 just based on the level of difference it creates between those with it and those without it.
Ignoring the fundamental breakdown of the concept of economy altogether though, inspect the situation further. What if those 2000 robots go farm and with no work from the original man make 15,000 loaves of bread a day, so now that one original robot is equivalent in value to 15,000 loaves of bread a day, now tell me when one individual can with such ease create an income of 15K*$2/day, how much does the guy with no robot (or job because they won't exist) make? The average person makes $30k/day now, and therefore the average price of a loaf of bread will become ridiculous because of the amount of fluidity in the economy, now our poor bipolar fellow with no robot or job can't eat except from the bread-lines, which will be large because the efficiencies become significant enough as to support large bread-lines and demotivate peopel from doing things they don't want to do so they join the bread-lines. Great, now the one guy who does work and runs the bread-lines, he's an alright guy, but his son is a straight up maoist, somebody speaks ill of him and this guy wants to make an example. Closes the bread-line, now 45k people who relied on his bread-line every day need to find something else, unless as he says; someone kills that fellow who spoke ill of him. The one guy who works basically commands the servitude of the countless who don't have the robots. It becomes an economic equalizer akin to a colt
Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
If you are referring to the Soviet Union and China, communism never really existed there. They started down that road, sure, but only got half way there when the dictators took over. If Trotsky had won out against Stalin, the Soviet Union may have ended up as a democratic communism, where the educated workers actually did make the decisions. You can't say that communism didn't work, because it was never really tried. Norway and Sweden are closer to the communist ideal than the Soviet Union ever was.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Take two cases and compare:
Case 1: Poor child grows up to be a poor adult. Lives in welfare housing, uses food stamps, gets free healthcare, government pays, never worked a day in their life.
Case 2: Wealthy child grows up to be a trust fund adult: Lives in family housing, uses trust fund for food, uses trust fund for health, investment growth pays, never worked a day in their life.
Neither case adds any concrete or abstract (assumed) value to society. Case 2 has more money to "drive" the economy, Case 1 has hardly an impact except for raising tax rates. Case 2 "earned" their money from their parents, but is in effect still leeching off of the economy. You can argue that those invested funds help drive businesses, but the individual is no better than a welfare recipient in terms of value.
The only difference here is luck.
Also doomed.
and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!
Failure to solve this issue could result in the unravelling of capitalism as we know it, to either a super class that will need to kill off any pleborian dissidents, or lead to a revolution similar to what the French had.
The first option isn't really feasible - the capitalistic society described still needs consumers. So they will just have to be very good at suppressing revolutions.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Will they teach Baxter the urban dictionary like they did with IBM Watson? Would really make them look like real plant employees. -- Stereotype
Really my problem with this is the idea that it will be "free" to have the machine build more machines. Look at the 3-D printing space right now. The idea behind a RepRap 3-D printer is that it can print out a copy of itself. This is a compelling concept, but in fact you still require ~3-500$ worth of additional parts. The printer makes some of the structural elements, but you still need to invest in the electronics, and the extruder, and the motors, etc. To be fair, you can bring down the cost by making a number of parts by yourself, but the learning curve on this is non-trivial, and the level of effort is significant (you do come out at the end with a new skill set, and one that will likely be marketable in the future but that isn't my point). At the end of the day you either need disposable income, a lot of time, or a business plan in order to make a bunch of 3-D printers using 3-D printers.
China and Cuba are doing remarkably well for communism not working.
China is hardly communist any more. It is a totalitarian (crony) capitalist society.
And unlike China, I don't see 10% yearly GDP growth going on in Cuba. It is true that Cuba is slowly trying to become more capitalist by allowing legal self-employment and limited private property this year, but progress towards capitalism there are glacial.
So, more workers will be let go, and replaced with cheaper machines? How does this help the rest of us who aren't the owners?
