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Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs
kkleiner writes "For the last 30 years, automation has enabled U.S. manufacturing output to increase and lift profits without having to add any traditional jobs. Now, in the last decade, nearly a third of manufacturing jobs are gone. As manufacturing goes the way of agriculture, the job market must shift into new types of work lest mass technological unemployment and civil unrest overtake these beneficial gains."
These exact same fears were written about in 1980. There was a famous BBC TV programme about how robots and microprocessors would replace everyone.
We already know the outcome.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
why does the job market have to switch into new areas to avoid unrest? why can't we just accept that 10x productivity means that only 10% of the people actually need to do something to maintain our civilization's standard of living?
work is not virtuous. work sucks and it's something we've been doing our best to eliminate for hundreds of years. why are we so afraid of that actually happening?
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
The way I figure it, most factory work will either be done be robots, outsourced, or done by immigrants. There's not much way around that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Assume you have an economy consisting entirely of factory workers. Now, half the work gets automated. What happens? Everybody can continue to live at the same standard of living but work only half as much, or half of the people can be unemployed while the other half work full time and pay half their salary to support the unemployed. Which future we get depends entirely on the policies we adopt. Unfortunately, policies intended to help workers and help the unemployed are increasingly looking like they are bringing about the second of these futures.
why are we so afraid of that actually happening?
Because people still need to obtain food and shelter somehow in order to survive. How do you recommend that people obtain necessities without trading for them?
Isn't this good news? Back in the 1970s we were all promised that increased automation would lead to us all needing to do less work, and having increased leisure time. It all seemed like a rosy future at the time. The only problem seems to be that the owners of the robots don't want to share the benefits. If they don't share then they deserve the unrest they get.
Korma: Good
The robots are taking our jobs. So what happens? Do we have 3 day work weeks with the same pay? Do we wear capes and tights and ponder the higher arts and philosophy while robot servants take care of our physical needs?
Or was the last century a fluke where a large middle class had power, which will soon revert to the more common system in human history where a tiny few live in splendor and the rest live under their heel?
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Unfortunately, policies intended to help workers and help the unemployed are increasingly looking like they are bringing about the second of these futures.
There's a cost of training each employee. Fewer workers working full time is cheaper in some ways than more workers working part time.
As someone will point out, early automation (think looms) displaced workers. Things shifted around, and they did find jobs. "Things will work out" is a nice long term solution, but not something folks want to hear in the short term. I hear a lot of folks (here in the US, but also in Europe) say "We're shipping our industrial base to Asia!" While true to an extent, I remind folks that a LOT of things are manufactured here in America.
Thanks to automation, more and more is being created by fewer and fewer folks. This will cause social upheaval. I have enough faith in humanity that we'll work through it. We always do. But it will be a bumpy ride, with no perfect answers.
"As manufacturing goes the way of agriculture, the job market must shift into new types of work lest mass technological unemployment and civil unrest overtake these beneficial gains."
Yeah, the job market can't do that. That's the problem right there. People who were doing skilled or unskilled labor and were replaced by machines aren't suddenly going to be able to become successful in a "creative class" job. If they could have, they'd probably have done that instead of the manufacturing job.
On the plus side, with so many manufacturing jobs having been shipped overseas, if they actually build the automated factories here in the US then that might make some number of jobs come back. (However, they'll probably build them in one of the Labor Hell countries anyway, which only sucks for the people in those countries.)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
needs a shift to 6 hour days or 4 day weeks
Just wait until the robots get unemployed... Then we'll see true unrest and uprising.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
Now you see the real reason for banning the slavery. Not because it is a-moral, or bad, but because it will cost you your job and your little house on the hill.
Blue Collar workers are not stupid.
They are not bolting doors onto cars or running forklifts because they can't do anything else. When they joined the work force, these jobs were available and were jobs a person could raise a family with. A smart option for most, but the side effect is that you get stuck in a rut. The same way a guy who only known COBOL gets stuck.
But things change and Blue Collar manufacturing is less and less a job market that someone want's to join. New workers, who in the past would have gone into this job market, are capable of more. They can be the guys designing the robots, programming them, maintaining them, manufacturing them.
The knowledge of manufacturing is just as essential now as it was in the past and a robot has to put the nuts and bolts in pretty much the same order, as a human did. There is a lot of Tribal Knowledge about manufacturing that you don't learn at college and can pretty much only be found on the factory floor.
The Trades are not going away, just changing.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Wikipedia has a good overview. No movie planned.
There's a third option.The half of the population that was in factory jobs gets trained to do a job that can't be replaced by a robot. However, this may become problematic, because it's my opinion that most people lack the intelligence to do anything that can't be done by a robot, or the jobs they can do, are not in high enough demand that we can give everyone a job. This is also the problem with everybody working part time. The people working in the factories lack the ability to fill the remaining jobs. If this option is for those people to go un-employed, those who are working will want some major kickbacks for being the ones holding everybody else afloat.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Once again we can expect a discussion of how displaced workers always move onto other jobs. Que over used examples of buggy whip makes...
So, one question: Isn't the long term goal of automation the elimination of human labor? The only jobs that would remain do so because people want to do them. And only so long as they don't also demand pay - because paying workers to do what can be automated cuts into profit.
So far, the expansion of the economy combined with our inability to automate everything has created enough new jobs to allow a high level of employment. And maybe this will continue to be the case. But I can not find anything guaranteeing it. It is more of an assumption that because things have been that way since the industrial revolution then they will probably remain that way. While a good way to predict what will happen in a few years, I don't think it is a good way to predict what will happen in the long term.
