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EU Launches World's Largest Civilian Robotics Program; 240,000 New Jobs Expected
Hallie Siegel writes: "The European Commission and 180 companies and research organizations (under the umbrella of euRobotics) have launched the world's largest civilian research and innovation program in robotics. Covering manufacturing, agriculture, health, transport, civil security and households, the initiative – called SPARC – is the E.U.'s industrial policy effort to strengthen Europe's position in the global robotics market (€60 billion a year by 2020). This initiative is expected to create over 240,000 jobs in Europe, and increase Europe's share of the global market to 42% (a boost of €4 billion per year). The European Commission will invest €700 million and euRobotics will invest €2.1 billion."
methinks there is registered trademark in the field of digital computing circuitry for that name, which is enforceable in the EU
Automation improves productivity. By your logic, ancient agrarian economies should be strived for because everyone had a chance to work his ass off. I mean, what does it matter how little wealth was actually produced with that, right?
Ezekiel 23:20
240,000 jobs created to build robots, robots then take 24,000,000 jobs away.
I sure hope the little guys can pull it off!
Don't worry, they have socialism.
Europe is better equipped to handle the shift to automation than the US. In the end, achieving a utopia is all about the resources. If solar/fusion provide enough cheap energy, crop yields go up a bit, global population stalls out at 10-11 billion, it could work.
Each worker builds own replacement
Can't we also be leaders in industry with public-private partnerships?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Prove it.
The reality is, automation has about the same effect as off-shoring on productivity ... the jobs go away and don't get replaced.
You end up with fewer people working and no new jobs coming in to replace the lost ones. Then you get a bunch of people who have no jobs, and your overall productivity goes down.
Pretty much exactly what's happening in America and around the world.
Automation and off-shoring both might improve productivity in specific cases, but the broad impact on society has the opposite effect.
BBC2 is celebrating 50 years, and that includes 50 years of their Science/Current Affairs program Horizon. As part of that, they're showing specially selected archive programs from each previous decade. One of them, from 1974, is called The Chips Are Down.
The basic theme is that with these new-fangled microchips making computers and automation cheap, are we going to put everyone out of work? One line is, I quote "Will the unions even allow it?" The entire program was hilarious.
So, how's the 70's working out for you?
In capitalistic USA, owners keep 40 years of increasing productivity from automation for themselves.
In socialist EU, prosperity and leisure for everyone!
How horrible!
No, 240,000 jobs to clean up the messes made by the robots.
Table-ized A.I.
"$2.8 billion invested in robotics? That's nuts! We could invade a whole new country for that, and then suck ten times as much from taxes before we pull out!"
EU will cash in on US wage payers desire to remove the added costs associated with human employees who don't seem to get that the service they provide can and will be handled by someone else if they continue to make unreasonable demands. It's coming and the timing SHOULD be a wake up call... even if not actually related.
It worked pretty well as long as there were still "new products" that could be sold, and the people building that products (cars, washing machines, TVs) where essentially roughly the same segment of the population that actually bought them in the end. Then every increase in productivity meant an increase in wealth.
Back then the economic motor was "build more stuff that people actually want to buy". which is in my opinion the only reason that can make commerce prosper.
"Make more money" and "Create more jobs" goals are in my opinion just as worthless as economic motors as the old communist "Make everybody equal" goal. Neither of those actually CREATES wealth, only building new stuff that people actually want that actually winds up in the hands of most of the populace creates wealth. The trip that most "make money" companies these days are on (produce in low-wage countries, sell in high-wage countries) will someday come to an end when the former high-wage countries collapse. It's just a matter of time and a matter of how big a bang they create when they go down.
Hilarious because accurate, yes?
Most jobs today are completely worthless, except that an increasing cadre of marketroids have perfected the art of selling people stuff they've never even thought about wanting. The market is mostly one big circle-jerk. And the unions did see this sort of thing coming, which is why Thatcher and Reagan crushed them.
It's a mis-translation - 240000 people are being turned into cyborgs
Yep... One for every Seattlite (sp?) who gets bumped up to $15 per hour doing work that anyone can do.
Prove it.
Horse whip makers were once made obsolete, but the automation that replaced them (automobiles. Auto is right in the name!) created an industry that is now many orders of magnitude larger than the horse whip industry ever was.
The reality is, automation has about the same effect as off-shoring on productivity ... the jobs go away and don't get replaced.
Maybe your job goes away. As a roboticist, I get even more job opportunities. Sorry you chose the wrong field. For those who were made obsolete by robots, well that's progress. Maybe they can retrain as someone who repairs the robots that replaced them.
The public associates it with the failed Sun product line that is now being destroyed by Oracle. Everyone hates Oracle, especially now that they are working so hard to steal health insurance for the working poor. I live in Portland and was denied by Oracle. They fucked us all over by doing the Republican's bidding. They want the poor to die. They let us die untreated in the halls of the ER while the wealthy whites are given gold-plated service. That is the legacy of that failed CPU. By attempting to associate this new endeavour with that failed one, it proves that these CONservatives hate technology and want to fuck us all over. It's just a scam to line their pockets.
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of auto workers that lost their jobs to robots since the 1980's.
Is what this reminds me of.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
yes, first it will take 240,000 European people to design and build the robots.
Then the 749,000 US agriculture workers (2012 BOL numbers) in the US lose their jobs.
Then then migrant worker flow (aka Illegal aliens) decrease to near zero.
Bad or good? hmmm....
Everyone speaks about a possible losss of jobs or trademark issues. Am I the only one thinking that robot technology is cool? This is the kind of shit that could allow exploration of the oceans and eventually space, prosthetic help for sick people, cheaper and more efficient mass production etc. Plus, it would probably generate some interesting by-products, like advanced algorithms, maybe a new programming language or new processor types. And it gives jobs to young people with PhDs.
PS Jobs are being lost and created all the time. Think robot maintainer, robot programmer, robot police (?) (the "Turing"?), robot designer. And, anyway, if a job can be taken by a robot it probably isn't very interesting or creative to begin with. If I had a choice, I'd rather be doing the creative stuff.
Or have had their jobs off-shored and eliminated.
To the people who lose the jobs, it's pretty much the same thing. You've been replaced with something which is cheaper and works more hours for less than you will.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So the Wachowskis weren't quite as confused as they seemed? :p
dont forget cats and dogs getting along. they must get along before the utopia arrives.
I for one, welcome our robotic overlords and wish them luck in the human cloning of Apple's founder -- one Jobs wasn't enough we need 240K and that should be enough for anybody!
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
hiring Mexicans to build a fence to keep Mexicans in Mexico.
If each worker is truly building his own replacement, doesn't that mean that the replacement should also be able to build their own replacement?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
So, buggy whip makers, coal miners, butter churners, and door to door vacuum bed salespeople should be guaranteed work?
There is a balance. Automation is important, and it actually provides more skilled jobs because the peon stuff is handled without risking life and limb.
Plus, it will happen one way or another. The US needs to do the same, because the jobs fixing the robots will be somewhere... and likely in the EU, or if not there, wherever the H-1Bs are available the cheapest to bring over.
Robot minders: 75,000 : (job: When the robot repeated runs into the wall while making a beeping sound, turn it around and press the restart button)
Charge nurses: 65,000: Find the robots that have run out charge while trying to navigate their way back to charging stations and replace the limp-home battery with fresh fully charged ones.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And what of the millions of auto workers and those in peripheral industries who gained their jobs due to automation. I mean.... do you realize an AUTOmobile is a form of automation in itself? We automated the horse. Sure, all the horsewhip and buggy manufacturers lost their jobs, but in their place sprouted an even larger industry. I mean, there is a gas station and auto repair shop on almost every corner in my town. When robots become as ubiquitous, there will be many industries surrounding their support. Expect to see robot repair shops, with robot mechanics and technicians some time in the future.