Oh, and someone mentioned shipping costs: a dozen or more years ago, I was arguing this with a neighbor, who was a purchasing agent, and he told me the shipping costs were so low it was still cheaper to make it in China. How much that's changed, with oil speculation, I have no information, but I suspect that's not so much the case any more.
mark
Your "musical chair" is the investments you make. Iff you invest/save enough now, the lower cost of living will allow you to live off the interest.
It doesn't matter if you're in debt right now. As your local currency inflates (and is replaced) those debts will become meaningless. Sure, pay some off now, but also SAVE. You've been warned.
- Paranoid Nutcase
I'm not talking about reality as we know it, I'm referring to the post-singularity reality as people imagine it being based on a world wherein efficiency is basically 100%. The idea being a machine will do everything for you, up to and including finding materials for components, creating components, constructing a full self-replica from those components, and furthermore to have AI capable of making this process more efficient all on it's own without our intervention.
Reality however is not that this supposed singularity would ever happen, I'm just trying to dispell the magic people imagine about a world where 100% production is automated (this would include production of automation which is the point in which people presume we reach the "singularity")
yes that is how it starts. automate a factory here, 1000 Chinese lose their jobs. and so on .. eventually EVERYTHING is automated, no more "other" jobs to go to.
Fuck you, I'm buying my own robots and firing there asses. In fact, I already did.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The whole world isn't set up for modern infrastructure though. The key isn't to make more widgets, but to improve basic living, food distribution, and transportation. People currently living in tin-roofed huts could be living in much more efficient and pleasant dwellings, utilizing a much better means of public or self-powered transportation, and eating foods that are fresh and disease free, with proper sanitization.
What really needs to happen though, is a rethinking of how the family is economically considered. Children used to be an asset in a society where they could contribute monetarily to their families, but now they are a burden. Schooling should pay minimum wage in order to not have the opportunity cost of education encouraging children to drop out.
The last structural problem is biologically, humans want to breed far earlier than they are economically and socially ready for a family. Hormonal contraception causes a reduction of the populations' immune system due to changes in natural cues, and is probably the cause of the increase in allergies in the first world. We need something better. The best thing to do is to figure out what is leading to earlier onset of puberty and do the opposite, so that biologically and societally we are in sync. Then we need to make sure that we have means to encourage stable families, with penalties for out of wedlock childbirth and divorce, but also economically encourage child-rearing after family stability, but before health problems begin to arise with babies born to older couples.
We need to look at the modern incentives put into place in society, and figure out how to change capitalism to provide for a future economy, but without discouraging some hard work that still needs to be done, and without turning society into chaos.
I'm so dead tired of hearing people mischaracterize social security. Let's get one thing straight right now: It's not a savings account, it's not a 401k, it is not any form of account where you have cordoned off money that you put in and is held for you.
It's insurance. Retirement insurance to be fair, they run the actuary tables and adjust the costs such that they're betting more people won't live to retirement than are paying in, if more people reach retirement than there are payers then just like any other insurance their bet loses and they go bust. I'm not calling it insurance to villainize it, I think it's perfectly good insurance to have, it insures that in the unlikely event that you survive with your marbles to retirement age, you won't have to continue working. Without it, only the wealthy would be able to survive past that age because work kills old people, fast. You pay health insurance for the unlikely event that you are injured, you pay retirement insurance for the unlikely event that you retire, and it pays out more than you paid in over the term that it's paying you *because* it's insurance: Pooled money. Not a savings account for you, not your personal 401k, but a company that you are paying, who maintains a pooled amount of money and tries it's best to pay out fairly without paying out too much so that it goes bust.
You all should be glad it's public, a private version would be for-profit and charge a *hell* of a lot more, especially because it would have a smaller pool since not everyone would be forced to use it. The result: Lots of people would make it over retirement and work to death in misery of old age because they couldn't afford to pay for this insurance their whole lives, and the wealthy well they retire early already so they wouldn't bother paying for this kind of insurance anyway.
Bullshit.
It turned out that way because all planned economies have the same critical flaw. Unhealthy concentration of power.
That is why hard socialism of any kind is doomed to turn into dictatorship.
