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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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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).
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.
aren't suddenly going to be able to become successful in a "creative class" job
And what's more, there is a massive surplus of people in the "creative class" jobs: The number of reasonably competent musicians, authors, artists, poets, etc far outnumbers the market for the arts. For every Brian May there are dozens if not hundreds of really talented and skilled guitarists that you've never heard of. For every Jackson Pollack there are many many good painters that you've never heard of. For every JK Rowling there are many many good authors toiling away in obscurity.
The completely fraudulent idea that has been pushed for the last 20 years is that if you give everyone in America a PhD, everyone will earn what a tenured professor makes. What actually happens is that if you give everyone in America a PhD, you have PhDs mopping floors for a living.
I am officially gone from
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.
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.
"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.
>you have PhDs mopping floors for a living
Actually, I think there already is a robot for that . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
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
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.
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
From what I remember in the news, one of the reasons why so many of the young were unemployed was that because of the free education they all went to University for free and all got PhDs and all have a dream to get a government job that they can't get fired from. They won't take anything less.
No, the reason many of the young are unemployed in Greece is the same reason the young are unemployed in the US: When there's a recession, nobody is hiring. When nobody hires for years running, new graduates (at whatever level, including high school) can't get into the job market. Normally, new graduates compete with older more experienced workers by accepting a lower wage, but in bad times experienced workers will take the lower wage instead of being unemployed, and the new graduates can't compete effectively.
I am officially gone from