-WolvesOfTheNight
I see automation doing more and more work that used to be done by "unskilled" labour. Given that not everyone can do "skilled" labour, what do we do with the people that used to do the "unskilled" labour?
Also, the stuff that can be automated is moving up the chain...so what are you going to do when *your* job gets automated?
As someone else pointed out, increased productivity led us from the 100+ hr work week to the 40-hr work week...but then we stayed at that level of work while automation continued to increase. The workers didn't get the benefits of the extra productivity, the owners did.
Assume you have an economy consisting entirely of factory workers. Now, half the work gets automated. What happens? Everybody can continue to live at the same standard of living but work only half as much, or half of the people can be unemployed while the other half work full time and pay half their salary to support the unemployed. Which future we get depends entirely on the policies we adopt.
Productivity improvements are nothing new. They have been happening regularly since agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago. In the past the neither of the two scenarios you listed has happened. What happens is a third scenario that you overlooked: Everyone continues to work, but standards of living go up.
Please read up on the Lump of Labor Fallacy. The idea that an economy has some fixed amount of work to do, and therefore robots displace humans, is nonsense. Economies expand in proportion to the resources available.
Capitalism does not guarantee low unemployment. It doesn't guarantee a meritocracy. We are fortunate that new technology has previously created new jobs for people to apply skills that gave them value to the rich. But as automation approaches human capabilities in more areas, there will be fewer opportunities available for humans. For those who don't already own capital, eventually the only jobs available to humans will be in the entertainment industry.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
As we get better at technology, we will be able to automate more and more tasks....so what is the end result? Presumably we should start planning for it now so we don't get caught by surprise.
What can we do in expensive places (North America, Europe, Japan, etc.) that can't be outsourced/insourced/automated?
And for the $1.65 per hour in maintenance costs for a robot arm, I can have 1.65 humans, with TWO arms EACH doing more complicated work
Part of that is because in countries that allow wage "slavery", the cost of living is so much lower. This causes the equivalent of 1 USD in a "poor" country to have far more purchasing power than 1 USD in USA or 0.65 GBP in Great Britain. This tendency for exchange rates to exaggerate apparent differences in wages is called the Penn effect. The Balassa-Samuelson model explains it through the difference between tradable goods and services ("widgets") and non-tradable goods and services ("haircuts"). If an economy exports few goods, there won't be much demand for its currency, and the exchange rate of its currency with those of industrialized economies will be unfavorable. But as companies invest in factories in such a "poor" country, it'll have to pay higher wages to attract workers, and employers in non-tradable industries will have to raise their prices to keep employees from flocking to industries that produce goods for export. This inflates wages across the board, and over time, the cost of living in the "poor" country increases.
In real life, I see most of the benefit of automation going to the owners/shareholders of the companies, and that money doesn't necessarily stay in the community where the factory is (or even in the same country).
It wasn't always like this. Keynes, for instance, believed (along with others) that advances in technology would allow people to work much less and enjoy life more.
We've said it here so many times it's worn through, but technology was supposed to spread out the benefits, allow less work and more enjoyment of life, not widening gap of fear and grasping where neither the rich NOR the poor seem happy with what they have.
There are some great books to kickstart the brain on this, I find Tom Hodgkinson's "How to Be Idle" and "The Idler's Companion" are good places to pause and ponder, a good launching point.
We need a major shift in the way people think about work, running themselves into the ground. A major cultural shift. What I fear is that mankind will keep on the way it has: Letting millions starve when there's more than enough to go around, competing and making various ***ocracies.
On the other hand, one might consider reading that "Rat Race and Why You Need It" book (or whatever it's called) for some counterpoint.
Advance in technology is good, I don't want to come across as a luddite here, but can't there be a middle ground? Isn't it supposed to be a social net to catch those displaced but a rapidly advancing society?
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The meme of capitalism is based on the idea that technological progress and investment of capital drives increasing productivity, and that increase in productivity drives increased wages and improved standards of living.
It's been as successful as heck.
Now that about 5% of the population is employed in agriculture and 8% in manufacturing, the question becomes what do you when all the material needs of a civilization can be supplied by 13% of the work force?
Or maybe 10%, or even less as time goes on.
Then there is the question of sustainability. I don't think what we have is sustainable. There is a set of giant externalities in place right now, the biggest being consumption of limited resources.
It's going to be a bit gut wrenching but these externalities have to be resolved.
As blue collar jobs get automated, there will be blue collar workers that are not suited to white collar jobs.
Heck, now white collar jobs are being automated or offshored. Royal Bank just got in the media up here in Canada for offshoring IT services for back-end financial teams.
What a load of crap.
You neglect to mention that those Foxconn employees are not only volunteers, but compete intensely for those positions. Why? Because the alternative of subsistence farming is significantly, brutally worse.
Why would it be morally superior to double the wages of the Asian factory workers, as opposed to keeping the wages the same and doubling the number of workers? The net benefit to those WITHOUT the factory jobs who get them would be much greater than those WITH them, but who get a raise.