Any serious open market capitalist can discuss the flaws of capitalism. Why do socialists not see the flaws in their system (because if they did they wouldn't be socialists).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You live in an interesting fantasy life.
Tell me more about these quality Chinese products.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You just have to believe hard enough. It's your fault tinkerbell is dying.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A median level of prosperity by 1950s standards is a higher level than the median now. In the 1950s, the CEO earned 14 times as much as the lowest paid worker. Today it's 400 times as much. They were right when they said that back in the 1950s; you do only work two days a week to meet your needs. Unfortunately you work three more days to meet the CEO and board of directors' "needs".
What jobs exactly? Baxter-Oiler? If that's a problem, they'll just have baxter oil himself every 3rd Oblogon he puts together, or hook him up to a continuous feed of oil. Automation doesn't create jobs, sorry. Even the word computer originally referred to someone who did computing for a living, that job no longer exists.
Every job automated.. Man, I can't wait for the first robot comedian, I'll be he's going to be a crack-up. He'll probably just display cat-videos on his tv-face and call it neo-post-neo-modernist sarcastirony.
Hmmm....
Work two days a week and ... raise 2.5 children, own a home in the suburbs and a sensible late-model auto, enjoy an annual family vacation to a popular American tourist destination, and have not one single case of throat irritation (from smoking Camel cigarettes).
You should check to see what "middle class" living was actually like in 1950. You might have a car and a house but the house was only 600 sq ft. The father got bacon and eggs and the rest got porridge because that was all they could afford. The family had to do laundry at the end of the week as if they didn't they wouldn't have any clothes for the next week. The wife had to stay home because most modern appliances did not exist or were not available to their price range.
The 50's were good times not because we were wealthy through the entire thing but because it was a time of increasing wealth. It was a general .com boom for everybody. Men were job hopping every year or two into a new job at a higher pay. Appliances were becoming affordable to lessen the work load at home. Clothes and food were becoming cheaper. What was considered middle class in the beginning of the 1950's in terms of size of house lived in, food purchased, and clothing owned would be considered well below poverty level these days.
If you really want to see bad times though, go back and look at the great depression. People in the US were actually in threat of starving to death. The soldiers of WW2 were an inch or two shorter than the generation before and after simply due to lack of food while growing up. People of today would consider great depression conditions worse than apocalyptic and probably were worse than some movies show life after the apocalypse.
You keep saying it. You continue to be wrong.
We started replacing individual people in their entirety when we invented the plow.
We can't replace all people entirely now and barring an unexpected advance in strong AI we never will.
We've already replaced 99% of the workers with automation (farmers) and yet people continue to work.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I guess you missed:
a medium level of prosperity
Required reading for internet skeptics
at which point the majority would say "hell, one more day a week and I can go from 40k/year to 60k/year!"
Um....you do realize that the average salary in the USA is around $30K/yr, right? So they will go from $12K to 18K with the extra day.
Now if you're talking about the average engineer/IT salary in the USA..it might be closer to $80K/yr.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Ive struggled with the concept of why a guy on this side of the ocean deserves jobs on this side of the ocean more than the starving, harder working guy on the other side of the ocean-- simply by virtue of which side he is on.
Because you don't have to support the guy on the other side of the ocean if he doesn't have a job. If the guy on this side of the ocean can't eat, he'll take your food or rob you to buy some. That's bad for you. If the guy a long way away starves to death, it doesn't affect you (directly).
Yeah, that's a pretty crappy way to look at things, but 'charity begins at home' works. I care about the schools near me, garbage pickup near me, industrial waste regulations near me, etc. a lot more than I care about those things a long way away. I would like the entire world to have enough to eat, have a safe place to sleep, and a good education system, and I help work to make those things happen, but local matters more.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Well, no shit. It is difficult to succeed if a large part of the world actively tries to destroy you.