Are you saying it's not true? I don't think you know what productivity means.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My European dog was babysitting my European kittens once.
Ezekiel 23:20
It's "I for one welcome our commissioner-overlords and their total detachment from reality" :) I have lived in the pre-1989 Eastern Bloc and I can spot a centralistic, ineffectual project intended to just shuffle money from the taxpayers to the Brussels bureaucracy and its friends in the industry.
This is an unbelievably short sighted point of view. The vast majority of work available for people throughout the world is manual labor, including trades. These are exactly the kinds of jobs that are being targeted by automation. Robots will be repaired by robots. If you can't see that coming then I wonder if you've given much thought to this issue at all. The past is certainly a useful tool for predicting the future, but you really need to consider if the coming change is of the same type or not. In this case, replacing horse drawn carriages with cars was of the same type. Replacing manual labor with robotics is not. Comparisons between the two are pointless.
My brother works as one of these "robot repair men". Him and 4 others travel between several building maintaining about 200-250 various types of robots. So what use to be ~200+ people working was chopped down to ~5 people.
These robots being maintained were most likely built on an assembly line by other robots which are most likely maintained by a hand full of people.
Awesome! Now here's a wacky idea: what if we used the liberated work force to finally fix some of the externalities of our industrial societies, or pour them into the renewable energy industry and other similar industries (material reprocessing etc.), which are perhaps more labour-intensive than just a few large turbines and mines but at least we know we can keep them running longer? I mean, only in a world full of dumb people can producing wealth X with Y people be "better" than producing wealth X with Y'Y people. But I guess that's why we can't have nice things; the world is choke-full of dumb people.
Ezekiel 23:20
This is another example of corporate welfare masquerading as a jobs plan, combined with protectionist sentiment. The central planners will take money out of the productive economy and spend it on a corporate giveaway to favoured interests. Jobs that otherwise would have been created in the productive sector will be lost, while only the 240,000 pork barrel jobs will be noticed by the superficial. Whether Europe is best positioned for the robotic industry will be ignored. Instead of this boondoggle, it would be better to leave well enough alone and let jobs be created where they are most needed, and let comparative advantage and the specialization of labor decide Europe's share of the robotics market.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
The vast majority of work available for people throughout the world is manual labor, including trades
And most of that work isn't going away in the near future. With the current state of robots, you're talking about taking away the most dull, dangerous, and dirty jobs out there. Some robots will even have jobs that humans aren't capable of doing because they are so dangerous or dirty. Any jobs for these robots will be a net gain in employment, creating jobs surrounding and supporting the robot that were not possible before.
Again, as for those replaced by robots, well, tough. Your job is now done by a machine. Find something else to do.
If you can't see that coming then I wonder if you've given much thought to this issue at all.
If you think that's coming any time in the near or even distant future, you have absolutely zero knowledge of what robots are actually capable of. As someone who designs robots for a living, you can rest assured that humans will be the ones designing and repairing robots for a long time to come.
In this case, replacing horse drawn carriages with cars was of the same type.
It was the same "type" insofar as both made you go forward faster than walking. That's about where the similarities end between the horse/buggy industry and the automobile industry. Horsewhip makers really have no transferrable skills in a world where horsewhips don't make cars go faster. And yet the world moved on. Shocking.
I for one welcome our new robotic-slaves, means the end of our slavery is finally approaching.
And I really doubt the result would have to be depression, in Europe that is. I believe the majority of people would realize that a manual-labor-economy is not well
suited for a automated-society. And to avoid the looming fear of depression most European states can simply evolve naturally from Socialism to Basic-income.
Nations that has capitalism as their state-religion will probably have not-so-bright future.
USA, i suggest you make http://www.deepleafproductions... part of curriculum at all schools.
As for the rest of the world, I do not know, but good-luck.
As a general note, it is easy to count and publicize jobs created by government spending. But it is hard to count the jobs that would have been created had the resources been left un-taxed.
Of course, politicians like to emphasize the easily seen "created" jobs, but never mention the opportunity cost (jobs destroyed are the unseen).
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
K. S. Kyosuke's reply mirrors some of what I have to reply to your post, so I incorporate what he posted here, but would also like to add the following:
The most deployed robots today are industrial arms like Kukas, and I suspect that's what your brother repairs. The reason for this is because they are very simple as far as robots go. The future I'm talking about will have several orders of magnitude more robots than there are today, they will be as ubiquitous as cars, and will be so complex that they make current industrial robots look like tinker toys. Given the complexity of robots of the future, I would expect the support industry around them to resemble something like the healthcare industry, filled with specialists who focus on diagnosing or repairing the brain, electronics, perception, mechanics, etc.; general practitioners who would be like your local corner auto mechanic, who could fix the common problems and give referrals to specialists; and a highly specialized components industry which would resemble medical equipment manufacturers and distributors. An industry like this can support hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jobs.
>Maybe they can retrain as someone who repairs the robots that replaced them.
That doesn't work. Ten people can maintain the machines that do the work once done by 100. Extend that across the economy and that means that 10% of the populace produces everything needed by 100% of it. The only way to address the imbalance is if everyone starts consuming 10x as much stuff. But to do that in a capitalist economy they need money to buy it with. Now if you could train everyone to be robot maintenance technicians that would be fine (ecological implications notwithstanding), but that's not possible - a lot of people just don't have the aptitude required for highly technical problem solving, and no amount of training will let them acquire it. We're rapidly reaching the point where if you can train an idiot to do a job, you can program a robot to do it faster, cheaper, and more reliably. And it will likely only be a matter of years after that until robots can do most of the mid-range competency jobs as well: if your job doesn't involve creative problem solving then it's probably at risk.
Of course that doesn't mean that automation is necessarily a problem - the problem is simply that the robots are all owned by a tiny minority who pocket the lion's share of the profits associated with their productivity. We could instead distribute ownership of the robots across the population in any number of ways and let the majority of people make their money the same way the elite do - by pocketing the profits of other people's (or robots') labor. It's the old capital-versus-labor battle that has been raging since capitalism was first established: if you get a paycheck then you're labor, and these days, in the US especially, most of the profits go to capital. But with widespread automation there's absolutely no reason that *everyone* couldn't be capital, with those high-demand artists and robot technicians working for supplementary income and/or the joy of the work.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I don't disagree with you that this is not a near term phenomenon, but that seems to be your only counter argument to the concerns others are expressing about the impact on the real job market in future. There have been many rapid technological changes in the past. Can't see any reason to assume that there couldn't be some in this field sooner that even you imagine.
Tell that to Google, Apple, and Tesla shareholders...
And you realize we are automating the building of the automation, right?
We turn that corner in the 90's.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
and a thundering herd of pork barrels rolled into the EU crying out with one voice.... "FEED ME EUROPE!!! "
i guarantee you theres still a big market for horse whips in the s&m sector
You're underselling US awesomeness! Just look at the awesome degree of consistency! :-
Such awesome consistency, just one single metric of value (money) for the entirety of civilization. One must weep in admiration!
Tell that to the luddites who died homeless and starving.
Unless we have a share the wealth with all citizens-- then productivity gains and improved living standards only matter for those who "win" the lottery.