The reality is that even on the meager pay from Foxconn (as an example), those workers manage to save and send money home. Those jobs give hope that the next generation can afford to get an education and break the millennium-old cycle of poverty. Without those factories, those born into poverty will always be there, generation after generation.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
All of us benefit from being the heirs of the industrial revolution. Even the poorest of us have better health and nutrition than before. We all have better health care than the mightiest king did 300 years ago. Yet for the average person who lived during the industrial revolution life was poor hell. Craftsmen and herders were sent into Dickensian factories and mines. I hope we can live long enough for the majority of citizens to see a benefit from our present computer revolution.
Posted previously Jan 23, 2013
For those who don't already own capital, eventually the only jobs available to humans will be in the entertainment industry.
And even those are threatened by programs such as Emily Howell.
The overwhelming attitude of technical jobs I have interviewed for lately has been "We expect you to work overtime because we do not want to hire too many people even though we are short-staffed [with a vague implication of we need to increase our profits and satisfy shareholders]". I still cannot understand why the insistence on one person for 60 hrs per week when we could have two working 30 hrs per week. Happier more productive employees and we double the number of available jobs overnight (I know, many people would require some technical training but I'm sure that could be fixed quickly as well with sound educational policies, or maybe simply extra tax breaks for internships).
Socialism won't happen while the public continues to listen to right-wing entertainers with names like Rush and Glenn and pretend that their characters' opinions represent a good direction for economic policy.
Bertrand Russell used almost exactly that same thought experiment in a 1932 article, fwiw:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Was the last century a fluke where a large middle class had power, which will soon revert to the more common system in human history where a tiny few live in splendor and the rest live under their heel?
Probably. When capitalism functions as designed, the price of labor drops to just above survival level. This is the "iron law of wages", and held for most of history. For much of the 20th century, in the developed world, it was different. When productivity went up, so did wages. That was driven by two factors - unions, and fear of communism.
Nobody has taken communism seriously in decades, even the remaining communists. But from the 1930s to the 1970s, it was seen as a serious threat to capitalism. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, capitalism failed, while communism in the USSR was on the way up. There was real fear that communism might win economically. Fear of nationalization forced companies to increase wages and treat their workers better.
When the USSR started building atomic bombs, space satellites, and ICBMs, there was fear in the US that the USSR might pull ahead in technology. This fear drove the "space race", and is why the US set up NASA and funded the space program so heavily.
This all ended in the 1970s. The best year ever for blue collar workers in the US was 1973. The USSR no longer seemed to be an economic threat. So things gradually went back to normal, and real wages in the US went down for several decades thereafter.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." - Orwell.
Manufacturing using robots is very efficient and can easily drive down the costs of hiring humans to do the job.
However, teaching humans how to assemble a new device is, in many cases, faster and cheaper than designing an automated assembly line, this reduces the time to market (TTM) of new product cycles.
China is still by far the most competitive country for this, not only in terms of price but available workforce too.
If you want manufacturing and jobs to 'come back' to the US, how about we stop penalizing US operations AND stop rewarding off-shore manufacturing (e.g. China = 'Most favored trading partner')???
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
People who were doing skilled or unskilled labor and were replaced by machines aren't suddenly going to be able to become successful in a "creative class" job.
It may not be easy but they certainly can do something else and most demonstrably do. If your job gets automated it might be economically uncomfortable for you for a while. However people are pretty resilient and most find some new way to make a living. Industries are getting disrupted constantly. It only becomes a macro-economic problem if it is too much disruption all at once without short term viable alternatives. 150 years ago, well over half the US work force was in agriculture. Now it is less than 3% by most counts. While getting there wasn't always easy people did manage and will continue to manage. Just because manufacturing has been a source of jobs for a lot of people historically doesn't mean it can or should always remain so.
On the plus side, with so many manufacturing jobs having been shipped overseas, if they actually build the automated factories here in the US then that might make some number of jobs come back.
What do you mean "if they actually build"? Automated factories are already here in the US. US labor costs are too high to compete in a lot of labor intensive work but there is plenty of manufacturing that is capital intensive and the US is second to none in that sort of manufacturing. If you go into a US factory you'll generally notice a high level of automation. That is how you compete when you have expensive labor. Europe and Japan do the same thing.
To prevent over-consumption, everything will need to be rationed, all governments will become communist or a variation of and money will become 'resource credits' lest we all live in 3d printed, robot assembled mega yachts.
Ah, we'll all be 'free'... to do whatever the government lets us do. Because the government is run by happy, fluffy philosopher kings who would never build mega-mega-yachts for themselves while the rest live in shacks.
The naivety level in this thread is truly off the scale.
The problem is not that a robot is doing my work. Actually, that is a good thing.
The bad thing is I need to work in order to earn money and somehow I need money.
That is the problem.
I also need something useful to keep me busy, like work, but that is an other thing.
Privacy is terrorism.
Actually, productivity improvements in the past did result in shorter work weeks. In the late 19th century, most people worked 12 or more hours per day, 6 days a week. Henry Ford standardized on a five day work week in 1926 (unheard of at the time). FDR established a 40 hour work week as standard in 1938. Increased productivity used to mean shorter working hours, however from about 1980 onward, average working hours have actually increased, despite continual productivity increases. The gains from those productivity increases have been captured by the top 1% instead of being spread evenly through the population.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Yes, I am an evil manufacturing systems integrator. I have put hundreds of honest, hard-working, but low-paid and low-skilled people out of a job in my career.
However, I've also created dozens of jobs for highly-skilled and well-paid operators and maintenance personnel.
Go ahead and hate me, but the companies I work for are still in business and still employ people. Without automation, they'd have been long gone.