... in addition to them trying actively to destroy the other in addition to following mind-numbing, immensenly stupid things like rounding up all your agricultural tools to melt them in backyard clay furnaces to "recycle" metals (despite all warnings by their own engineers) and the complete destruction of their intelligentsia (I'm referring to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.)
There are plenty of economic textbooks written not by us but by then-Soviet economists that outlined the fundamental failures of communism as an economic system.
It didn't help that Lenin thought and said on record that running a business was something so simple anyone could do it - it didn't help any further that he actually attempted to run a fiscal policy based on such an idiotic lunacy. Shit, take a look at Thomas Sowell's book on economics for some interesting and sadly humorous tales of Communist economic idiocies.
The communist economic system, to put it bluntly, cared more about ideology that on objective measures of production. Sounds great on paper, but when the rubber meets the road, that's where the real tests begin.
True that the Cold War costs run them to the ground, but that's because the Communist economic system was and is inherently flawed. The Soviets would have fared much better had they relied on Fascism as an economic doctrine. Not that I'm condoning or promoting Fascism but we can see how well China has been doing when it moved from Communism to Fascism (which is the actual economic system under usage by the Chinese government since Deng Xiaoping started his push for reform in 1977.
Those are the facts than even former Soviets-era rank-n-file officials acknowledge, but don't let that get in the way of revisionism.
Do you actually live in an industrial block, though? I would be interested in knowing if industrial electrical power hookups are as unstable as mere consumer power hookups.
My mistake, I was remembering household not individual. The average household (or is it median? whatever..) is like $40k/year, or at least in the 30-50 range, I don't remember off hand. Either way the point stands even if my numbers aren't all there heh
"Rather than observing how unworkable ST:TNG is in our current situation we should find ways to make it workable."
From 2004: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
He said is was Romney and Bain Capital that offshored jobs.
"Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.'"
Well played. The troll is strong with this one.
He's not talking about communism at all, he's just saying there may be ways to construct an economy wherein no one has jobs; no one has work they *must* do, and suggesting people think about how a world like that might actually function. He's not prescribing any one new approach, just that we should look at new approaches (wherein we all get to frollick instead of work).
You are totally wrong. They use the cheap overseas labor because robots and the programming and factory lines for them are expensive and as soon as you have a new device you have to retool and reprogram. Someone working a slave wage 7 days a week sleeping in the locked down dorm in hot-swap cots is cheaper than doing it with robots. Remember these people often cost $2,000 a YEAR to employ. You can't buy much robot for that kind of money. It has nothing to do with being UNABLE to do it with robots.
Do any of you work for a factory or have you ever been in one?
There are TONS of jobs that no one, and I do mean NO ONE wants. That is why many factories, even union ones, utilize temp agencies who go through 1 person a month for the worst jobs.
There are just a few jobs in every factory that are mindless, painful to the joints, and/or dangerous and dirty enough that only someone starving to death (china) would take it long term. No one, not even the Union really wants these jobs.
But they are needed.
Things like boxing small parts, or worse, counting them as you box (sucks) or dumping raw materials in a bin dozens of times a hour while inhaling dust or gently nudging parts on a belt into line, or hundreds of other little crappy things that have to happen in factories.
They are necessary for the whole operation but until recently there was no way to easily automate them at a cost that the company can afford.
The workers would rather be running the press, or doing final assembly, or tending the machine or driving a forklift or QA or many other 'menial' jobs that are less menial than the others.
The game change comes from an affordable, easy to program robot that could do a few of the least desirable jobs in a US factory.
Just getting rid of the 5 or so most repetitive stress injury causing jobs in a small factory can add hundreds of thousands to the bottom line of the business without reducing headcount at all.
Instead you can up production, reduce workers comp claims, and put the poor slobs previously stuck on the 'shit' job to work on one of the jobs in the factory they would rather do anyway.
As soon as that small change is made your price becomes more competitive with china's both because of the labor spend as well as the savings in transport, the (usual) better quality of US made becomes something that increases demand.
FTA:
It can also be programmed with additional capabilities. (Rethink is currently developing software that would allow Baxter to communicate with other machines, say a conveyor belt.)
