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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.'"
" 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
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.
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)
If nobody has jobs anymore we better transition to an economy where everything the robots produce is free.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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."
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.