Any serious effort to bring more manufacturing back on-shore has to include maximing the operational efficiency of the factory.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I've worked in automation. When you are proposing an automated system the financial calculations are heavily dependent on the interest rates. In a free market this is set by peoples time preference which also affects their savings and borrowing. You wouldn't have money to borrow if there wasn't savings to borrow. This provides a natural feedback mechanism. As peoples time preference moves into the future they are consuming less and saving more and production can shift from consumer goods to producer goods and longer lines of production. This is typically what happens when there is low unemployment. But if there is high unemployment people have short time preference and they consumer more and save less and production should shift to consumer goods and shorter lines of production.
The problem is when you have a central bank that is keeping interest rates artificially lower than would be set by peoples time preference. When an company is looking at how to structure production there is always a trade between automation and labor. In a natural market when there is high unemployment there is a high interest rate. This makes investing in automation more expensive and hiring labor a better choice. But with artificially low interest rates it makes automation cheaper even though there is labor going unused. This is exactly the situation we have today.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Everyone will point out how "doom and gloom" predictions of automation have been made before, and the historical results.
This is extrapolating future conditions from past events. All previous predictions of "doom and gloom" turned out to be a non-problem.
The question is, will it be a problem this time? To answer this, we must examine whether the current situation is like the historical examples. If the same assumptions hold, then we can be reasonably confident that future events will play out as they have done in the past. If the assumptions are different, then there is chance for a different outcome.
In this situation, macroeconomics makes an assumption with one corollary: the assumption of infinite consumption, and the corollary of infinite need for labor.
If people are like microorganisms, then consumption increases exponentially. Humans will tend to consume more and more goods and services if given the chance. Who wouldn't own a mansion and a yacht if given the choice? And more mansions and more yachts if they were essentially free.
Furthermore, like microorganisms, people will increase in population without limit if given the chance. If population increases exponentially even at constant per-capita consumption, consumption must increase exponentially.
Corollary: With infinite consumption, there will be an infinite need for labor. No matter how efficient and effective the system is at providing goods and services, there will always be a need for labor to produce more. Infinite consumption implies infinite labor.
Those are the assumptions. Now let's see if the assumptions are valid this time.
The population in industrialized nations is declining. Industrialized nations are below the "replacement rate" fertility level and have been for some time. The US would have negative population growth if we had no immigration, and since the fertility rate has been steadily dropping it's likely that we will have negative growth even *with* immigration in the near future. Third world nations are predicted to enjoy the same decline in population once they become modernized.
That's population, how about consumption?
The productive level of America has about doubled since 1970. If the productive wealth were evenly distributed, every man, woman, and infant in the country could spend $38,000 on goods and services this year, and then do it again next year. Every "family of four" could have 4 times this amount in spending power each year, while breadwinners put in the same number of hours at work.
The question we should ask: Is consumption infinite? Will people always say "it's not enough - I need more in my life than I have at the moment"?
If the answer to this (largely psychological) question is no, then the assumptions of macroeconomics are false in this instance and we must predict from a different model. We cannot rely on historical evidence to guide future decisions, because the situation is different.
If the answer is yes, then continue on as before. Doom and gloom naysayers are simply Luddites, and we all know how that movement turned out.
Name one that can be done by someone with only a high school diploma and no experience.
Either these folks get jobs, free money, or they will steal what you have. Those are the only choices.
If the introduction of robots created as many jobs (in production and maintenance) as they eliminated (in automation), then the total cost of ownership of the robots would make them non-viable in the market.
The reason robots are cheaper than workers is because they result in a net loss of the need for human labor.
Yes, there are shifts in pricing and interests in other industries. That does happen. But saying that will always compensate for whatever labor loss there may be is hand-wavy. There are too many variables at work to say with confidence that labor automation does not eliminate jobs.
The alternative, however, is not to halt progress in the enterprise of labor automation. On the contrary, that should be persued with alacrity. And, as an inescapable consequence of this, we will either start a slow shift towards more socialist principles, or start imprisioning more and more of our population who had to turn to crime to eat (at which point we are still providing for them just like we would in a socialist society, but we are also keeping them in cages).
"He could be running around like a savage in the jungle with the other Beasts. Instead we give him Civilization, clothe and feed and educate the Savage."
Maybe we shouldn't accept our economic systems as a "fact of life." They're a human manufacture, subject to our rules and goals.
People underestimate when a new theoretical technology will be commonplace, e.g. HAL in 2001. But they don't generally get it wrong. Computer technology has advanced to the point where a lot of automation makes financial sense. In a free capitalist system, corporate profits are the overriding goal and I recently heard robots cost about $3 an hour for repetitive manual labor. Creditworthy companies can get cheap loans to buy the technology so fiscal policy is actually accelerating the transition. But TFA says that robots will do *everything* you do better than you, and that's simply not going to be true for a long while. People need to get creative, get local, and find meaningful work in a service economy. Hopefully government policy will lean towards public works programs instead of free handouts. Humanity certainly may be approaching a crossroads, but it doesn't look like a dead end to me.