Nothing to see here, move along.
But what if they develop software that allows Baxter to speak the binary language of moisture vaporators?
Basically, humans are really good at finding new ways to keep themselves busy, so they can enjoy a pint and bitch about it.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
I am new to that party... sucks bad. I have to live with around 600$ a month. Once the bills are paid, I have barely enough to eat. How the hell am I supposed to find a job when I have to budget a car trip to town?
I take it you haven't watched videos of Asimo trying to climb stairs.
Don't get me wrong that's my personal plan as well. It's just that's hardly a good campaign for a whole country; All of the poor people unemployed watching tv, and all the rich people making products for eachother. Also bigger corporations will force you out, how will you be able to compete with all the googlebots (maybe your a millionaire and can buy 50, but they can have millions with much better programming).
Rocket Surgeon.
I just don't see how anyone can look at the big picture, see what has been going on with computers, robots, and automation for the past half century and not see the writing on the wall.
If you would have told workers in the factories in the early 1960s that we would be able to replace them with fully automated factories, where you send the raw materials in one end and out comes radios or cars or shoes? They would have choked from laughing so hard and told you to go back to watching Star Trek yet that is EXACTLY what we are seeing more and more. Look at those Hondabots they have working in Fukushima, climbs ladders, works in high radiation areas, doesn't get hazard pay and when its over they can just abandon the contaminated bots.
That is why even as a little kid I pointed out everybody got the moral of John Henry wrong, what the REAL morale was was that John Henry literally worked himself to death while the steam hammer? Ready to go and could have kept right on hammering as they took poor John Henry's body away. At the end of the day as we get smarter machines, microchips with multiple cores that can process huge amounts of data on a couple of watts worth of power, and smart computer controlled optics that can allow a computer to spot flaws on a fast moving line that no human would ever catch? The human becomes worth less and less. Again look at the auto industry, when forced to pay living wages with benefits all it took was a simple spreadsheet even when the machines were so much more costly back then to realize that the machines ended up coming out the better. Now the machines are getting cheaper by the second while things like food, rent, health insurance, workman's comp, all this is going up and up. I bet if you raised the minimum wage to a living wage every Mickey D's in this country would be nothing but a computer controlled automated assembly line within 5 years, why? The machine would be cheaper.
And THIS, this right here, is why capitalism like every other ism is doomed. You have nearly half a BILLION people in the USA counting the illegals, the average IQ is 103, yet all the jobs that would typically be open to somebody that would allow them to feed their family with the sweat of his brow just don't exist or are dying. As we go into the teens its is increasingly obvious, just look at how in 1960 the CEO made 8 to 12 times what a line worker made, now that is up to over 800%, you'll have a handful at the very top who can afford to buy the factories full of robots while the people either starve or the government simply pays them to STFU and stay out of the dwindling workforce.
Its a game of musical chairs GameboyRMH and no matter how smart we are fewer and fewer of us are gonna get a seat. I can see my own job being destroyed in less than 5 years, computers will be replaced by black boxes cranked out on automated assembly lines and just sent to an automated recycler when the unit is no longer useful. The days of fixing ANYTHING are quickly coming to an end, why? The machines can crank that shit out so much cheaper that just as we have seen in appliances it quickly becomes easier and cheaper to replace than fix. Its musical chairs and as the machines get smarter, faster, tougher and cheaper fewer and fewer of us will end up with a seat.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm not absolutely positive that it was this robot (I listen to the audio podcast, then skim through my recording of the show once in a while if there's something I want to see), but the 1/13/13 episode did have its first segment about robotics, and they did talk about a very inexpensive robot.. I think this one.
You can still get the audio podcast, and I think watch the video at cbs.com
Wow...way to miss the fucking point. Show me EXACTLY where I said they'd replace "everybody" because you know what? Never said it. What I DID say was that fewer and fewer would get a seat in this game of IQ musical chairs and the evidence very much bares that out. Look at the link above you, 1 million workers at Foxconn being replaced by machines. China pays their workers a pittance, has practically no environmental laws or worker protections yet it STILL ends up cheaper in the long run to replace them with the machine.