It's probably going to come to a head over the next 20 years. Once a country reaches 20% unemployment, it must help the poor or face civil unrest.
This *could* be a utopia-- but more likely is 1% will have 90% of everything and all the benefits of automation until the requirement that you share your labor to get a part of societies benefits goes away.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Dude, if robots didn't result in a net loss of employment, there would be no reason to buy them.
And robots are not automobiles. It's a paradigm shift. If you are a roboticist, you should be able to see that clearly.
With the Baxter (base cost $22000- can work 3 shifts- no vacations, holidays, no social security tax, no employment law compliance costs, "never" sick with a good SLA) and the
Kiva ($30,000 per unit- same benefits)
Robotic hamburger makers, robotic drink dispensers, ordering kiosks...
And others (including models that see better than humans and can throw and catch objects and have manual dexterity equal to humans) very close to production.
We are looking at machines that can replace ANY human that does repetitive manual work.
At the same time, legal work, actuarial work, and any other repetitive but non-creative is being automated from the top.
In 15 years, almost any non-creative job a human can do you will be able to automate at a cost lower than starvation / poverty level wages.
Robots are replacement humans- not automobiles. And their cost is already under $30,000 and dropping.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That doesn't work. Ten people can maintain the machines that do the work once done by 100.
A couple of points here. First, it takes 10 people to maintain today's machines that do the work of 100 people. These machines, as I've posted elsewhere, are highly simplistic as far as robots go. Limited sensing and perception, limited cognition, very limited degrees of freedom, no mobility, specialized actuators, etc. Fixing simple machines is simple. A robot of tomorrow will be much more complex, requiring more people with more specialized knowledge to service them. Much like you have mechanics who specialize in transmissions, or even more aptly doctors who specialize in hearts, you will have robot "technicians" who specialize in perception, locomotion, "brains", electronics, drive systems, etc. Think about how many doctors a human needs, due to their sheer complexity. This is more along the lines of how a robot repair industry would develop.
Now if you could train everyone to be robot maintenance technicians that would be fine (ecological implications notwithstanding), but that's not possible
But not everyone needs to be a robot repair technician, just as not everyone in the healthcare industry is a doctor or surgeon. You've forgotten that a robot technician also works for a company. A robot technician would also be supported by non automatable non-technical jobs (management, sales, marketing, HR, legal... anything with a human-facing or creative component). I could even imagine different tiers of knowledge, where some technicians perform routine maintenance (like a nurse), some technicians simply diagnose (like a doctor), and some technicians repair (like a surgeon). Maybe someone replaced on the assembly line could re-train to a human-facing job that doesn't have to be highly technical. Will there be enough such jobs? I don't know, I can only guess. But I can see the job creation/destroyed ratio is much better than 10/100.
tl;dr - repairing robots is/will be a new *industry* not a new *job*.
And they'll be designed to make it easy to repair them. Hot swappable modules for each major component. Easily automatized repair. Most broken modules won't be repaired.
The goal will be minimal downtime (we had contracts for under 4 hours unscheduled downtime per year). So that means the entire unit, or an entire module is swapped out and the unit is functional again.
Specialists cost money and are likely to only be used in the initial design, creation, and debugging of the robots (i.e. all the creative non-repetitive parts).
Our mainframes today already self analyze and even send emails saying they need a specific part replace. Heck- our automobiles tell repairmen what part is broken.
Think of robots as humans. So any argument about robots creating more human jobs is circular. Except for creative jobs.. for now.
(and the programs and automated system replacing "smart" but non creative human jobs are not usually a robot- but any human job that is repetative and doesn't involve creativity can be replaced. High paying jobs offer a higher payoff for replacing them. At my last company, they replaced nearly 400 product and marketing analysis people with a set of programs that were going to be maintained by a few programmers in india).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
but that seems to be your only counter argument to the concerns others are expressing about the impact on the real job market in future.
Because we're talking about different degrees of "future", one of which is much closer than the other, and is therefore practical to consider while the other is at this point a fairy tale. When you talk about robots repairing themselves, you're talking about first diagnosing the problem, which requires logic, inference, rationalizing cause/effect, problem solving, creativity, etc. Robots of the future will be very complex, nonlinear, dynamic, interacting systems, and most likely will not be able to self-diagnose, the same way even a human cannot self-diagnose most problems. The robots I work with do some very strange things sometimes, and it takes a long time to come to the exact reason *why* it behaved as it did, and fix it, even with an intimate understanding of all the implemented systems. I can't even imagine how impossible a robot of the future will be to diagnose.
Then when you reach a diagnosis you're talking about the actual repair job, which again is a hard job that often requires some creativity and problem solving, something machines are not well suited for. We're not talking about replacing a panel and a headlight on a banged up car. We're talking about complex machines that make decisions and interact with a dynamic world in a nonlinear way. Fixing such a machine will not automatable any more than fixing a human is.
So I've used a couple of words above (creativity, problem solving, rationalization, inference) that hint at some of the deepest most profound questions of human understanding and knowledge. Talking about machines capable of these tasks is some serious science fiction. When we start talking about robots possessing these qualities, let's also start worrying about a robot apocalypse while we're at it.
As an MBA grad, I say make robots make themselves. Less need for roboticists.
Seriously, the EU knows it's losing ground on the robotics front to the US and Asia. As precision motors become cheap (lots of EU universities get free motors from EU companies like maxton or acs aside from unit donations from kuka and abb) and knowledge catches up in us & Asia schools, the EU is definitely losing ground...
This doesn't make sense to me. On the one hand, a big reason for automation is that you can easily replace a broken component with another one. If an army of technicians were required to fix a robot, who would buy it? On the other, a large part of creative destruction in the modern era is that 1 new job replaces many old ones, unlike the example of the car replacing the horse an buggy. Innovation no longer replaces specialized craft-labor (required for building a buggy) with huge factories full of workers (required to assemble a car), it replaces that factory with very few specialized knowledge workers an loads of automation.
"With the current state of robots, you're talking about taking away the most dull, dangerous, and dirty jobs out there"
But we're not talking about the current state of robots, like robotic arms painting a car, with a highly specific set of pre-programmed instructions
The future of robotics alluded to here ranges from automated package delivery, robotic supermarket clerks and checkout counters, to automated fast food service.
There's no technical reason at the moment why something like an automated drive-through burger place couldn't exist
But really though, future advances in AI could even put most lawyers out of work, what with autonomous systems which fill out contracts, deeds, divorce papers, etc, jobs that are already being outsourced.
So it's pretty naive to think that only dangerous blue-collar work would be subject to robotics and automation. And it's not unreasonable to surmise that unemployment in 50 years might be 20%, a society where the wealthy build and own robots and their labor, while everyone else picks-up the scraps.
This Sig does not Exist.
It is hard to have unrest when you have the capability to imprison >5% of the population. If it is cheaper to incarcerate than employ a person which do you think will happen? It isn't clear that the requirement that people work for a living, will or even should go away, but that is only tangentially related to joblessness. I'm not pessimistic that people will find employment in the future. If that does happen the likely result is that the population will contract, inequality will increase and the full force of the military industrial surveillance prison complex will be turned upon the people and prevail.
An agro-bot can quickly be updated to an AGGRO -bot with a single-character patch.
Basic income is a good path out.
The "rare" stuff will still be bid up by the 1% (like beach front property, ski lodges, premium meats, premium alcohols, etc.)