Greed is the root of all evil.
and the mandate of the corporation in general is to generate a profit. as we continue pressing on through consumer capitalism we realize that demand is perhaps not as infinite as we've considered it to be. in the past we've tried to stymy this by creating things like the interstate commerce clause, which limits your ability to grow your own wheat for example. we've also mandated that corporations consistently and continuously generate more profit than they had before. we've concluded through our own absurd philosophy that since demand is to us endless, there can be no equilibrium in which a company exists to supply a good or service. far past their titration points, corporations have sought to 'fudge' this profit margin by various means; all those except admitting demand is and can be limited. redacting sick days, mandating overtime, and the 38 hour work week for example are all slight-of-hand that corporations will continue engaging in to continue to turn ever greater profit.
machines that replace humans are good, however until we admit as a society that capitalism has equilibrium, then the notion of a corporation is entirely divorced from its workforce. in other words, a corporations final state is inevitably a gross disservice to the society in which it operates; it can be no other way.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Pulling a number right out of my ass, lets say a typical person needs to earn $35 000 to $45 000 a year to support themselves at today's cost of living. . Lets say that random person X, working at a creative class job might only be able to earn $15 000 a year simply because he is just not that good.
Now lets automate the shit out of everything. Lets say we have robotic lumberjacks, miners, farmers, prefabricated construction factories for building homes, the whole smash. Lets also say that some kind of wonder tech combo both reduces the energy requirements while also making renewable energies viable for a standard of living comparable to the american average. Pure science fiction bullshit sure, but lets set that aside for a moment.
The real cost of living is going to fall way the hell down. Rich and Poor still exist because humans suck and we compete for mates as much as anything else. But the cost for a person to secure food and shelter drops to something like $10 000 a month.
The guy who can only earn $15 000 in a creative type job is going to be able to live while doing that job. Maybe they aren't living the high live but they can probably get by as well as they would have before.
Also, lets not call it a 'creative' type job, and instead call it a 'cultural' job. Some people will create art of various forms. Some people will perform (art or sports). Some will teach. I am sure some people will just try to party all the damn time.
END COMMUNICATION
Pace of change is really the issue more than that change is happening.
It's one thing for a generation of people to go to work in a factory and then have their work disappear slowly over a generation; with a similar kind of timing, the people doing job A will die/retire/etc at the same pace that job A gets phased out and job B comes into demand, allowing the next generation to do job B.
But when the cycle is so much faster and job A gets phased out faster than jobs B, C, & D become available then you have a short-term problem with people who are trained/experienced to do job A and cannot easily switch into performing other jobs due to their age, training, etc that you have a problem.
I think the larger issue with the economy has been the pace of change -- 'new' jobs are being created but they require skills that are quite difficult to obtain, especially for people mid-career/mid-life.
I started working as a power engineer, and then worked smelting alloys. A lot of what we did has been enhanced by robots and better computer systems, quite frankly.
But your premise is that jobs in manufacturing are not growing. This is not correct.
Jobs are growing in manufacturing, but only in forward-thinking cities with low energy costs that invest in large quantities of cheap alternative energy (e.g. Seattle, parts of Texas) that costs less than oil (e.g. solar, wind, hydro).
Most of the jobs that "disappeared" were pretty dangerous, actually.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Productivity as such isn't a particularly useful concept. What's important is, who gets the gains. The owners/employers are getting the gains and the workers, whose productivity has increased, are not. Thus the unprecedentedly high persistent unemployment in the US, downward pressure on wages, and all the social ills that follow from this (massive budget cuts in social programs like education, for example). As the long-term rate of profit continues to drift downward, these pressures will increase--for decades capitalists ("investors" if you prefer) were content with a lot of dollars as profits instead of looking at the rate of return. But for some time now the rate of return has been so low that the mass of dollars has become noticeably lower. We can expect more speedup, more on the job injuries, more West, Texas-type events because this is the face of productivity "gains." Gains for who?
Automat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat) FTW!
We're already dealing with automation in entertainment. It was one of the first industries to go in fact. Radio and Television replaced live theatre and live music. Then came tapes and VHS. Then CDs and DVDs. Now it all just streams from a server. Think of today's artists as robot programmers. They do it once then sit back and let the "robots" do the work.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Everybody can continue to live at the same standard of living but work only half as much.
Dude- what fictional plane of reality do you exist on, where everybody's hours get cut in half but their pay stays the same?
I want to go to there.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
http://despair.com/pu-059.html
If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Keep in mind that this is not a black and white issue. Yes, it is ridiculous to assume that the demand for labor is fixed. But it is also ridiculous to assume that it is not possible for automation to take over so many jobs that a substantial portion of the workforce can no longer find work.
Based on the changes over the past 250 years new jobs will replace the lost jobs. Short term unemployment occurs due to new technology, in the long term enough new jobs are created to meed demand. What this argument really amounts to is "Because things have happened that way for a long them they will always happen that way." Sure, that is a good assumption to make when you don't have more information, but it does not create an unassailable argument.
The entire point of automation is to eliminate the need for human labor. We can't do it yet; our automation is just not that good. But some day it might be. I don't think that day is anywhere near, and I think panicking about it is silly. But dismissing concerns about the possibility is also unreasonable. Maybe automation really will eliminate the need for human labor . Or, more likely, so many of the low-education jobs will be automated that a substantial portion of the population is not capable of learning what it takes to get one of the remaining jobs.
-WolvesOfTheNight
That's true. However...
When robots are sufficiently cheap and capable, as the economy expands in proportion to the resources available new production results in new automation instead of new jobs. The advantage people have always had is the "general purpose" nature of the human body and mind. Once robots are sufficiently general purpose the number of jobs for which people will be better suited is going to shrink dramatically.