You have 8 billion people on the planet or so, been awhile since I looked at the figures, and by the very nature of a bell curve half of those are gonna be below average, following me so far? Now you replace those doing manual labor with machines which is increasingly becoming easy to do, I mean just look at the $22K robot in FA, you are talking nearly half the population whose labor is no longer required. We have 42,400 factories lost since 2001 and at an average per factory of lets say 1000 workers per factory counting all 3 shifts that gives you 42 MILLION workers out of a good paying job. If just half of those are permanently replaced by machines that is 21 million jobs gone forever...what do you do with those people? As we've seen with the education bubble that is getting ready to burst you can't educate your way out of this, so what do you do? Pay them to sit at home? let them starve?
Finally your farmers example simply doesn't work, all those workers on the farm ended up taking factory jobs in the big city, where are those jobs now? They don't exist. For the first time in all of human history are we actually capable of replacing the human almost completely. In my home town there used to be a factory that employed over 1800 people to make aircraft parts, know how many they employ NOW at that very same plant? Less than 30 to keep an eye on some screens because thanks to lasers that can measure cuts in the nm scale and automation the majority just aren't required.
Mark my words as all you are gonna see in the next decade is the White House continue to fudge unemployment numbers, why? The jobs that supported so many just don't exist anymore. Again look at Foxconn, China is one of the cheapest places on the planet to make anything and even THERE the corps are replacing the workers with bots as they are cheaper...what do you do with those million if the other factories follow suit? I just don't see how you can't look at the past 50 years and see what is coming, I really don't. We'll have a $15K 2 legged bot by the end of this decade that can climb ladders, work in hazard areas, and for the corps it's lack of need for medical benefits and pay will just make it a better long term investment...what then?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The entire economy is a game of the-man-behind-the-curtain.
So much so that the phrase "man-behind-the-curtain" comes to us from The Wizard of Oz, a work of economic satire.
2.5 children? How does that work? Midget?
You live in an interesting fantasy life.
Tell me more about these quality Chinese products.
They were case goods; dressers, chests of drawers, things like that. The original US made stuff was of above average quality starting out, but quality declined to below average. They started substituting plastic for metal parts, staples and nails for proper joints, and using worse grades of wood. When the lines moved to Mexico, they continued using all the cheap tricks, but now the wood itself was just crap. Lumber wasn't dried properly before milling and manufacturing; pieces warped, and even snapped apart, glued panels developed severe ridges, warping, cracking, and busting apart at the joints. When the lines moved to China, they started using high grade lumber, and went back to proper dovetails, miter and tenon joints, and just generally well-fitted, excellent quality joinery all the way around. Like I said, built like a brick shithouse. The new pieces were almost twice as heavy as the originals, with much thicker wood and no particle board or OSB.
I lived it dude. The bottom line is the Chinese stuff won, because it was cheaper, and the return rate dropped near 0. Almost 100% of the Mexican stuff was rejected, and when the lines left the US, about 60% of the product was going back for rework.
No, you are not seeing through with the concept.
Cheap $500 robot can build 2000 more robots. But singularity doesn't guarantee building 2000 more robots from thin air. It would need raw materials. Given the enormous value of robots, price of raw materials would increase. $500 robot not so cheap any more. Eventually it leads to the mining land price rise.
Similarly , 2000 robots can farm, but not without land. Agricultural land prices will increase.
And anyway, given the rate of rise in wealth disparity, the mega - corporations would own all the robots. Technology will be patented, with trillions in lobbying spent to deny the same robots to proletariat. So there is no question of an individual "working", because no one but the corporations will be able to work.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I hear ya. I was just thinking that while I might be willing to work a 3 day wk and take $60K/yr; most people don't have that luxury because they can't make due with $18K/yr, let alone $30K/yr.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Population, three hundred million, non government work force, 95 million. A person works 13 hours supporting themselves. 27 supporting someone else.
$12k was a lot to pay for a car in the 60s. My dad bought a new 66 Mustang for about $2500, a VW bug was under $1500. Houses then were $30k, about 2 years salary for him as a teacher.
You're right about the safety features, but that mustang was fun to drive.
I think some things have become much more affordable, such as clothing and technology. Some things have become less affordable, especially houses. Cars are about the same level of affordability in my view.
Man, you really need that seminar!
though ... again ...
If robots do all the work why would people need an education? The people only need basic skills to repair and maintain robots and be soldiers to defend our mechanized utopia. The self appointed ruling class will train their scions to maintain control and advance technical knowledge.
The robot could really benefit small businesses in the US. This would help more businesses stay in the US and create more jobs in the future, that is assuming these small business owners don't get wise and employ only robots...
Farming example is exactly on point.
Just as farm hands couldn't imagine the factory work that was next for them, the factory workers (and you) can't imagine what's next now.
As with farm hands becoming assembly line workers they will have to raise their game. Perhaps their kids will pay attention in school, I know vain hope.
In any case it's not my problem. It's the unskilled workers problem. They need to step it up or starve. I'm OK with ether option. The world continues to need ditch diggers (there are many places a trencher just can't reach).
Let's not pretend the morons are a majority. Most people will continue to find productive work. Those who don't put forth the effort will live on the edges and serve as a bad example to others. If they get too uppity they will catch copper jacketed led. Again, I'm OK with that.
You are clueless about automation and robots. That's the source of your confusion. Strong AI is not about to happen. It's still in the SF stage.
For the foreseeable future any task that doesn't have to be repeated thousands of times will continue to be done by humans. Robots are expensive to program and just not very versatile. Motion capture to teach robots is a very limited method. It's been done for decades within limited scopes (car painting).
But what do I know? I just run an automated factory. Why don't you teach a robot to do _anything_, then come back.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm not talking theoretically, using googlebots.
I'm talking history. CNC machines etc. Like I say: 'I already did'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Oh don't worry, they aren't gonna "step up or starve" which completely ignores the fucking fact that I just pointed out you can't educate your way out of this as those going from the graduation line to the unemployment line prove so nicely.
No what will happen is the poor will rise up and execute anybody with money unless we have our very own crazy Austrian who'll say "Its not YOUR fault there is no jobs, it is the evil OTHER that has taken your God given rights FROM you!" and he'll take Poland, in this case Poland being resource rich South America. Why do you think rabid xenophobia is being hammered more and more by the press? Because those in power realize that when the student loan followed by the massive stock market bubble burst, which will take away their ability to print money and leave them in the same boat as those now dead dictators at the start of the Arab Springs they'll have to have 1.- A scapegoat and 2.- Something that will let them manufacture jobs out of thin air. As we saw in WWII the massive mobilization of the working age males into soldiers combined with war industry can take care of the later pretty damned well.
But feel free to ignore it, just remember when you turn on the news sometime between now and 2020 and see the riots as the stock market crashes and burns to think about the words of Lenin: "A capitalist will sell you the rope that you intend to hang him with" which is why no truly capitalist country has lasted very long history wise, those at the top end up voting more and more for themselves and less and less for the poor until they get a little hair cut like they did in France a couple of centuries ago.
Its coming, can't be stopped, the bubbles are too big, too many without a job and nothing better to do than join the angry mob, you have been warned.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm not talking about YOU using googlebots, i'm talking about google using google bots to compete with your little crappy cnc bot. When you put robots into the equation and add enough time only the very rich survive, they will take over your little cnc router business faster than you can shoot down a good idea. They are going to want to make more and more money, and because everybody else is only getting poorer, the only way to do it is through taking over new businesses. Then eventually a rich person would be able to buy a part from your little shop, or get one from a Google CNC bot at a much higher precision, lower price and quicker delivery.
Rocket Surgeon.