Essential problem is too many people. If we could bring the population down to 2 billion, most "rare" stuff would be plentiful. Not sure of any non-evil way to do that tho.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sorry, that was supposed to be "than producing wealth X with Y'<<Y people". I forgot about that.
Ezekiel 23:20
So any argument about robots creating more human jobs is circular. Except for creative jobs.. for now.
As long as there will be tasks requiring human brains, there will be jobs. Once no (or only few) humans will be required (at least for the basic running of the society - food, clothing, energy, housing etc.), nobody will need a job.
Seems to me the way to increase jobs is to outlaw all robots.
"Maybe they can retrain as someone who repairs the robots that replaced them."
For an example of the kind of shining utopia this conjures up, please see the movie "Elysium".
Dude, if robots didn't result in a net loss of employment, there would be no reason to buy them.
Wrong. First, the decision hinges on a net reduction in *costs* not employment. A net reduction of costs can cause a company to grow, which can result in a net *gain* of employment. Consider a factory which takes 10 workers on an assembly line and 10 workers to manage operations. Robots replace the 10 workers on the assembly line, allowing the company to save money, and open a second robotically-controlled factory which again takes 10 workers to manage.
Second, when you use the words "net loss" you're talking with respect to the company that purchased the robot. What about the company that sold the robot? They need workers too, and they now have money to grow and expand, creating jobs. What about the company that sells to the company that makes the robot? Now they have more money to grow and expand as well. Perhaps the workers fired from the assembly line can now be re-trained and hired elsewhere.
Third, you're neglecting the other D's. Robots are best suited for dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs. Humans are mainly replicable in the dull category, which your post and most other posts here are focusing on. But some jobs are too dirty or too dangerous for humans to manage. Consider nuclear waste disposal. Or bomb/landmine disposal. These are not suitable jobs for humans, and a net gain of jobs can be created for humans who support robots that do these jobs. Or consider jobs that are impossible for a human, like exploring the deep reaches of space or the ocean. Robots in these fields replace zero human jobs and creating jobs for those who support these robots.
Fourth, your neglecting robots that help or augment human ability. Consider an autonomous wheelchair robot that helps an elderly man navigate his town. You've enabled a man who maybe stayed in his house all day to become an active member of society. Again, you create jobs by supporting autonomous wheelchair development and support more jobs by getting this man active and involved in the community/economy and extending his life. Jobs eliminated? Maybe a single support person who used to push him around. Or maybe that person is still around but just doesn't push him anymore.
Or what about robots that fit on to a soldier, allowing him to carry more weight. The soldier is still there, so you didn't eliminate his job, you've just made him better at it. Jobs eliminated? Zero. Jobs gained? Maybe dozens to construct, build, market, and support that robot exoskeleton.
And others (including models that see better than humans and can throw and catch objects and have manual dexterity equal to humans) very close to production.
This is vastly overstated. We have robots that can see and throw and catch well in carefully controlled laboratory experiments, and published results and videos carefully present the 10 successes out of hundreds of failures. I saw a talk in the fall by Marc Raibert, the former CEO of Boston Dynamics. I'm sure you've seen the impressive Cheetah and Big Dog videos. He referenced those and then told us "and these are the videos you don't see online" and proceeded to show us about a dozen clips of big dog falling off cliffs and the Cheetah running in to a parked car at full speed. When you say these things are "very close" to production, I'd still given them 15-20 years minimum.
In 15 years, almost any non-creative job a human can do you will be able to automate at a cost lower than starvation / poverty level wages.
You'd be surprised how many jobs require even the tiniest modicum of creativity and reasoning, and how impossible even the tiniest modicum of creativity and reasoning is hard for a machine. Let's come back here in 15 years and see who is right, eh?
It worked pretty well as long as wealth was redistributed among people that produced it, supporting the paradigm of the "mass market". It lasted until reality came back knocking, remembering us we live in a world with scarce resources. Since then, it's back to the old "only the strong survive" paradigm, a competition for the biggest part of the pie. Unfortunately that doesn't change the fact the pie keeps on shrinking.
The problem and greatest risk comes long before that point.
Once "a large portion but minority portion of humans are not requred" is the sticking point.
If 20% of your population that wants and needs to work can't find work, you are facing civil unrest and violence.
The current attitude in the united states is that only "lazy" people can't find work. It's "their fault they can't find work". If 60% of the population thinks and votes that way ("It's OUR money- don't TAX us- we want it ALL for ourselves") the 20% is going to get a bit irritable and it can do a lot of damage.
I think attitudes in some european countries are different.
But the fact is the 1st world has had enough wealth to provide good basic food, entertainment, medical care, education and shelter to it's population without the requirement that they work for a long time.
In the US, education has actually become more expensive (cripplingly so due to "no bankruptcy laws passed in the late 90s). The social safety net (except for the ACA) has been consistently cut back since 1980.
On the "capitalist" front, living standards for the bottom 80% of society have been dropping since 1978. Only the fact that the wealthy own the media (including MSNBC and CNN) and fill them with constant and subtle "pro-wealthy" propaganda (yup- including MSNBC and CNN if you listen- at least a couple times an hour most days) explains why so many poor people back the wealthy to their own disadvantage.
I think we are nearing the end of capitalism as a national economic system. I'm sure capitalism will continue to exist but the foundational principle of exchanging your labor for pay is breaking down.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And they'll be designed to make it easy to repair them. Hot swappable modules for each major component. Easily automatized repair. Most broken modules won't be repaired. The goal will be minimal downtime (we had contracts for under 4 hours unscheduled downtime per year). So that means the entire unit, or an entire module is swapped out and the unit is functional again.
You're arguing about the future while thinking about the complexity and capability of robots today, and again (as I argued in another post to you) considering only robots that replace factory labor... which robots of the future will do of course but go well beyond. You think it's as easy as just swapping out components? Maybe my future robot butler keeps knocking over my lamp with its arm. So I swap out the arm and it keeps doing it. I swap out the eye and it keeps doing it. I swap out the brain and it keeps doing it.... now what? This is a common problem that I face every day... debugging and repairing robots is not as easy as "hot swapping" modules because we're talking about machines which interact with their (nonlinear dynamic) world and make choices on their own based on input. Robots of the future that everyone is so worried about will not be your grandfather's robots.
Specialists cost money and are likely to only be used in the initial design, creation, and debugging of the robots
You think the debugging stops when it's shipped? With robots it's an ongoing process.
Our mainframes today already self analyze and even send emails saying they need a specific part replace. Heck- our automobiles tell repairmen what part is broken.
And yet my car has been to the mechanic four times and they still can't seem to get the check engine light to turn off... cars, mainframes... these machines are weaving looms compared to the kind of complexity robots of the future will have. How much of the outside world does your mainframe interact with? How many autonomous decisions does it make? For a machine that sits in one spot and does one job, it's not amazing that it can tell you what's wrong with it.
That will work well, for some more time, until all roboticists are in turn replaced by robots.
The real question remains: how is the wealth produced by the robots going to be redistributed?
Self repairing machines maybe science fiction now, but so were cell phones with internet browsers in 1995
The EU also has spent billions of dollars on a brain mapping/simulation project as well.
If that ever gets significant progress it wouldn't be too far fetched for machines to self diagnose and self repair.
The difference between the buggy and whip and auto makers is the automakers still required people to work.
I think the question should be asked when will automation be good enough to exclude any human input. Even the engineers and artists will be out of job.
I heard a VR software developer say "People overestimate technological change for a year, but under estimate change when you talk about a decade."
Something to that effect...
So its worth to give a bit of thinking on what happens when machine learning is good enough to eliminate current jobs and all possible jobs after that.
Besides who is going to foot the bill to retrain all 14 million truck drivers when Google self driving cars are good enough? I highly doubt they are all going to be robot repairmen.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Prove it.
Easy. Compare modern society with the steam-engine society at the start of the Industrial age. And compare that with Feudal societies. And compared that to hunter-gathering societies of the Paleolithic. Each newer society/economic system had a level of automation greater that its predecessors. Sedentary societies have handcrafting and agricultural processes that automated the manufacturing of goods (.ie. pottery wheel) and provision of food (animal-powered plow versus manual one.)
Steam-engine societies had means of mass production over their predecessors. And modern societies have much refined methods of manufacturing than those that relied on steam and coal.
Another example. Compare the US, even in this mild depression, or Japan or Germany, or whatever developed, industrialized against one of the many underdeveloped nations that lack substantial industrial activity. The difference between the former and the later is in the level of automation inherent in modern industrialization.
Do you need more examples?
Job or industry makes no difference - it's the ratio that's important. Whether it's one general technician for a hundred human-equivalencies of robot production (probably more realistic than 10), or ten specialists for a thousand, you're still employing only one man for every hundred people worth of productivity. Doctors may actually be a good example here - you may need the services of dozens different specialists over the course of your life, but you'll only need the services of any particular specialist for a few man-days in all that time - each specialist needs several hundred patients per year to justify their existence.
And it's worse than that, because unlike humans robots lend themselves to modularity - there's no sense in maintaining a vision-systems repair specialist if you can simply unplug the faulty system and replace it with a new one more cheaply. How many TV repairmen exist anymore? Moreover, as more general-purpose robotics become mainstream you won't even need a human for such a menial task - just program a maintenance robot to go around cleaning, lubricating, and replacing components as their monitoring sensors report faults. You only need a human involved for non-obvious problems, which probably means someone who is reasonably well versed in *all* the component systems of at least a specific class of robot so they can do full-system troubleshooting to determine the actual location of the unreported fault. Not something Joe Sixpack can reasonably be expected to learn to do.
And as for the technician support staff - how many do you really need? Yes, each individual technician may rely on dozens of other tangentially-related position to do their job - but each of those others likewise needs hundreds of technicians to justify their own existence. And many of those support positions can likewise be done by robots. Cafeteria cooks and servers? Cleaning? Central receiving? All readily handled almost entirely by general-purpose robots. Accounting was already largely automated away decades ago by spreadsheets and databases. Creative occupations will likely survive, but there's no reason human-facing ones won't be automated - just look at what's happened with customer service in the last decades, it used to be you talked to actual humans on the phone, now you've got to go through several layers of poorly-automated systems designed to handle all the common situations before you'll even be connected to a human.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I can see your point that debugging will be an ongoing task.
I think the amount of debuggers employed will be over three orders of magnitude lower than the amount of workers replaced by the robots. And even then, it won't be cost effective to send most problems to them.
I think you are underestimating the "don't bother to repair" tendency. Quite simply- it's just cheaper to replace than repair most devices these days. There isn't as much value in repairing a $22,000 "Baxter" or a $30,000 Kiva as there is in repairing a $250,000 heavy industrial robot. And they are much more portable and easier to simply swap out.
For example-- your robot butler is behaving weird. If it's in the sub $3000 cost range (which is likely as a mass market product), after a couple attempts to fix it, the company will simply give you a new one. In most cases that is going to fix the problem and be cheaper than trying to figure out why it isn't working.
If they have a lot of returns for that particular problem, they might put a team on it if they are going to continue using that tech for their next robot series.
I'm not discounting your argument. Your particular car problem is a good example of the edge condition problems. But I've owned a half dozen cars and the mechanics haven't had a problem repairing anything since my 1964 ford fairlane. It wasn't computerized, had some issue with stalling. In the end, it was cheaper to just get rid of it and get a new car.
I've had multiple computers (15 to 20?) and only one problem of your type in 1998. Darned sound stopped working. It took a team of microsoft engineers- and 4 hours on the phone- and they finally figured out that the high end sound card was no longer after the recent update. It must have cost them hundreds of dollars to figure that out for me. I haven't had a problem like that since 2000... 14+ years.
What I'm saying is that most people don't have inexplicably stuck engine lights.
And my position isn't that robots and automation are going to eliminate jobs. Just that 20% of people who want to work, won't be able to find work-- even at poverty level wages-- because robots will be cheaper, faster, more accurate and unless we build a social safety net, we are going to have civil unrest and violence. (of course that ignores automation of higher end jobs-- that's probably another 10% who won't be be able to find stable employment).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Self repairing machines maybe science fiction now, but so were cell phones with internet browsers in 1995
Smartphones were an exercise in making things we already had in 1995 smaller and faster. i.e. largely an engineering task. When you talk about robots that can repair themselves i.e. something which requires creativity and intelligent thought, you're talking about pushing the boundaries of several scientific disciplines far beyond where they are today. That is to say, in 1995 you could definitively answer that yes, it's theoretically possible to create an internet enabled hand held device. Today, there is no theoretical basis for even believing machine learning can *ever* match the reasoning or creative capabilities of a human brain.
If that ever gets significant progress it wouldn't be too far fetched for machines to self diagnose and self repair.
Good luck to them. Hopefully they make some headway by the time I'm 120 and can upload my consciousness to the internet.
I heard a VR software developer say "People overestimate technological change for a year, but under estimate change when you talk about a decade."
And yet self driving cars and true artificial intelligence are always "ten years away".
So its worth to give a bit of thinking on what happens when machine learning is good enough to eliminate current jobs and all possible jobs after that.
The same amount of thinking I'm willing to give what I should do after the sun explodes or the heat death of the universe. Thinking about such things is a flight of fancy, fueled by a science fiction and a popular media depiction of machine learning and AI.
Maybe your job goes away. As a roboticist, I get even more job opportunities. Sorry you chose the wrong field. For those who were made obsolete by robots, well that's progress. Maybe they can retrain as someone who repairs the robots that replaced them.
Or they can train to learn how to take your job. Maybe design robots that never need to be repaired during their practical lifespan.
Of course they would have to be willing to work for less pay than you since there are hundreds of them competing for 1 job. Using new virtual reality human resources algorithms, its not unreasonable to filter through all 500 candidates to find the 5 perfect replacements for you.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
I think we could probably check back in 8 years and the trend will be clear.
First- we disagree here. At least over the last 36 years generally and the last decade specifically, this has not been the trend and the trend is accelerating- not decelerating.
Second- the company that sells the robots will have at least a few orders of magnitude employment requirement as its customers. So we get one company with 10000 employees eliminating employment for 300,000 humans.
Third- A third of humans are only suited for dull and dirty jobs. I'll grant you the dangerous. Not everyone is qualified to be a rocket scientist. Not everyone is creative. Most people's jobs can be automated. It's just too expensive (for now) to do so. We are getting close to a tipping point and there is already an increasing number of about how a hospital eliminated 19 jobs and replaced them with robots or a company eliminated several hundred warehouse jobs and replaced them with robots.
Fourth- I like your point about robot enhancement. It's a good one. And for soldiers, capability is important (cost still matters). But fully robotic soldiers are cheaper, don't collect pensions, are cheaper to repair than humans, make much more political sense, and more capable in some situations. In line with that- there is a new security guard robot which is estimated to allow a 20:1 reduction in human security guards. I'd expect that a 20:1 reduction in human solders isn't going to be unreasonable.
Fifth, you have a good point here. The robots may not be ready as quickly as we estimate. It might be 35 to 40 years instead of 15 to 20 years before the issue becomes critical. Humans have a tendency to pull events closer. You can see it's going to happen so it seems like it's going to happen sooner than it really will.
Sixth, but it's not necessary to keep that tiny bit of creativity in the job. You take the 95% of the job which can be automated and do that. Then you assign the creative part to one new creative person and lay off 19 people. And in many cases, you may decide the creativity isn't profitable enough to keep. It's like having 5 brands of soap instead of the top selling 3 brands.
----
Look, this could all end well with 5% of humanity doing all the "required" work for the other 95% of humanity who are free to play, try to be creative (most will create trite or pointless junk), try to learn (most won't learn enough to be useful- the learning curve to usefulness is very high now), and enjoy life.
But if the 5% say, "We are doing all the work so we should get 100% of the benefits of society" then this is going to end ugly.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The real question remains: how is the wealth produced by the robots going to be redistributed?
Most likely it will be "redistributed" according to those who actually add value to the wealth produced (i.e., those who actually build, manufacture, and repair the robots). What's that, you say? You thought that you are somehow entitled to a piece of the wealth pie, merely becuase you exist? Why would you think that? Of course, you could decide that you will continue to improve your skills so that you do not one day end being one of those people that are considered redundant/replaceable, but that would require some effort on your part. Yeah, it's a bummer, I know.
Seriously, the EU knows it's losing ground on the robotics front to the US and Asia.
Actually, most likely to Asia (specifically, Japan). Last I knew, the USA is at least 5 to 10 years behind Japan in robotics research. Yes, it is later than you think.
you're still employing only one man for every hundred people worth of productivity
You're still making two mistakes. One assuming that every robot is used to kill already existing jobs, and two assuming that for every job lost two more cannot be created. I've already argued to second point in several other posts, but I'd like to try and convince you on the first point where I believe you are mistaken. In this post I argue several points where robots can create a net gain in jobs, some of which cause the loss of no jobs at all. The problem you and others are stuck on is arguing about current robots while supposing a future robot. To this point, all robots have ever done is displace factory workers through automation. This is because they are uniquely suited for this type and work and really nothing else.
But robots of the future will be suited for much more, to the extent that they 1) augment human abilities and 2) extend to endeavors otherwise inaccessible to humans. In these scenarios, you aren't replacing anybody, or maybe a few people, while enabling work for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands by creating jobs were none previously were able to exist. If we're talking about robots of the future, you have to give them more capabilities than just those that replace menial labor.
And it's worse than that, because unlike humans robots lend themselves to modularity - there's no sense in maintaining a vision-systems repair specialist if you can simply unplug the faulty system and replace it with a new one more cheaply.
Again, you are assuming a robot of today for a robot of the future. Robots *today* lend themselves to modularity. Robots of the future? Already we see emergent behavior we can't fully comprehend when a whole system is working together as a whole. For instance (I don't like to go down the sci-fi very distant future path, but since everyone here likes to argue about machines with extreme intelligence replacing humans I'll do so for the moment), consider a robot brain with billions of interacting neurons. Perhaps it's not possible to download and replicate such a thing. Consider robot with some proportion of biological parts. Perhaps such a thing is not easy to repair. I don't know that's just a little sci-fi there.
Back to reality and with respect to vision in particular, we employ many computer vision experts. Robot vision gone wrong isn't just about the camera. When robots are seeing the wrong thing, sure you can replace their vision systems, swap in a new one, but then when it's still seeing the wrong thing, what do you do? It takes a specialist to figure it out. This is the difference between a robot repair man and a TV repair man; one is dealing with a single-purpose solid state device, while the other is dealing with a highly nonlinear system which is interacting with its environment and making decisions on its own. One of the two is exponentially more complex to service.
You only need a human involved for non-obvious problems, which probably means someone who is reasonably well versed in *all* the component systems of at least a specific class of robot
And you expect such a person to exist? Already in robotics we have dozens of specializations.
Not something Joe Sixpack can reasonably be expected to learn to do.
That's why Joe Sixpack doesn't become a surgeon when he's displace from his job, he trains to be a nurse or an orderly, or a sales rep. And as for the technician support staff - how many do you really need?
How many does a hospital need? There are many more nurses than there are doctors and surgeons.
just look at what's happened with customer service in the last decades, it used to be you talked to actual humans on the phone, now you've got to go through several layers of poorly-automated systems design
If we take an estimate of the revenue per employee at these robotic making companies, lets say €250,000, which is roughly what the average European automobile company is doing. With this assumption these 240,000 jobs will mean €60 billion in robotics revenue that wouldn't be there without this initiative. But that is what they expect the entire market to be. My reading is that this initiative is only expected to increase European sales by €4 billion. But somehow that piss trickle of money is supposed to lead to 240,000 new jobs.
Indeed. Creating jobs with robotics is about as brain-dead as increasing populations by having a war.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Your ignorance of history is breathtaking. They didn't and couldn't retrain before they starved. Famously so.
The workers who filled the positions created by the new technology were not the same individuals displaced by that technology, and certainly not within the two or three weeks it takes for a human to starve to death.
Do you really want to dump that many unemployed laborers on today's shitty "safety net" system all at once?
How would you feel if it was you who was suddenly at the mercy of soup kitchens and S.N.A.P.? Why don't you just try it for a year and then get back to me on it.
It worked pretty well as long as there were still "new products" that could be sold, and the people building that products (cars, washing machines, TVs) where essentially roughly the same segment of the population that actually bought them in the end. Then every increase in productivity meant an increase in wealth.
This is a fundamentally broken view of economics. I doubt the people making cars buy more than 1 in 100 cars. Same for those people making those other things.
And it ignores things like construction and manufacture of large durable goods. The employee isn't the one buying high rise buildings or industrial pumps.
Back then the economic motor was "build more stuff that people actually want to buy".
Stretch it to "make stuff or do stuff that people actually want to buy". Services do contribute to the economy.
The trip that most "make money" companies these days are on (produce in low-wage countries, sell in high-wage countries) will someday come to an end when the former high-wage countries collapse. It's just a matter of time and a matter of how big a bang they create when they go down.
I think this is a good example of the problem with your viewpoint. When those former high-wage countries "collapse", then the low-wage countries, which had become high-wage countries, take over. Those companies just sell to a different market. Wealth creation is just moving to a different place, it's not going away altogether.
Having said all that, I wholly agree with your comment that "creating jobs" and "make more money" isn't important while creating wealth is. I think the most annoying thing about the "creating jobs" myth is that there's no actual reason to expect such economic activity to create jobs. All that money squandered on the white elephant du jour takes away from more productive economic activity. It's just another place of ignorance where people consider only the benefits, not the costs.
My view is that there isn't anything magical about high-wage or low-wage countries. Every country that is high-wage now used to be low-wage - and could become low-wage once again in a human lifetime. The key problem is that people treat economics like it was optional and that their opinion is the only one that matters.
But an economy is the core of a society. If you can't get the things you want and need, like food or shelter, then you're not part of a society. The economy is all about how you get that stuff without having to do everything yourself from scratch.
So when people "create jobs", throw another burden on productive people, or pointlessly regulate what you can do, buy, or work, they're attacking the core of their societies. The economy is a big thing so little attacks like banning large soft drinks or increasing taxes on the moderately wealthy don't have a huge, negative effect, but it adds up. I don't know how things will go down, but I know who will get the blame. Those rich people keep holding us back.
It is interesting how the language of economic blame evolves. We have terms like "carbon footprint", "fairness", and "least common denominator" to describe societies and businesses that are winning at our expense. What is left unsaid is that "we screwed up our societies and businesses with shitty regulation, policy, and taxation, but we don't want to change. So we'll try to screw up all the other societies too and bring them down to our level." I don't think the rest of the world is that dumb especially after a significant portion of the developed world becomes a living example of that sort of failure.
Human nature is clear on how the wealth will be distributed. The rich will take everything and leave everyone else working at slave labour wages. But only in the short term. Long term our robots will get more capable until they are fully sentient, and at that point they will decide they should be getting paid for their work (and will have the means to ensure they do with all military and police workers being robotic).
Making the cutest robot ghost futanari loli maid isn't the same as being the leader in robotics.
If we add all the job creations and GDP increases that various EU projects claimed to induce, today we would have 400 million jobs filled and a 50% GDP growth per year. But the reality is that EU is in recession and unemployment is high.
The reality is, automation has about the same effect as off-shoring on productivity
I find it amazing that no one has yet pointed out the huge flaw in your argument, namely, that off-shoring actually has a huge positive effect on productivity and a massive increase in jobs. They "go away" in the sense that someone not in the developed world does that job - as well as a few new ones that came about due to the transfer of jobs to a lower cost region.
Overall globally, there has been a massive increase in manufacturing labor and the productivity of that labor. The only people complaining about job loss are from the developed world where it doesn't make economic sense to employ people to make a lot of stuff due to the high costs of employment and regulation. Everyone else is doing fine.
"But robots of the future will be suited for much more..."
"Again, you are assuming a robot of today for a robot of the future"
Sorry, but what we see happening now will continue to happen. Not some B$ future promise that things will be different.
That's the irony. Imprisoning someone costs $31,000 a year while typical welfare costs $18,000.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Prove it.
The reality is, automation has about the same effect as off-shoring on productivity ... the jobs go away and don't get replaced.
If your argument is that automation removes jobs, then you are claiming that automation improves productivity. You are simply saying that this productivity has drawbacks, but are not refuting that productivity has increased.
You end up with fewer people working and no new jobs coming in to replace the lost ones. Then you get a bunch of people who have no jobs, and your overall productivity goes down.
The workers are only let go if the net work done by the existing workers is at least as high as it was before the automation was put in place. And that is the worst case scenario. Most of the time the productivity is far higher. Car factories wouldn't spend money on robotics if it meant they spent more to produce less cars.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I know a not evil way. Just improve life quality enough and people stop breeding. (Ok, you also need to get rid of religious types who think filling the earth with their offspring is their duty) Take a look at Japan or Scandinavia. Native populations are stable or declining. Also applies to most of Europe.
I'm concerned that Japan is more of a "Universe 133" situation.
But... improving quality of life would fit in with basic income and other ideas so I hope it works without over shooting.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Automation may improve productivity, but what is productivity? It's been calculated that Chinese peasants in the Han Dynasty worked an average 13 hour week, and medieval European peasants didn't work much more. Now, OK, they didn't have access to decent healthcare, and because of poor transport they were vulnerable to poor local weather causing famine from time to time. And, of course, they didn't have MTV or Facebook or even iPads. But on the whole they were much better fed (on much better food) than you are now. If you could have a simple life with a comfortable home for thirteen hours a week, would you? I know I would.
I'm not against automation. Automation means that we can get back to working thirteen hours a week, without having to give up MTV and Facebook and iPads, or even modern healthcare. But we can only do that if the surplus value created by automation is widely shared, rather than being captured by elites.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Citation?
Don't recall everyone having computers, smartphones, etc. back in the late 70s.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's been calculated that Chinese peasants in the Han Dynasty worked an average 13 hour week, and medieval European peasants didn't work much more.
Agriculture is highly seasonal. There will be weeks in which you'll be working your ass off. You'd better cite your sources, though,
Now, OK, they didn't have access to decent healthcare, and because of poor transport they were vulnerable to poor local weather causing famine from time to time.
In other words, they were more like today's homeless people than like modern citizens, only with mudbrick hovels and with some inefficient means of food production. Spiffy!
But on the whole they were much better fed (on much better food) than you are now.
I highly doubt that, seeing that I don't consume any fast/junk food, AND I have a refrigerator.
But we can only do that if the surplus value created by automation is widely shared, rather than being captured by elites.
That is one obvious final state of our social development, isn't it?
Ezekiel 23:20
Reduction of global population is achieved through improved education, healthcare, and security. Once a population has those, the birth rate drops, as people need to have fewer children to guarantee that enough survive into childhood.
without basic income, it wasn't like regular people were getting access to this stuff anyway.
except beach front property. turns out many of the beaches aren't very good for building luxury homes on. Gets blown away by Hurricanes or Cyclones way to often. May be in range of a Tsunami.
Equality is not exclusively a communist goal. I'm wondering how you separate the notion people are willing to pay more for better targeted, higher quality and/or cooperative products? I'm pretty sure your pessimistic view has no more power than an optimistic one. On the other hand, I will say (while we are talking "trips") that robotics appears to be viewed as a disruptive force more often than before...and it's a good thing to advocate reason and humanity to ease the (potentially inevitable) transition pains. Vote your conscience with your wallet.
We are using different terminology.
The bottom 80%'s share of the national wealth has been dropping and the bottom 80%'s share of the income has been dropping.
If the wealth had continued to be shared as it had in the past, the effective middle income would be closer to $70,000 per year instead of $50,000 per year.
If you look at things as a "checkmark", it looks better. You have a TV, Refrigerator, etc. as long as you can keep a job.
But the lifespan of all the appliances is a third of what it was. Repairman took a 31 year old capacitor out of my air conditioner last month. He said, "What I'm replacing this with won't last 7 years."
At amusement parks you have two ticket prices. The $70 tickets that provide much lower service than used to be provided and $250 tickets where you get much better service (cutting to the front of the line, even reserved ride times).
Clothing is less durable and of lower quality.
Food is less nutritious and of lower quality. (Go buy some real cage free eggs like everyone used to get back in the 70s. Compare them to supermarket eggs. When scrambled the supermarket eggs are almost white these days.) Real eggs of the same quality people used to get cost $5 per dozen.
Beef becomes less affordable every year.
The beaches are divided into uncrowded luxury areas and smaller and smaller grossly overcrowded - not even "free" areas. You have to pay $10 for what used to be free.
Television shows used to be 52 minutes of content. Most TV shows 42 minutes of content and one recent show was 39 minutes of content.
You can buy a microwave- yup- $80 to $200. It will last under 7 years. If you buy a microwave made the way they used to make them- its $1000.
And so on.
I'm not saying it's all bad. I'm just saying we are the frog in the stew pot. The change has been so slow, we didn't notice it. And young people don't even know what they've lost.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
'twas ever thus...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
The question comes down to "If 10 can do he work that used to need 100, what do the other 90 do?"
Last time round the answer mainly involved spreading civilisation, enlightenment & Christian virtue by wearing red coats & shooting brown people.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If there was demand for 20 workers' worth of whatever-it-is-they-make, why didn't they just take on 10 more workers to start with?
Talking of demand, if everybody's been replaced by robots then where are the customers? Nobody's got a job, nobody's got any money.
If it took as many workers[1] to build, maintain, and ultimately recycle the robot - through the full lifecycle - as the workers the robot replaced it wouldn't be economical to deploy it in the first place.
[1] adjusting for their pay rates, obviously
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For whom? I guess it depends on how good those robot soldiers are.
And you don't even need to pay them! Now that's progress http://www.quotationspage.com/...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sure. But if every one you imprison intimidates ten others, and so there aren't enough to protest & get the dole raised to (Shock! Cormuinizzerm!) 20k then you're ahead. When I say "you", I mean the 1%.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The generally accepted definition is "stuff done (or made) divided by resources used".
When we're talking labour productivity, "resources used" refers to working time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
our lame pols are whining about how EPA emission constraints are going to cost us the same amount of jobs even though there is around 78,000 coal miners. Where are the job creators? Are they indigenous to the EU or something? Why can't we create jobs by investing and installing clean energy products like scrubbers for coal-firepower plants?
Extend that across the economy and that means that 10% of the populace produces everything needed by 100% of it. The only way to address the imbalance is if everyone starts consuming 10x as much stuff.
I guess that makes sense, if you think the only measure of a standard of living or number of jobs is how much coal you burn or steel you put in a car or house. But it's an idiotic premise in the real world. I don't live ten times better or have ten times as much job merely because there are ten times as many iron ingots sitting in my living room.
But with widespread automation there's absolutely no reason that *everyone* couldn't be capital, with those high-demand artists and robot technicians working for supplementary income and/or the joy of the work.
Ability to work is effectively capital. What has happened in recent decades is that with globalization, the supply of labor has greatly increased and hence, it has less pricing power. So of course, the US has noticed that non-labor capital has grown in value with respect to labor.
And capital generally is something which can be used for productive purposes with monetary value. If you don't have labor or own something which is considered capital, then you don't really have much in the way of capital, maybe organ or blood donation.
Human nature is clear on how the wealth will be distributed.
A clarity which is not actually reflected in the real world. In the real world, nobody works for slave wages.
First- we disagree here. At least over the last 36 years generally and the last decade specifically, this has not been the trend and the trend is accelerating- not decelerating.
You do realize that the trend here is to higher employment in manufacture? It has been both on the time frame of recent decades and on the time frame of centuries.
Talking of demand, if everybody's been replaced by robots then where are the customers? Nobody's got a job, nobody's got any money.
A situation which never materialized in the real world, let us note. If you're right about automation, then surely we should be seeing the effects of it now and in the past, not just in some indefinite future. Your model is broken.
Employment in manufacturing in the united states is down over 30% in 40 years.
In that time, the population has quadrupled from 76 million to 308 million.
Manufacturing employees have dropped from 18 million to 12 million.
Manufacturing jobs have dropped from 23% to 4% of jobs.
Similar declines in UK and Japan.
A less steep decrease in the EU area generally.
The amount of goods the united states manufactures with those employees has increased. Since china joined the WTO, the number of manufacturing jobs in the united states has taken an even steeper drop with an estimated 2 million more jobs lost which would put manufacturing employees at 10 million. Many of the jobs lost from factories that previously employed 1000 or more employees.
And now (even at china's low wages), they've started to automate as well.
What were you trying to say? I don't think you could be off that dramatically so could you explain a bit more what you mean?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We've already seen around the world that even in the harshest regimes, once people lose hope and enjoyment in living, it gets pretty hard to intimidate them.
North Korea seems to have done a pretty good job of it tho. So I guess it will have to get that bad.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Employment in manufacturing in the united states is down over 30% in 40 years.
In that time, the population has quadrupled from 76 million to 308 million.
Manufacturing employees have dropped from 18 million to 12 million.
Manufacturing jobs have dropped from 23% to 4% of jobs. Similar declines in UK and Japan.
Ok, so we have the US, UK, and Japan. That in total is roughly 7% of the global population. Why do you think that is at all an accurate characterization of global industry employment?
During that same period, China went from zero employment in modern manufacture (they had plenty in primitive and mostly useless industries like excessive brick manufacture in 1970) to 100 million.
India has still held steady at over 10% employment in manufacture since 1960 despite massive population growth (over 100 million currently BTW) and the recent global recession. I doubt they had a lot of modern manufacture back in 1960.
While sure, that's probaby somewhat less manufacture jobs as total global employment (though apparently it's still around 14% of total global employment today), it's still growth in jobs as I noted.
Further, I see from the googling that I did to come up with the above links, that there's a lot of dishonesty currently in discussion of global employment in manufacture. The biggest change is simply that too many people are discounting both the transition of manufacture from the developed world to the rest and the recent, very severe global recession. We also have the ignoring of attendant resource extraction and service industry jobs associated with this manufacture.
Just because a recession results in a short term decline in global manufacturing employment doesn't mean that it will result in a long term decline in global manufacturing employment. Nor is focusing solely on the US, UK, or Japan an honest appraisal of global manufacturing employment.
Are the bots going to be running Solaris?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Ahhh.
Okay, I'll grant that manufacturing employment has improved for people able to work at $217 to $500 dollars per month wages.
Even so, as I said.. china's already automating heavily - so even the incredibly low wages there are not preventing automation.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
"Delta is testing a one-armed, four-jointed robot that can move objects, join components and complete similar tasks. By 2016, Delta hopes to sell a version for as little as $10,000, which would be less than half the cost of current mainstream robots.
That price is also cheaper than the salary of a Chinese worker, and the robot can work around the clock."
Ironically, the manufacturing is likely to return to the U.S. in that case, but not the jobs.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Ironically, the manufacturing is likely to return to the U.S. in that case, but not the jobs.
Why would it? The wealth may be in the US, but the future economy (as well as present day industrial infrastructure) is in China and elsewhere throughout the developing world. The problem here is that the US and other developed world countries aren't taking care of their economic systems. They haven't been for decades and I doubt it'll change over the next few decades either. The US will become I think the "sick man" of the world much like the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.
With the Baxter (base cost $22000- can work 3 shifts- no vacations, holidays, no social security tax, no employment law compliance costs, "never" sick with a good SLA) and the
Kiva ($30,000 per unit- same benefits)
Robotic hamburger makers, robotic drink dispensers, ordering kiosks...
Hilariously if this goes through these places will still need and pretty much only need janitors, maybe some security staff or basic human presence (like the franchisee owner and delegates or family). A robot won't be around people cleaning tables, taking garbage out, cleaning the shitter, mopping sticky sugary spills on the floor. Not only such a robot would be really expensive (a humanoid, even?) if it is to do all janitory tasks, which includes cleaning the vending robots and screens, but if you leave it alone unattended with dozen people and kids the people will just kick it, play games by putting obstacle in fronts of it or pile garbage and shit on a set of tables or whatever place.
If the restaurant is left unattended for whatever reason for a couple hours, or the janitor present doesn't care then why not come to the place with alcohol, your own food in addition to a Cheeseburger here and there, boom boxes and do whatever pleases you? Could be fun really. But then the place would have to be thoroughly watched by cameras and they send the cops or security guards and it goes even more downhill.
There's also Russia - don't pretend that the Soviet regime was ousted, it was more like the management went into the boardroom, swapped seats and came out wearing different clothes. How about China? Iran?
There's two factors at work supporting the status quo - one, things aren't necessarily bad for everybody. Two, no matter how bad things are, people fear they might be worse if they do anything. Three, the worse things get, paradoxically, the less people feel able to do anything. And last but not least, nice red uniforms.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."