I think that as exciting as technological advancements are, there is also the reality that robots can do a job quicker and more efficiently than people. It's something to be aware of and it will be interesting in the next 10-15 years to see what happens.
Did you ever wonder if this explains some of the fervor in the US abolitionist movement? If I'm working in a factory in Maine and people ask me if slavery is bad I say "Yes, it's evil and should probably not be allowed." But if they say "We're thinking of moving your job to Georgia and using slaves to operate the machinery" then I say "Slavery is so evil I'm prepared to risk my life in a war to stamp it out."
Even if automation does increase unemployment without creating new opportunities, that is no reason to stop. The correct response is not "lets halt science and engineering so that everybody can continue doing work that humans no longer need to do." That makes no sense.
The correct response is, "now that fewer humans need to work, we can establish new socialist policies to meet their needs anyway."
That, however, rubs red-blooded Americans the wrong way, meaning that the actual response is (and will continue to be):
"Automate away! Anyone who can't adapt and find new work can conveniently starve to death or turn to crime and wind up in jail, where taxpayer dollars will provide for all their needs but breeding will not be an option, resulting in an eventual die-off of all non-essential humans."
That's just how people do things around here, for better or for worse.
We do not condone slavery here, but Foxconn does.
Here we go again with the hyperbole. Foxconn employees are not slaves. Nobody who can quit his job and walk away is a slave. There are a lot of slaves in the world, and this kind of empty-headed rhetoric doesn't do them any favors.
Now you see the real reason for banning the slavery.
Pretty much true. Much of the opposition to slavery in the Northerners who didn't want to compete w/ slave labor. However, there's no contradiction between opposing slavery for that reason and opposing it for the other reasons as well.
If you have a public fire department or a public library, that's socialism. I don't care if it's a volunteer fire department because the firehouse and the equipment are still government owned.
Wouldn't it be feasible for a volunteer fire department to own its own trucks? Or for a private charity to run a library? I've read that if people would donate 10 percent of their income to charities, there wouldn't be nearly as much need for government services.
Or by "government owned" do you repeat the claim that a recurring property tax is tantamount to renting land from the government?
the alternative of subsistence farming is significantly, brutally worse
If the Foxconn and other Chinese factory jobs were so desirable, you'd see little turnover. Instead the typical factory worker only stays for a few years. After every Lunar New Year (when everybody takes a week or two off and often visit family) Chinese factories have to hire a bunch of new people, because so many of the old ones have left without notice. The same pattern is often seen in maquiladoras. Why? In the US and Europe people who have decent factory jobs often hang on to them for year after year.
Why would it be morally superior to double the wages of the Asian factory workers, as opposed to keeping the wages the same and doubling the number of workers?
Why would they double the number of workers unless there was a demand for it? OTOH paying workers more means they'll buy more things, which means there will be more jobs making things, etc. in a virtuous cycle. Worked for Henry Ford. What makes China any different?
Social status is not a function of material wealth alone.
In fact, material wealth is a factor ONLY when the status in that particular SOCIAL GROUP is based on material wealth.
In reality, social status is far more often based on immaterial things like "popularity" than on wealth.
Nor is the social status an absolute standard.
Again, as a kid your social status may be sky high cause you can spit really far, but if you end up doing research at CERN for living some other qualities may determine your social status.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Now you see the real reason for banning the slavery. Not because it is a-moral, or bad, but because it will cost you your job and your little house on the hill.
I'm pretty sure the guys with slaves had perfectly fine houses.
We're already dealing with automation in entertainment. It was one of the first industries to go in fact. Radio and Television replaced live theatre and live music. Then came tapes and VHS. Then CDs and DVDs. Now it all just streams from a server. Think of today's artists as robot programmers. They do it once then sit back and let the "robots" do the work.
But the number of man-hours needed to make a movie or a TV series or a video game has stayed the same or gone up over time because the audience reacts to efficiency gains by demanding more. After about 5 seconds of watching a scene in a movie or a character in a game someone will call out "obvious render" or "obvious script" and then it's back to work for the 'robot programmers', because the bar has just been raised for the next movie or game. I don't see any obvious end to that.
The problem is that we're probably not nurturing the demand side enough. Piracy is bad for demand. Insisting on selling physical copies is very bad for demand. Having working class people work so many hours that they don't have time to watch TV or movies or play games is extremely bad for demand.
Welfare stops the minute you have a second child, either accidentally or deliberately. [...] I'm sure there are problems I haven't thought of, so lets hear em.
Would a mother who has a second child due to sexual assault have cause to sue the rapist for the forfeited welfare checks?
For those who don't already own capital, eventually the only jobs available to humans will be in the entertainment industry.
Isn't that... you know.... one of the flavors of a utopia? Nobody has to do back-breaking work and everyone just sits around making art and music.
Which is why nobody is a professional musician now-a-days. /s
Thankfully art is more of a fashion than a commodity.
who said that price is going up? It is going down. However, the upfront money is more expensive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Assume you have an economy consisting entirely of factory workers. Now, half the work gets automated. What happens?
Well there are 4 factors at play:
1) The old factory workers
2) The new robotics engineers
2) The owners
3) The customers
The new robotics engineers are a smaller group. Not all the displaced factory workers can go be robotics engineers, as awesome as that would be. They didn't exist before and they see 100% gains. They can be separate companies entirely, or they can be a new division of the old factory, it doesn't matter for this analysis. What's important is that the robotics system is cheaper than the workforce they're replacing. That's why they bought robots. So overall there's less money spent of the overhead of actually making the thing.
