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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there an alternative way of stimulating research in a specific field for the public good? And why wouldn't the proposed approach work? I mean, NASA went to the moon in the 60s and here we are today waiting for some billionaires who hope to one day send some rich kids at a hundred km from the earth's surface. As if that would be a great achievement. And don't even tell me who in the private sector would ever fund obscenely expensive shit like CERN or the ITER fusion reactor. The fact is, if you want basic research, government funding is extremely important. So, while the productive sector is busy developing the iPhone 6 or some other must-have "gadget", someone will have to pay for basic research if you want to get that flying car one day.
And, for what it's worth, getting EU research funding is often so hard and competitive that if you manage to obtain it, it becomes a key item in your resume. Sort of like a prize. So, I fail to see how a highly specialized research program with high barriers to entry will result in pork barrel jobs.
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.
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.
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.