So some of the old factory workers go become engineers, which is cool. And the company/industry experiences better efficiencies. Yay progress. Now who reaps the benefits? Everyone wants it for themselves.
The owners claim that they bought the tools, they have the same customers as before, they steered the boat, now gimme gimme gimme. And to an extent, they're right. If none of the benefit went to them, why would they seek the change?
The workers claim that the benefit should go to them. There was work put before them, and they get the work done, just as before. They either want everyone to work half as long or have the remaining employees earn twice as much. And to an extent they're right. If we suddenly give the axe to half the populace of whereeversville, the turmoil would be astounding. Detrimental to everyone involved.
The customers claim they the benefit should go to them. They want a thing and now the thing costs less to make. And they're right too. If there's a free market all it takes is one factory to try and undercut the others for a quick buck and the price will come down.
It's a difficult problem. If I were king for a day: For a while the customers will continue paying the old price.It takes a little while for the free market to kick in. Eventually, all the benefit goes to the customer (which, remember, is all of us). But until that time there is surplus money at the factory. Some goes to the new engineers to run the robots of course. Some goes to the owners who bought the robots. Some goes to the employees who continue to work hard. Some goes to re-train\retire those who have been laid off.
For a while, the bosses have bonuses, the workers work less, the laid off have tuition paid. Until they're undercut and things go back to normal: No bonuses for the bosses, full-time employment for the workers, and no free tuition. And they all have to find some new way to make everything better.
And so, hopefully, the transition will be deemed as "fair". And that's the goal of politics isn't it? To keep everyone working together without ripping out each others throats.
It is not a fallacy. It has been in the past, but at present the economy, even looking at it on a global scale, is getting to the point where robots are quite literally displacing humans for which NO NEW ECONOMIES OR JOBS are being created for those people to fill because A) Robots in newer high tech fields are actually already better at doing what they do than humans are or B) not everyone can be a programmer.
There is a lump of work to be done, but its a moving target. That moving target directly correlates to a percentage of the global economy.
Automation rates are FAR outpacing growth rates, you do the math.
Aristotle: We labor so that we may have leisure.
means people can buy more stuff? Why would I, as a capitalist and owner of most everything, just charge a lot of money. Especially when it's basic necessities like food, cancer meds, etc. Moreover, it's in my best interests to keep the lower 99% fighting among themselves for the little remaining work there is to do.
While we're on the subject, _what_ different industries? The only new industries I see popping up are automation. Unless you mean professional bootlicker for the 1%. But I can't imagine needing too many of those.
Moreover, look at places like China with large surplus populations and no socially accepted means to distribute wealth besides work. They're not exactly living well.
Heck, you end out your post with a link to the spending myth. You're linking to a site that's main narrative is that we're broke. How are we going to buy all this stuff when we have a spending problem, huh?
Basically, you're yet another conservative right winger with no real answers accept the old crap "The Free Market will take care of it". Meanwhile every shred of empirical evidence plus 2000+ years of history shows the free market results in the ultra wealthy use worker surpluses to their advantage and don't care much if the rest of us have jack $@!T.
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When it comes to economics, people love to look at the perspectives of the unskilled / low skilled laborers, but they never look at things from the perspective of the entrepreneur or hirer. Like in this case, because auto companies can now hire less people to do the same amount of work, they can lower the price of the cars that they are producing by the amount they are not having to pay in people's salaries. A few laborers lose their jobs but the rest of the world gets cheaper cars.
At least, that's how it would work in a free market, where competition were actually a factor. There are so many government restrictions, rules and regulations (all formulated by the automotive lobby) that keep competition out of the auto industry that the CEOs of the mega auto corps are probably just pocketing the extra money they are making.
Robots can't vote, and meanwhile the majority demographic will use their vote to determine the economic structure that meets their needs best. So your fantasy that non-robot owners would wallow in frustration is just a fantasy.
During the 1970s, they said the same thing about computers - that they would replace all the jobs, that only the rich would own them, that everybody else would be unemployed, etc. But now everybody owns a computer - just like how everybody may own a robot.
That day could be near; I think fear of that day is what is preventing its quick approach. I know I personally could accomplish much in that field of technology, but I don't consider it morally acceptable to do so.
Did you seriously just suggest that we should look at a comic book for a likely model of how we'll run our society in the future?
Science fiction has been wrong in the past, but it has also been right in the past. Read the article "5 Important Things You Won't Believe Comic Books Invented" by Diana McCallum, and once you finish that, there are more. If an idea appears plausible, and the implementation described in a work of fiction appears plausible, why not? Jonathan Swift described the welfare state of Lilliput in Travels into Several Remote Nations long before "welfare state" was a household name. And now you even.
Welcome to post-modern slavery: where a small "aristocracy" composed of slaves is forced to labor to provide for the needs of a massive herd of uneducated livestock who contribute nothing to society
"Livestock"? Really? Next thing you'll tell me is that 800 millennia from now, humankind's descendants will have speciated into above-ground fatted cattle and the below-ground cave dwellers who tend them. The subterraneans provide the necessities of life for the upworlders, who turn a garden full of food that food eats into flesh that the subterraneans' carnivorous digestive systems can handle. Oh wait, that's an H. G. Wells novel.
Dude, you don't understand: their pay doesn't have to stay the same because the stuff they want costs much less.
"obvious render"
That has a solution: more stylized graphics. One of the reasons why The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and the DS Zelda games are cel-shaded is to cover up lower detail. That's also why toys were the main characters of Pixar's early shorts and its first feature film: plastic is far easier to shade convincingly than mammalian skin.
Clippy: "I seen that you are trying to keep your job, would you like me to help with that?" HB1game admin: "expend all your points to bump competitor xxx?" H.G. Wells had this viewpoint of the elite, but I think in reality they are more vicious than helpless. The eloi would be twittering, posting deaths and social faux pas to social sites with great interest, while the morlocks laboured to make reality match their whims.
In NSA America social networks join you!
Indeed, neither "capitalism" nor free markets (which is what you probably mean) guarantee much of anything. Markets crash, people get screwed, people cheat, etc. But they do that in any economic systems. Free markets are the best system known to man to limit those problems and give the best outcome to everybody, because screwed up as it may be at times, no other system actually works better.
There is nothing preventing you from putting money into the stock market, and you benefit just as much from it as "the rich". In fact, for many people, a large part of their assets are already in stocks because that's how their retirement is financed (even if they have a "defined benefit plan").
Yes, and the problem with that is ... what? Once the cost of manufacturing falls to nearly zero through automation, people will be giving away the products of manufacturing as gimmicks to attract people to pay for things that are actually hard to produce, like good entertainment. Think movie theaters, game parks, and amusement parks with free foods and free gadgets.
I didn't commit the "lump of labor fallacy". I specifically imposed the condition that standards of living remain constant, i.e. that the economy doesn't expand. If you're going to be pedantic, at least get it right.
Yes, in practice, neither of the two options that I mentioned applies. I was making a simple economic argument under the assumptions that most people who warn of mass unemployment usually make, mainly to illustrate the point that if you impose certain regulations, you're likely to increase unemployment or decrease labor participation.
That reasoning doesn't work, for the same reason even a nation that is worse at everything than another nation still produces and exports.
But that doesn't work if you force employers to pay people more than they are worth and simultaneously engage in policies that keep the prices of essential goods like food and housing artificially high.
Dude, you don't understand: their pay doesn't have to stay the same because the stuff they want costs much less.
Ah, I see - theoretical idealism. A nice thought, but difficult if not impossible to achieve in practice.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You forgot the part where the other half of the working population gets offshored to China.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
There's nothing "theoretically ideal" about it, that's the way the economy actually works.
in reality, all resources are free
If you come on to my property and try to take wood, sheep, clay, stone, or wheat, you'd quickly learn how "free" they are.
There's nothing "theoretically ideal" about it, that's the way the economy actually works.
No, it's not - if my employer cuts my hours in half, the cost of goods does not automatically halve itself in response. Let's go back and analyze your original post:
Assume you have an economy consisting entirely of factory workers. Now, half the work gets automated. What happens?
OK, for starters, we don't have an economy consisting entirely of factory workers," thus supporting my contention that this exercise is a purely theoretical one.
Back to the subject, FWIW, I used to work in a factory, and have seen first-hand what the effects are of people being displaced by automation (not me, thank goodness), so I feel I have a pretty good handle of how things actually work in those sorts of situations.
Everybody can continue to live at the same standard of living but work only half as much,
In an idealistic utopia where standard of living is not defined by personal income, sure; but that's not the world we inhabit. In this plane of existence, the reality is that the displaced workers lose hours, which means their checks are smaller, and thus, they are pushed to a lower standard of living due to being unable to afford to continue living at the level they had become accustomed to.
or half of the people can be unemployed while the other half work full time and pay half their salary to support the unemployed.
There is no option for half the people to work and pay for the other half's unemployment as you suggest; even if there were, I presume most if not all of the working class would stand together and shout "fuck that" from the rooftops when told they had to sacrifice half their pay (thus reducing their own standard of living) to maintain the standard of living a bunch of people who don't work are accustomed to. In fact, if I'm not mistaken that second method was attempted by the former U.S.S.R., and if my history serves me, the experiment did not end well.
Thus, we can see from simple observation that neither scenario is an example of "how the economy works," and therefore exist purely as an exercise in economic theory.
Not that you've posited a bad idea; it's just not reflective of reality.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs
1. If manufacturing is recovering, someone must be doing their job.
2. If Robots were introduced without adding jobs, then the robots cannot be the ones doing the jobs.
3. Then the humans must be doing what jobs they had been doing, and the robots' jobs also.
4. Therefore, Alexander The Great had an infinite number of arms.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
OK, well, I was hoping for an intelligent response. Had I known all you had left to offer was childish insults, I wouldn't have wasted my time.
Shame, that.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Until you stop accusing people of naive idealism for illustrating an economic principle in a simple way with an idealized example, you are indeed wasting your time. You're like someone arguing that physics doesn't work because mechanics textbooks use examples without friction.
I never said anything about "naive idealism," I specifically stated that your contention is an example of theoretical idealism - that is, a great idea in theory, but not reflective of actual practice. That you took it as an insult is a result of your personal hangups, not mine.
Now, if you can somehow give example of how the economic theory you've posited, where half the population is put out of a job and somehow there is no negative effect on the economy as a whole, is utilized in an actual economy, please do; I'd be glad to read it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Can't you read? The subject is "mass unemployment due to policies, not automation". Nowhere did I say that mass unemployment wasn't a bad thing.
So... is that your example? Or are you still too locked in to "argument mode" to have a discussion about the topic?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese