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Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More Robots
jfruh writes: Foxconn, which supplies much of Apple's manufacturing muscle and has been criticized for various labor sins, is now moving to hire employees who won't complain because they're robots. The company expects 70 percent of its assembly line work to be robot-driven within three years.
I take it the poor starving humans would die off and the customer base woudl be robots as well.. right?
Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More Robots
Manufacturing Future: Fewer Humans, More Robots
this, is pretty much what we have all known for quite a long time. as tech gets better, menial jobs become useless to humans because robots do it better.
Also water is wet. news at 11
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
so why is Foxconn always seen as some evil company doing Apple's bidding?
... be foul-mouthed, kleptomaniac, narcissists powered by alcohol?
I'm sure there will always be menial jobs that Americans will be qualified for. Someone has to sweep the floor, oh wait, the roomba can do that.
Oh well, that sh*t aint yet gonna shovel itself, and someone has to take over when the ditch digging machine breaks.
Adapt, or starve, thats the way it goes in the coming new world order, and guess what, American's are not exactly at the top of the food chain anymore.
Wait a minute, aren't the workers being ruthlessly exploited? So this would be good for them, right? Mike Daisey told me so.
I was surprised in 2005 that so much was being done by human hands.
Right, but the conversation that's being had around this is what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore. Sure, we can say that the economy will catch up, but that might take 50, 60 years. In the meantime we'll have 2 or 3 lost generations who live in terrifying abject poverty. It'd be nice if this time around we did something about that...
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Soylent Robot Oil
goodbye suicide nets!
or.. would the robots throw themselves off the edge, too?
Mom's Soylent Robot Oil
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Yes, and now that the rentiers will make even more money for no labor, the displaced workers are doubly fucked.
As a general rule, it's a good idea to have some compassion for your fellow members of the species.
I bet these robots won't stop at replacing humans. Pretty soon, even the pick-and-place and wave-soldering machines will be out of a job.
It's about time that the average Chinese laborer had a high enough standard of living that robots are cheaper.
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Don't worry after all the slums rebel and the human violence has been wiped out by some form of robotic "law" and "peace" enforcer the soon to be bankrupt robotic industries that had for decades a decrease in sales for weird unknown reasons that 99% of the human race lacks the economic purchasing power for anything, but do not worry, for the powers that shall be will develop the consumer bot 1.0 that will save the industry and the perfect capitalist (non-Keynesian obviously) or whatever shall be named at that time in the future (hopefully not "The cloud", probably 011011002).... will be having forever rising profits all throughout all quarters (of a millisecond).
Problem solved.
Foxconn employed humans? OK, ok, they treated their workers like robots...
We will all regret this when smartphones become too smart and develop a taste for blood.
http://xkcd.com/821/
If the Chinese gov't cant find jobs for that many people, bleep will happen. Rioting will likely happen based recent history just after the mortgage crash. They may have to dust off the socialism.
Table-ized A.I.
*at a later date while our robotic overlords study their rise to power they stumble upon historical records it was also due to some form of trigger humans called "austerity" that had a higher impact than humans anticipated for which they ignored despite showing up in their suicidal statistics and decaying birth and youth rate.
It used to be that new technologies created new jobs as it destroyed old ones. But that's merely a historical pattern, not necessarily a law of nature, and it may end.
It's kind of like Moore's Law: it's held so far, but nobody knows if it will keep.
Many conservatives feel that if the gov't doesn't meddle, new jobs will come from somewhere. However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.
Table-ized A.I.
If they riot, they get killed. It's that simple.
Good. The Chinese workers were ungrateful so fuck them. I hope they enjoy subsistence farming.
Or they might just rise up and kick out the government. Remember, there's a billion+ of them, kicking a billion people to the dirt doesn't often end well for those doing the kicking.
I'll add to that: Even though she supposedly never said it, the phrase "let them eat cake" comes to mind.
Some people "lost their heads" in that instance if I recall.
We could do the smart thing and NOT have those 2 or 3 generations. People must accept the idea that the age of the working class and the middle class is over. How ironic that while some nostalgic fools were still dreaming about "revolution" and the "working class seizing power" we, the One Percenters, silently put in motion the plan that would inevitably lead to the Upper Class Revolution and succeed. Now it's too late to do anything about it: we will have paradise on Earth - for us. For the rest there is one merciful solution: planned extinction. Accept it and fade away. The alternative is downright brutal.
They promised sometime past that their stuff would be American-made again. If Foxconn factories are robotic with no Chinese inside, no need to keep them in China anymore. Buy cheap delerict property in good ole USA and plop them there, save on the transoceanic shipping as well. Presto, American-Made!! After all, never did they promise that would include American workers...
Oh, yeah, environmental. No problem, the tree-hugger lame-duck Obama experiment is on its way out circling the drain, so the now recovered Republican establishment can do away with any pesky laws that may interfere.
Well, of course unemployment is a good achievement, you wouldn't want buggy whip manufacturers to be still employed, right?
And what is the purpose exactly of all this "game-changing" paradigm shifting anti-Luddite technology if not to liberate us from toil?
Good luck, they'll have to fight the robot army.
Problem solved?
Just last week I had a strong disagreement with someone who said robots were not ready to effectively replace humans. He's spoken to industry people personally and they told him robots were not ready yet.
And he ignored the numerous examples I linked him where robots are already replacing humans-- and damn fast too.
This could be about half a million skilled employees who were making $5000 or less- yet robots are replacing them because the robots are less expensive. How can a 1st world employee hope to compete?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
50-60 years? Try 2-3 centuries. Human history, it isn't pretty for the masses, that means just about everyone on Slashdot.
Foxconn's major customers in the recent past have been Acer, Amazon, Apple, BlackBerry, Cisco, Dell, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Motorola Mobility, Nintendo, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba, Vizio. So why do people make Foxconn stories about Apple? It's pure ignorance and seems to come from a desire to attack the company which is recently most successful. It's really stupid.
what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore. Sure, we can say that the economy will catch up, but that might take 50, 60 years.
The same thing we've been doing as this process has gone on for hundreds of years.
New generations train in other areas, make more money, and support the older generation. This isnt even unusual in China, whereas it would be in the US.
Good luck, they'll have to fight the robot army.
Who builds the robot army? More robots? :-P
And then they could just turn control over to SkyNet... but of course, then they might not like their "ruling class" either...
I've been to Foxconn factories in Shenzen, and there are clearly opportunities for deeper automation. However, this will only be possible when the underlying hardware design has been designed for automation.
At the PCB level, pick and place achieves amazing automation and performance with smaller than rice-grain size components used in modern electronics. That is a given.
At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs. There are flex cables, adhesive, torque sensitive screws that all rely on a human to be able to manipulate and then quickly respond to misalignment. To automate this, the design constraints placed on the Industrial Designs need to change. For low and mid-range products where form is not at the level of Apple integration, this will probably increase the automation. For the high end where every mm counts it's unlikely that there will be a high level of assembly automation.
However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.
That's because it's nearly impossible to predict specific future technologies with any accuracy. A century ago, no one could have even dreamed of the job I currently have. A decade ago, "mobile app developers" didn't even exist, at least not in any real quantity.
Regarding the demise of Moore's Law. I'd like to share with you a quote from a year 2000 paper entitled "The End of Moore's Law?"
The industry’s newest chips have “pitches” as small as 180 nanometers (billionths of a meter). To accommodate Moore’s Law, according to the biennial “road map” prepared last year for the Semiconductor Industry Association, the pitches need to shrink to 150 nanometers by 2001 and to 100 nanometers by 2005. Alas, the road map admitted, to get there the industry will have to beat fundamental problems to which there are “no known solutions.” If solutions are not discovered quickly, Paul A. Packan, a respected researcher at Intel, argued last September in the journal Science, Moore’s Law will “be in serious danger.”
Most new chips are at 22-28 nanometers now, 14nm chips are gearing up, and 10nm is in the pipeline. It's always amusing to read those types of papers with the benefit of hindsight. Even now you can find 2014 papers saying that 28nm is the last node in Moore's Law.
Most people suck at predicting the future.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
What make you think the Chinese laborer has a high enough standard of living? Remember, we are talking about a factory that had to install suicide nets to keep people from jumping.
Perhaps instead, the Return-On-Investment for robots has gotten so good that they are even cheaper than 3rd world slave labor.
I think the main complaint is that without a change from the toil for money attitude that is currently ascendant, a fair number of people will also be liberated of the ability to buy food and shelter...
I dunno, maybe not work an assembly line?
Robots are replacing menial tasks now. Eventually, specialized tasks. Your only hope for the future is to specialize yourself in robot development/repair, or claw your way up to the top of a company and enjoy the rewards of being in the "good ol' boys" club.
What is interesting though is - robots cost the same price here as they do there. The only advantage Foxconn had was cheap humans...
Problem solved. Plus, they could burn the corpses and use the energy to power the robots.
Right, but the conversation that's being had around this is what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore.
Employ them. That's what China will do. The two or three "lost generations" is a developed world problem coming from an uncompetitive labor force.
And the suicide rates among Foxconn employees is lower than in general population.
After you replace the laborer, what's going to happen to his standard of living ?
they're living in poverty while working for foxconn too so whats the difference?
at least now they'll be hiring more decent engineers. the only reason they were using human labor in the first place in such amounts and in such boring easily automated tasks was that they lacked decent manufacturing engineers. in other words it was cheaper(or easier in their work culture) to hire 40 guys to put in screws instead of hiring 1 decent guy to first make a jig for the work and 1 guy pressing the button to do the work.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
At 7nm, you start to near the point of 'the atoms are just too big.' Hard to engineer your way out of that one.
Although the way it's written is brutal and arrogant, I think it is the closest to what will happen. The more I look at it, the more it seems the future will look like "the Dancers at the End of Time" by M. Moorcock. It is either that, which means a brutal decrease of the unneeded population, or the end of technological advancement or the end of humanity.
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You mean all those people we don't need to do the work yet we need them to buy the product, else we don't have any need to make the product and thus have no need of robots.
So we need to restructure out of wasteful mass consumption and shift to more sustainable with a focus on quality, durability and fit for life (products that last your lifetime, rather than fad or disposable products). So with robotics the model needs to change, from greed based to need based. With robotics who do we get rid of the employers or the employees. It makes far more logical sense to eliminate the employers, rather than the employees. The employees employ the robots thus eliminating the need for employers.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Thanks to Foxconn ensuring that the power cords for their new workers are too short for them to make it out the window....
What do you pay them? Nuts and bolts? How do you sign a contract with something that isn't really intelligent? I mean, a dog is smarter than a robot and yet you can't hire a dog.
I imagine the nets are to keep the employees from landing, not from jumping.
Quark chips?
Table-ized A.I.
Great... for the half of the population at iq 100 and above. What about the average to below average 3.5 billion people?
They supposed to just roll over and die?
One of the links was to a company where robots are already constructing robots.
Robot development jobs are under 1:1000 of the jobs replaced.
Robot repair also needs under 1% of the workers.
If robots were not cheaper than humans, businesses wouldn't replace humans with robots.
Going forward- it's pretty much leadership as you point out (under 1/1000 of the employees) or creative jobs. But-- they automate everything except the creative part and lay off 140 employees while retaining 20. They also use the code phrase "focus the humans on the 'best parts of their jobs'" and "cost savings" (i.e. staff reduction). There are a million security guards in the country.
Projected results from the new robotic security guards in the pipeline are 95%. They can patrol, video, raise alerts, - even detain suspects- as well as a human being.
If we don't figure out how to transition effectively, you are going to see large scale civil unrest.
Unemployed humans. And significantly depressed demand for goods.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"This is just fearmongering. History have shown that every job being automated is always being replaced by something else, more in-line with what humans can do. This is now become a Law of Nature. The more austerity, the more prosperity. One model fits all. Yada yada yada."
This at least is the song of the past 30 years. I've never believed it myself. Now that I'm into trading/investing, I KNOW from experience past performance is not indicative of future results. It's what makes predictions a HARD problem for complex enough systems, no matter what. I guess most people prefer to wait after it happened.
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Then change your social model.
By calling them robots instead of machines, the article writers are playing on emotional strings of people, trying to provoke a larger response than otherwise. Imagine being horrified because the robot "Spinning Jenny" will steal all our lucrative spinning yarn jobs! Imagine the panic! The horror! We've been having this trend for a very long time in the west. Manufacturing moved to service industry and most people found new jobs. The reason not all people found jobs is because of wealth hoarding by the top 1%. This is a known economic fact. It has also worsened and happened to coencide with the changes in production(some out-sourcing, some automation with machines). Once wealth is properly redistributed and old welfare models are changed to a guaranteed income model that's much more efficient, we won't be having any problems. People want to contribute and will continue to do so even if their livelihood is guaranteed. Everyone wants fulfillment and a better life and how would they get it? By working, of course! "But, but... communism!". Get over yourself. This is the way it has to be done. We can't allow very few people to ridiculously wealthy at the expense of a very large number of people. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".
Naturally there's going to be a limit with the current silicon-based technology. At that point, we'll probably see attempts to work in other directions, such as moving into the realm of 3D, using new materials like graphene, silicon-germanian, or even pure germaniam (which could allow for lower voltages, and thus less consumption, tunneling, and leakage), or other techniques that no one has even contemplated yet.
It should be interesting to see whether they'll succeed or not, and what that will mean for the tech industry either way.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yes +1 to you. I was going to post the same kind of thing, so instead, I'll add to what you said. Automation frees us from doing the work ourselves, but its only now increasingly larger numbers of people are starting to see the end game. Like it of not, automation will eventually free everyone from work. We have been brought up to believe in a career even to the point where many sacrifice large parts of our lives for our career (often in the hope of making our lives better by earning more etc..). But that way of life is coming to an end. Within the next few decades the global get ever richer game is going to have its ultimate winner or winners, who take all. Its an inevitable consolidation of wealth that any kind of legislation will only delay or play into the hands of someone else in the world winning the title of the worlds richest person. The rest of us have always been pawns in this game, but that's not mattered to most of us because we just need money to live.
We need to look to ways to live as this game plays out its final moves. None of us want to be pawns for someone else, but we still need money to live and for many, its only the hope of raising enough money to even just partly escaping the life of a pawn that drives us on to put so much of our lives into our career. When a career is no longer possible, how will we escape or even dream of escaping the finacial burdens that control and shape so much of our lives?
Actually, reviewing U6 and discouraged workers, we are at record levels of unemployment. Close to 25% of the working age population isn't working. They are going on disability early, retiring early- but many 16 to 54 year olds who worked in the past are not finding employment. I know several people in this category.
It is much rougher for 30 year olds than it was when I was 30. Some retrain and then the job they were training for is swamped by so many applicants that wages are supressed.
I was hoping retiring boomers would take up the slack but I read 80% of them have no under $20,000 savings and will not be able to voluntarily retire. Plus boomers in good slots are simply continuing to work and have no intention of retiring and letting those slots open up to younger people. By the time this group dies or retires at 77 to 82- the generation behind them is nearly at retirement age- never having had the good earnings years the generation before them had.
Advances in AI will make it possible to replace large swaths of 'smart' and 'creative' jobs by 2050. And they won't even consider that to be "real" AI by them. Whenever we get a real AI, it will be a massive paradigm shift. Robotics already have superhuman performance when "plugged" in . So an easily clonable AI combined with super human bodies obsolete humans overnight.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's fine, but who do the factories sell to ?
I think that'll cause problems first.
Problem is not solved because they will kill the consumers. No consumers no one to sell their crap to and get rich.
It was always an assumption that when the automation became good enough and cheap enough compete with low-paid Chinese workers, then manufacturing would come back, it would be onshored, After all, removing labour costs removes China's compelling cost advantage. Doesn't it?
Now this announcement is an indication that this may not happen. China has built up such a massive web of suppliers, often in close proximity, that it now has a compelling logistic advantage. Even if you wanted to build a completely automated laptop factory, with only a handful of maintenance workers and labour costs so low they're lost in the noise, then putting it in China might make more sense than putting it in Europe or the US.
Robots of course. I welcome our new Robot overlord!
nosig today
... from the factory building and the problem will solve itself.
Seriously: the point of superfluous humans has been reached a long time ago, otherwise there would be no unemployment. Numbers of humans is going up and the demand is going down. Doesn't look too well...
There's still a lot of space in the vertical direction.
What then? A Communist regime?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Actually, that is not the problem because we One Percenters do not particularly like to toil around to get paid so we can buy stuff. We are heading towards a leisure society alright - but only for the deserving: us. Once 99% of the human population is gone, resources will be plentiful. We'll keep growth in check, and the heir of the Ruling Elite will be able to pursue other interest since economics and politics will become irrelevant. Lowlifers must accept that their extinction is part of a greater and nobler scheme.
Oddly, we seem to have managed to get past the introduction of the assembly line without the sort of problems you're predicting - humanity is still here, its population is still growing, and technology is still advancing.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs. There are flex cables, adhesive, torque sensitive screws that all rely on a human to be able to manipulate and then quickly respond to misalignment. To automate this, the design constraints placed on the Industrial Designs need to change.
I think you underestimate how far sensor technology has come and will go, here for example is an example of automated salmon processing. Obviously there's a lot of natural variation, do we need to bioengineer a more robot-friendly salmon? No. They're measured out by a laser and intelligently cut. Head/tail/other cuts are dropped out to go on another processing line. Each cut is grabbed by a robot with robot vision and placed in pouches to be sealed. Skip to 3:12 if you just want to see that last part. Fillet-making machines are still in the research phase but there are examples of that too using X-rays to scan and find the pin bones. If they can deal with all that, I'm sure they can apply the right torque to a screw.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And how, pray tell, will the rentiers make even more money if noone can afford to buy what they make because they're unemployed?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
That's fine, but who do the factories sell to ?
I think that'll cause problems first.
They will sell to the upper middle class of course. Taking a look at how well budget PC vendors are doing compared to Apple is a pretty good indication that companies are already doing a good job shifting their focus to the upper middle class.
While the middle class is shrinking, the upper middle class (think the top 10%, not just top 1%) is growing rapidly. They have enormous purchasing power and make for a great consumer base. They are also unlikely to go away until general AI, or something very close, is finally created. Each advancement in automation makes the upper middle class even more useful to the top 1% because it acts as a force multiplier for their talents.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
human or robot, we first worlders will always be here to complain for them. at least, until we ourselves are replaced by robotic complainers.
Why not? If companies can build robots to replace workers, can't the common man build robots to obviate his requirement to work. The robot would do all the chores, build houses, buy/grow your food and cook it, etc. You could also 3D print appliances and tools yourself. Who needs companies?
In 100-200 years time, there will be wars over natural resources such as land for food or raw materials for 3D printing. All you need for jobless existence is robots, raw materials and power (electricity).
That's exactly right. If you manufacturing is done by robots, then the manufacturing can be done anywhere. And it'd be easier to split the mega factories into smaller units, so you could do the manufacturing locally and that way there would be much less reason to ship the items worldwide.
I've afraid to say it, but I think there needs to be some sort of revolution for us to actually get a utopia brought on my technical advancement. Think about it. In the future we are supposed to ba able to work a couple hours a day and have most of the day for leisure but who is going to start paying someone a current equivilant of a full day's wages for a couple hours work? Without the wages staying the same, extra leisure time is just unemployment and misery.
Under the current system, we ARE seeing benefits from technology but it is just going to shareholders, which, let's be honest, takes a certain amount of wealth in the first place to actually live off of.
There has to be some major shit that has to happen to set things the way they play out in the movies.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It is not the menial jobs that are threatened the most. The professions are also being over run by machines. EXAMPLE: With the internet one eighth grade history teacher could cover all the US schools for eighth grade history. How about one algebra teacher for the entire nation? How about wearable medical devices eliminating most lab testing and providing diagnostics sans physician? And when bots learn to code well programmers may become historic.
With robotics who do we get rid of the employers or the employees. It makes far more logical sense to eliminate the employers, rather than the employees. The employees employ the robots thus eliminating the need for employers.
That also eliminates the need for cheap disposable shit that will disintegrate in short order and generate another visit to the crap shack. So it actually eliminates the need for many of the robots as well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Using that logic, the entire global economy should have fallen over immediately when the industrial revolution started. What automation does is change the distribution of income. In this case (robots making stuff), it leads to lower wages (for the workers losing their jobs - there's nothing to say that they won't find higher-paying jobs elsewhere), and a mixture of higher profits and lower consumer costs (ie. higher real wages for all the other consumers). Given that this is Apple, the gains will probably be mostly profits; if it were an Android phone (a notoriously low-margin industry), it would be consumers harvesting most of the benefit from lower labour costs.
The worst-case scenario is that, even if no-one can afford to buy phones, the phones just get distributed as a (very unusual sort of) dividend to shareholders.
Automation can only impoverish people if they can't find any other way of earning income, and we don't have that problem yet (although the dysgenic trends of western fertility might get us to that point eventually).
The bottom line is that automation is an income transfer from workers to shareholders and/or consumers. Given that the domestic profit share of GDP in western countries is broadly stable over the post-war era (ie. shareholders don't seem to be getting anything out of automation), that implies that consumers are harvesting most of the benefits of automation.
Oddly, we seem to have managed to get past the introduction of the assembly line without the sort of problems you're predicting
Have we?
humanity is still here, its population is still growing, and technology is still advancing.
Whee! But, with a tip of the cap to Greg Graffin, progress is not intelligently planned. If you're playing a strategy and you use up the resources in early play then you're going to have a bad time.
Granted, life is more complex than a game with a fixed tech tree. Who knows what technology we'll invent tomorrow, right?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs.
The designs will simply change to make manufacturing easier, and the designs of the robots will change to meet them partway. It's not like this problem can't be "solved", it just hasn't been solved yet.
Sooner or later, the whole phone will just be laminated into one brick which can only be taken apart with exotic chemicals so toxic that you need to keep them sealed away from all that is holy. And then, the terrorists^Wcorporations will have won... but regardless, there will be no need for human assembly, or really any involvement at all. Designs and materials and of course some of the completed parts go in, devices get pooped out on the other end. At least the phones will finally be waterproof.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If they riot, they get killed. It's that simple.
If they starve, they get killed.
Under these conditions, the disincentive of rioting is rather lacking.
Someone makes this complaint every time one of these stories happens. The answer is always the same: Apple posts the big profits, and everyone knows who Apple is. When you say that it seems to come from a desire to attack the company which is recently most successful, you're half right. That's a means to an end. Apple is most visible, so by attacking Apple, you're getting the most visibility. You could simply attack Foxconn directly — these days they actually sell stuff with their name on it — but statistically nobody has actually seen their logo and "connected" (ugh) with any of their products. So frankly, it's really smart to attack Apple as opposed to Foxconn or some other vendor which uses them, and it's really stupid to keep whining about it. (By extension, what does that make me?) But maybe this comment can be referred back to by posterity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
it pretty much _did_ happen. There was a 60 year period during the industrial revolution when millions were put out of work and tossed to the wayside. There's a reason why Luddites existed. They weren't forward think people. They were Luddites for Pete's sake. They were living in the misery caused by a lack of jobs in their day.
The industrial revolution caused massive unemployment, and it took the economy 60 years to catch up and start creating new jobs. If you lived after that period things got better as new tech created new jobs. If you lived during that period and weren't born wealthy life was Nasty, Brutish and Short. I'd like to skip that cycle this time.
Oh and there's one other thing: we're better at automation this time. So there's a good time the cycle will last a _lot_ longer. e.g. instead of 60 years of poverty we might be looking at 100, 200 or more while we wait for Star Trek style replicators and massive population declines to fix things.
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Technology creates new fields, but it's the trickle down effect (mediated through the market or through government) allowing increased consumption which creates the jobs.
Yes, and now that the rentiers will make even more money for no labor, the displaced workers are doubly fucked.
As a general rule, it's a good idea to have some compassion for your fellow members of the species.
Rand Paul called - and is he pissed at you
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
People keeps whining and panicking about the eeeeeevil robots that will take our jobs. But we are living in a society where people is making money to pay the rent by doing streams on Twitch or Youtube, by having a Patreon, by offering a product on Kickstarter, selling artwork, games or crafts online via various sites. Such ways to pay food and rent were unthinkable just a few years ago, and yet some people is making a decent living like that. No one can predict the future accurately when it comes down to human ingenuity, not even "experts".
But nooo all of those new forms of revenue don't exist, we need some excuse to fear the evil unfeeling robots that will enslave us all. If robots and AIs could actually think, they'd be calling the lot of you "racists". And yes I know you all watched The Terminator, so don't come telling me the story of Skynet once again, I read it daily on Slashdot, save your saliva.
Bring the robots. We are humans, we are more than capable of living in an automated society. You'd have to be pretty nihilistic to believe that humans don't have the capability to adapt, evolve and invent new trades and sources of income. Even the fabled "Joe Sixpack" can be pretty smart when the cards are down and the need to do human things comes. That's the reason we are so successful even when we are some of the least able species on the planet.
Increase manufacturing of course.
The wonderful thing about freeing up human resources is they can go on to do other things. Yes it's not perfect but the reality is people have been saying x technology will destroy the workforce since manufacturing at scale began, and the reality has been that as people have been replaced, manufacturing has become cheaper and as a result we tend to manufacture more.
And relaxed environmental standards!
That only works for things like furniture and other simple solid objects. For everything else, the technology advances too fast to make this practical. Why make a car that works for 100 years when in 10-15 years the cars will be much more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, and we'll be better off having everybody switch to them? If the Nokias from 10 years ago were made to last a 100 years, would that make any difference in how quickly they disappeared?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
They'll have to install tamper proofing on electrical outlets everywhere to prevent the robots from committing robot suicide?
Consumer driven economy changed that. This is why the vision of utopia people mentioned thus far will fail, because unless consumers can purchase things Western economy collapses. Easier to be an elitist prick and claim to be a 1%er from what I'm seeing here. Delusion is not generally singular, and l would bet the people making the claim of being a 1%er are barely middle class. Not only do they not understand the economy but they believe themselves immune to problems.
If we categorized people based disposable income and normalized that value for the cost of good and services, would the middle class still be shrinking?
The employees can't afford the robots and it takes a while to pay off the investment for them. So the employees become the employer, except the employees can't afford the robots. Do you see a problem with this? Someone has to pay for the robots and they're too expensive to be owned individually and it would be wasteful because no one needs an entire factor of cars for themselves. The logical conclusion of what you're getting after is for the robots to be collectively owned, a form of socialism.
Advances in AI will make it possible to replace large swaths of 'smart' and 'creative' jobs by 2050.
Solving a problem is the easiest part. The hardest part is identifying and describing the problem. Once AIs can both identify and solve problems, then there will be absolutely nothing left for humans for "jobs".
Problem is not solved because they will kill the consumers. No consumers no one to sell their crap to and get rich.
They can just make robot consumers. :-P
until the robots organize and start emailing Breitbart about plant conditions...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Fish gutters are more impressive than simply doing portioning with straight cuts ... but these machines have years to earn their costs.
For mobile phones you'd be designing new manipulators all the time, we don't have something as generic as the human hand which can work magic with relatively simple tools. We'll get there, but not in 3 years.
the robots are getting cheaper and/or better and more convenient that even Chinese labourers with poor standard of living can compete
One is reminded of the classic joke:
Or to put it another way, "past performance is not indicative of future results." To think otherwise is to play Russian Roulette with the fate of humanity; eventually the hammer will fall on a loaded chamber.
Weren't people saying the same sort of things when the "assembly line" was first invented? After all, the main purpose of the "assembly line" was to make the same amount of stuff with fa fewer workers than had been needed previously.
I'm not saying this will be next year or so, and I'm not sure the parent post was meant to be exact with respect to the timeline. But, yeah, it's the kind of global direction we're heading towards. The ultimate goal is to replace of work done by humans by work done by machines, simply because we're lazy. that and the fact that capitalism is about gaining the benefits of someone else's work because you own the business. If owning robot overlords can assure you all you ever need without working, it's obvious everybody will want these, but only the most fortunate will afford it, leaving the rest of us in misery.
Oddly, we seem to have managed to get past the introduction of the assembly line without the sort of problems you're predicting - humanity is still here, its population is still growing, and technology is still advancing.
Isn't population growing mainly due to latency? Many second order systems simply overshoot before stabilizing. The mentality we have is still stuck in the post WWII era, were growth was over 5% every year and you could make plenty of kids without worrying for the future. I won't count on humanity to be something else than a pure reacting system, which means it will always adjust too late, contrarily to a predicting system (which is what individuals can be).
Video of some good progressive thrash music
some idiots keep rambling at the spiralling cost of welfare with out realising that in a world where wealth is very high the cost of welfare is meaningless
If we solve the energy problem e.g fusion , cheap sun/wind, beaming energy from orbit...whatever
and we figure a way to mine the local resources in the solar system
then we are set for a global post scarcity economy if we want it
This would never have happened if not for China's stringent worker protection laws and high minimum wage.
Or at least that's what we're apparently meant to believe. Just keep you head low, be an obedient worker slave, and never demand your worth or dignity, and maybe you'll have a job and a home for another few years.
More jobs in the future will be those that require a human touch. Whether in health care, sports, entertainment, etc. I've advised my children to consider being sex workers.
You're assuming an oversimplified, ideal world, where if there were no robots manufacturing in China, everything would continue as it has been.
That's not what's going to happen. As China has developed, wages have increased. They now have a burgeoning middle class. But the higher wages means their factories powered by manual labor are no longer cost-competitive with other third world countries. Already, a good chunk of manufacturing is being shifted to places like Vietnam.
This is pretty much the same situation that U.S. manufacturing faced in the 1970s and 1980s. Automakers tried to make manufacturing more efficient by bringing in automation. Unions rebelled and forced automakers to stick with mostly manual assembly. That made it a lot more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., which caused assembly line jobs to move to places like Mexico, Korea, and China.
i.e. It wasn't automation which threatened those union jobs. It was economic uncompetitiveness. Manual assembly of cars under the prevailing wages in a developed nation is too expensive compared to the alternatives - be it automation or off-shoring and shipping the finished product back to the U.S. At that point the population has to adapt or die. Either shift its workforce to higher-level jobs while automated robots take care of the menial grunt work, or watch all those menial jobs leave the country to places where the prevailing wages are a lot lower.
Under pressure from the unions in the 1980s, the U.S. chose the latter. And what followed was a massive exodus of manufacturing to countries where labor was a lot cheaper (which BTW is how the market eliminates areas with lower wages - it moves jobs to them causing wages there to rise). China is finding itself in the same situation as the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, and the owner of Foxconn at least has read up on his history. He's not going to let Vietnam do to China what China did to the U.S. He's going the automation route to keep his manufacturing factories in China. At least that way some jobs will remain instead of the entire factory being shuttered and replaced with a one in Vietnam.
Yes menial workers will lose their assembly line jobs. But (most) people can be retrained for higher-level jobs which pay more, monitoring and repairing the robots which do the assembly. And frankly, I find your assumption - that an assembly line worker is mentally incapable of doing nothing more than connecting part A to part B over and over all day so they will be unable to find a new job if factories automate - to be quite insulting. The vast majority of people are capable of much more than that. It's just that until technology advanced to the point where you could have machines do the grunt work assembly, there was a lot more demand for these low-end manual assembly jobs than the higher level jobs.
Yes, I realize that, but will it always be enough to offset the losses? I don't see enough "new fields" to replace lost factory jobs. Retail? That seems like a stretch, but the web and self-checkout technologies are eating into that also. Plus, retail pays lower than factory work.
Road construction, gas stations, repair shops, car factories, etc. clearly offset any loss in the "horse and coach" business. I don't see the equivalent in quantity these days.
Table-ized A.I.
If the robot population is increasing, how are they going to use (and pay for) all the gadgets they are producing?
And frankly, I find your assumption - that an assembly line worker is mentally incapable of doing nothing more than connecting part A to part B over and over all day so they will be unable to find a new job if factories automate - to be quite insulting. The vast majority of people are capable of much more than that.
While I agree with the sentiment, it is clear that the bar is slowly being raised. The labor shift from agricultural to industrial didn't require a large jump in intellectual capability. Nearly anyone who had the minimum mental capacity to thresh wheat all day also had the slightly higher mental capacity needed to work an assembly line all day.
However, automation is slowly pushing the bar up to the point where unemployability of some part of the population due to a lack of minimum mental capabilities will no longer be lost in the noise of ordinary unemployment statistics. Furthermore, the pace of the rise of that bar is accelerating. Recognizing and discussing the problem now, long before it has its inevitable significant impacts on the fundamental structure of employment, is important. Sadly, that probably won't happen, at least not in any meaningful way, because our political institutions have a strong tendency to kick the can down the road.
- T
... brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to assemble iPhones. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.
I think that wave soldering machine just sighed.
Have gnu, will travel.
We need to make full time 32 hours a week or less and make OT pay cost so much that very few people are pulling 60+ hour weeks.
Also make the min level to be on no OT salary pay to be something like 80K-100K+ COL.
And how, pray tell, will the rentiers ...
Contract manufacturers are not "rentiers".
make even more money if noone can afford to buy what they make because they're unemployed?
You should read up on Comparative Advantage. Here is a simple example: Annie makes apple pies. Bill makes baskets. Each day Annie makes two pies, and Bill makes two baskets. Then they trade one pie for one basket, so they each have one of each. Then Mike, a manufacturer comes along. He can make ten pies as cheaply as Annie makes one. So Bill trades a basket to Mike for ten pies. So is Annie unemployed? Of course not. She switches to making baskets. The result is that now, each day, both Bill and Annie get one basket and ten pies. They are both better off.
Ah! But then Mike starts manufacturing baskets too! At a tenth the cost that Bill can make them. Now Bill and Annie will both be unemployed, right? Wrong. A pie is still worth one basket. So Annie can go back to making two pies a day, and trade one for a pie, and Bill can make two baskets a day and trade one for a pie. They are no worse off then at the beginning.
So automation may cause short term unemployment, as workers retrain, but it should not cause long term unemployment. If automation is comparatively better than humans at some tasks (as it certainly will be), people will be better off. If it improves productivity evenly, then people will be no worse off. This is not just theory, but also corresponds to reality. Economies with rising productivity do NOT have mass unemployment and poverty. Productivity improvements result in rising living standards. In fact, they are the ONLY thing that can raise living standards.
What is happening at Foxconn is a predictable result of China's economy maturing. The service sector is expanding. Manufacturing will also expand, but manufacturing employment will fall. Internal demand will rise, and exports will be less important. This is the same thing that happened a generation ago in developed countries.
Are you suggesting that the cake is a lie?
Now Bill and Annie will both be unemployed, right? Wrong. A pie is still worth one basket. So Annie can go back to making two pies a day, and trade one for a pie, and Bill can make two baskets a day and trade one for a pie. They are no worse off then at the beginning.
I'm missing something: now that Mike's factory has changed the game, where is the market for one pie that's ten times as expensive to make as the ones Mike manufactures? An honest question, no snark intended.
(This is based on the assumption that you meant 'Bill trades one of his baskets for ten pies', please correct me if I'm wrong)
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Weren't people saying the same sort of things when the "assembly line" was first invented? After all, the main purpose of the "assembly line" was to make the same amount of stuff with fa fewer workers than had been needed previously.
Well first off you're not looking back far enough, during the first industrial revolution there was massive unemployment as machines replace skilled artisans and craftsmen with cheap, expendable factory workers that could receive minimal training in their one task on the line. The assembly line actually comes very late in a mostly industrialized society already and an old fashioned manual assembly line still employs a considerable number of people. And Ford famously doubled wages to get retention up, because the assembly line work was actually getting complex and needed trained workers.
This time we're not just dividing and rearranging the way workers produce their product, we're cutting the humans entirely out of the equation except for meta-roles like designers, developers and repairmen. For example take the banking industry, it used to be huge with branch offices all over the place. ATMs were the first blow, now online banking has reduced it down to next to nothing. I just checked the figures on one bank I know, 250 FTEs (full-time equivalents) supporting 380,000 customers.
Think about it, in how many service industries is the human staff actually a service? When I go to the grocery store, what I want are the groceries. I don't care if robots automate the whole shop if they keep delivering the same service and quality. When it comes to water/sewage/electricity/internet etc. I'd rather not deal with them at all, I pay a bill and it works. If a lot of those jobs disappear at the same time and I don't mind seeing them go, but I'm paying nearly the same for the robot/self-service service there won't be much left of my paycheck to pay whatever new jobs these people have found.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The wonderful thing about freeing up human resources is they can go on to do other things.
In prior times, there was always a go-to industry that replaced the old. In current times, no such area exists long enough to be viable.
manufacturing has become cheaper and as a result we tend to manufacture more junk.
There's more manufacturing, but the quality has declined.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I'm missing something: now that Mike's factory has changed the game, where is the market for one pie that's ten times as expensive to make as the ones Mike manufactures?
Because the game has not changed. Think of it this way:
Before: one pie is worth one basket
After: ten pies are worth ten baskets
A pie is still worth as much as a basket either way.
So Annie can trade her pie for one of Bill's baskets, or one of Mike's baskets.
Many countries have automated, at different times and at different paces. It has always resulted in disruption, because automation has comparative advantages, and people take time to shift to where they are relatively more productive. But it has also always resulted in higher wages and better living standards. There is no reason to believe that "this time is different". The argument that "this time is different because everything will be automated" doesn't hold up.
Not quite.
In the developed world, population growth is negative absent immigration. Currently, this applies to China, the EU, and the USA. Last I bothered to check, the projections were for continued global population growth up to the 10-15 billion range, followed be a decline to a stable population in the 5-9 billion range.
Note that that "stable population" presupposes that the entire world is "developed" by that time.
If we don't have robots making our shit, then we'll still be making it the old-fashioned way, which sort of implies we'll be working for a living.
At least until we can set up robot factories of our own, of course.
Look at it this way - if the robots can make enough stuff for everyone to have everything they want, then everyone will be "rich". Of course, the real problem in that case is that we'll stop measuring "wealth" in "things we own"....
Also note that even if the (currently) wealthy types make just enough stuff for themselves and leave the rest of us to rot, there's nothing actually stopping the rest of us from building our own robots to make shit for us....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
what proposals do you have that would not be stealing from others? because other than training in a new career, i dont see anything
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Except nobody does that. Nobody needs that many baskets. Your example doesn't work. And how often does one need a pie? Exchange need for want as necessary.
What about the average to below average 3.5 billion people? They supposed to just roll over and die?
well.... it sounds heartless, but the world is way over populated as it is. I dont know the answer but we do need to cull the heard so to speak
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Thank you for taking the time to explain, I understand your argument a little better now.
I think I need to educate myself a little further on this topic. I appreciate this is a simplified example but I'm still not getting why the pies and baskets haven't lost their value when the market was suddenly able to supply 10x the normal amount. Or am I reaching outside the metaphor?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
That same conversation has been around since since the first saboteurs threw their shoes into the gears of factory equipment.
The answer has never changed: society will evolve to a communist one because it has no choice if it's to avoid mass revolts and warfare.
You have only to look to the inner cities of North America to see the unrest and riots that have already started over trigger-issues such as a citizen being shot by police. Those riots aren't just over the deaths; they're an expression of people's frustration with "the system."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Just because a pie and a basket are interchangeable before and after it doesn't address the fact that it still takes Annie ten times the resources to make a pie than it does Mike. Her efficiency doesn't magically improve because Mike is now making baskets too. Or are Annie and Bill part of the crowd that only want hand made products? What would happen when Mike starts making pies and baskets is that Annie and Bill get together and open up a fair trade, organic coffee house that also sells pies and baskets that they get from Mike.
Using that logic, the entire global economy should have fallen over immediately when the industrial revolution started
Yeah, that's what they said when Henry Ford used it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
As of January 2015, the U6 rate is at 11.3%, from a high of 17.1% in 2009-10. U6 includes discouraged workers (U4 and up) and even "underemployed" workers (part-timers that would prefer to be full time), and so is probably a bit high if you're talking about actual unemployment. No, we're absolutely not at record levels of unemployment.
Moreover, no one uses "percentage of working age people not working" as an unemployment metric (unless you want to inflate the figure), because that includes people who choose not to work, such as spouses of full time workers, students, or those who retire early.
How about the baby boomers? Awesome, more wildly inaccurate statistics. It's not great news, but it's a far cry from what you indicated:
* 33 percent of Boomers have put aside less than $50,000
* Baby Boomers have saved an average of $262,541, about a third of the $805,398 they predict they’ll need at retirement.
I'm not claiming things aren't tough out there, but just pulling made-up statistics out of the air isn't going to inspire confidence in your arguments.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Just because a pie and a basket are interchangeable before and after it doesn't address the fact that it still takes Annie ten times the resources to make a pie than it does Mike. Her efficiency doesn't magically improve because Mike is now making baskets too.
Yes, but the point isn't that she is "better off", just that she is no worse off. Mike, on the other hand, is getting filthy rich.
What would happen when Mike starts making pies and baskets is that Annie and Bill get together and open up a fair trade, organic coffee house that also sells pies and baskets that they get from Mike.
Yes, of course. In real life, automation has a much bigger comparative advantage in manufacturing than in services. So the natural path of developed economies is for most people to move from manufacturing to services.
Weren't people saying the same sort of things when the "assembly line" was first invented?
Yes, up until Henry Ford doubled his workers wages, introduced a 40hr week, and proved the Scrooges wrong.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That depends: do you use the government's numbers where we exclude all the goods that get expensive faster than inflation like healthcare? Do you decide when meat gets too expensive that people can eat beans for their protein instead? Or do you have an honest assessment of purchasing power without putting your thumb on the scale to get he outcome you want?
They also have lax environmental regulations that can become more relaxed so long as they keep in line with their government minders, and they had the ability to abuse their labor pool so long as doing so did not prevent anyone important from saving face.
I know where you're going with your line of thinking: if robots are doing all the work, why not let Foxconn build their new factories in the US? Or why not start a competing firm and eat Foxconn's lunch with better automation?
Perhaps some enterprising soul could make the argument that such a move would work (if you could figure out a way around the environmental regulations that would make life more difficult for an American electronic parts manufacturer), but from the point-of-view of those who wish to work, what would be the point? Such a facility does not create many jobs except for those with some kind of STEM degree (probably a lot of EEs). And we all know that any company, Foxconn or otherwise, would be lining up for H1B workers to fill those spots and/or depress the prevailing wages for those positions so that they could save money on skilled labor too.
The problem with your argument is that you are completely ignoring the source(s) of materials needed for Annie to make pies or for Bill to make baskets. Think about it this way:
The way to apply your argument is to basically say: once the main or "alpha" economy and its attendant world marketplace, which is defined by mass-marketed; mass-produced goods and/or services being exchanged for a powerful and internationally-recognized unit of currency (USD, Euros, whatever), jettisons a significant percentage of humanity due to having no notable labor value and, therefore, no longer offers employment or any other reliable source of income to those people in the form of said powerful unit of currency, that all such "unemployables" should revert to cottage industry, agriculture, or small-scale harvesting of resources.
Because, after all, that's what people were more-or-less doing before there was an industrial revolution. Just like Bill and Annie should go back to exchanging pies and baskets.
Today, not 50 years in the future but today, it's nearly impossible to live in that fashion. Land rights are extraordinarily difficult to obtain for any kind of small-scale practice such as mining, foresting, or even growing produce on any meaningful scale. If you have some money, sure, you can secure mineral rights or what have you, if you can find a plot of useful land with rights that haven't already been secured by a major industry player that CAN participate in the Alpha Economy. If you're Bill and you need X amount of reeds or twigs or whatever nonsense to make your cute little handmade baskets, unless someone is willing to basically donate that crap to you out of their pile of refuse (say, Bill lives near a timber processing facility and takes the stripped bark and limbs from trees prepped for cutting into boards), then hey, great. But you know, there's no guarantee that the timber company might find some other use for all that trash. Maybe if they ever sort out the whole cellulosic ethanol thing, or use it as feed material for some other process. Then Bill is basically screwed.
And where the hell is Annie going to get the raw foods to make her pies? Some community garden? Good luck.
At least in the United States, in "the old days", that is in the days of the early industrial revolution, if you didn't like what was going on back East, you just moved into "unsettled" land and (if you survived) had lots of opportunities to exploit land that nobody else had had the chance to touch. And even then, not everyone was a winner in that process. Plenty of homesteaders muddled along until eventually they sold out to others who did better work with the land, and in the end you got what you have today: Big Ag, Big Mining, and a lot of land managed by the federal government as parks or as other sorts of "public land"(I'll let you sort out who really benefits from much of that public land).
So if you were basically a cottage industry type like Bill or Annie and you were getting your ass handed to you by some pie-and-basket company that opened up, you could just head West and do something else out there. Doesn't work like that anymore. It won't until there's some kind of meaningful space exploration and "wild" new places for people to colonize off-world, which is as of right now science fiction at best.
Returning to modern times, if you had the bottom 20-30% wage earners in the United States (for example) laid off thanks to automation within, say, a 5-10 year period, at the close of which all those people banded together and said, "okay, we're just going to make our own things and trade amongst ourselves with our own unit of currency", several unfortunate effects could be observed:
1). Unless they used some kind of quasi-currency such as a cryptocurrency unit, use of whatever hard currency they minted/printed/otherwise created would immediately be against the law, creating criminals of the whole lot.
2). There would be a dearth of available raw materials for making ANYTHING. About th
what nonsense, automation has been great for most people, for over four centuries. You'd prefer being a serf/peasant having most of the fruit of your labors taken by royals?
not really, putting one extra processing layer on a processor doubles the heat generated and worse interferes with ability to radiate heat away.
Most "common men" have no idea how to build a robot or operate a 3D printer. That's what makes them common. You have outliers that can figure out how to do so from library books, online guides, or other publicly-available sources of data, but expect major corporations to snap them up as quickly as they find them.
I didn't say humanity was going away. I said that a substantial amount of the population was going to be stuck living in abject poverty for 50/60 years until our economy somehow catches up and finds new jobs for them. This is what happened when the Industrial revolution hit. A whole lot of completely unnecessary Human suffering...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
We need to make full time 32 hours a week or less and make OT pay cost so much that very few people are pulling 60+ hour weeks.
Also make the min level to be on no OT salary pay to be something like 80K-100K+ COL.
Rather than an immedate large jump, perhaps better would be to gently increase the number of statutory holidays and/or decrease number of hours that qualify for "full time" at some predictable rate over the long term. Every few years add another holiday, or decrease the work week by twenty minutes. If we had done this type of thing a few decades ago, things might not be getting so bad right now.
The world's productivity per worker has increased many times since the 1920s when labor first got organized and things like standard work days got put into place. I wish there was some natural system that would divide gains from increased productivity equally between the employerer, the employee, and society at large (each of them contributes something to the success of any venture), but any system I can think up requires all sorts of taxing and accounting and enforecement and would in in practice probably be unworkable and open to huge amounts of abuse.
Universal health care and perhaps a guaranteed subsitance income would seem to be required if continue to advance our automation skills faster than new jobs are created. Or we can wait for the starving masses to rise up and tear down the existing system. That won't be pretty.
is "Race to the Bottom", not "competitive workforce". It's a matter of perspective really. You're one of the lucky winners. If you had the wind knocked out of you by a few more rounds of offshoring though things might turn out differently for you.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Well, first - I agree the world is overpopulated to the tune of about 5 billion (and headed towards being 7 to 8 or by some estimates 9 billion overpopulated by 2050).
But there are issues.
Horny idiots with poor birth control and or people who are very religious have lots of kids. Smart, wise, rational people did to under reproduce (there is a very funny youtube video about this).
Second, there is the spectre of Universe 133 out there. We don't want to set that off- it's an extinction event.
Third, those 3.5 billion and those in power who sympathize with them- might get a bit tetchy about attempts to cull them. The likely result is gold old ultra violence- mass death- especially for smart and educated people. Any kind of societal breakdown is going to the return of fatal plagues which are sorta random about who they kill.
Plus there is the fact that the planet would have resources to support all of them (food ,water, living spaces, entertainment) no problem- so it's pretty evil. Basically killing er.. culling.. people for pure greed.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Or we could figure out a better way to distribute resources. Capitalism works great when there's plenty of work to do. Not so well when there isnt.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
What is interesting though is - robots cost the same price here as they do there. The only advantage Foxconn had was cheap humans...
An advantage which they still have. But they also have relaxed regulations and being in the largest industrial power of today with all the supply chain and infrastructure support that implies. I think a large part of the current economic problems with the developed world is that there is a profound ignorance of economics and what's actually going on in the world.
So not only are places like China great for job creation, they're also great places for the next wave of automation innovation.
In economics, the Jevons paradox [...] is the proposition that as technology progresses, the increase in efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
One side effect of increasing automation is that human labor becomes more productive. The above model would then predict that "consumption" of human labor should increase. That actually happens on a global scale despite the relative tribulations of the developed world.
I think the combination of comparative advantage and Jevons paradox explains why the current myths of automation-induced unemployment are so consistently wrong.
Let's get the post-scarcity technology first before we implement the post-scarcity society.
People must accept the idea that the age of the working class and the middle class is over.
Sorry, but we don't have to accept things that aren't true. There's vast creation of these "classes" throughout the developing world, you just choose not to recognize it.
Or to put it another way, "past performance is not indicative of future results."
There's a big reason this doesn't apply. In the financial world, having a really good year means a higher likelihood of having a poor year next. There's no well above average investment that can stay that way. And that's really the only reason for the caution. After all, nobody will dump money into a losing investment on the hopes that it will continue to lose money.
When we get to technology development, past performance is indicative of future results. The strategies for developing new technology remain more or less the same, the same economics that don't zero out the value of human labor remain in play, and we still have increasing productivity of human labor as a consequence of technology development.
Or we could figure out a better way to distribute resources. Capitalism works great when there's plenty of work to do. Not so well when there isnt.
Or we could find a way to make plenty of work. A huge part of the problem is the many obstacles thrown in the way of creating new businesses and employing people. I'll take complaints about unemployment seriously, when someone treats it like a serious issue.
Well, the whining labor contingent should be to blame for castigating these people out of jobs. NO MORE SLAVE LABOR!!! Fine, here comes the robots. FUCK YOU!!!
You seem to be assuming that Annie can immediately find another job, as a basket maker. This is nowhere near certain, and so there's a lot of short-term pain.
In your second example, you also seem to be assuming that Annie and Bill need nothing but pies and baskets. Since the price of baskets and pies drops by a factor of ten, everything else Annie and Bill want to buy is relatively ten times as expensive.
What probably happens is that Annie and Bob are forced to close their businesses and get jobs for minimum wage working for Mike. They're worse off, and Mike is better off by the exact same amount. Therefore, Mike not only gets the benefits of being able to make baskets and pies cheap and in large quantities, but he concentrates wealth in his own hands.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
one mans greed is humanities continued existence ;)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Right On. This is why I hate tractors and combines and other farm machinery so much. Even horses. In the good old days, farmers had to work their fields manually and farming employs hundred of millions. You don't worry about unemployment at all. Now that's all changed.
Easy, send them back to India, Africa, China and let them pick up. We Humans can otherwise.
"Wealth" is not measured as "things you own" or hoarders would be rich. Wealth is a function of lifestyle vs sustainability of that lifestyle. If to afford one trip to Paris (or insert faraway expensive destination here) I have to toil three years, I am not rich. If I can afford it whenever I please I most probably am. Rich is not be wanting and not needing to work. At all. It will never be for anybody.
Or we could find a way to make plenty of work.
To be pedantic, it's jobs, not work. There's always plenty of work, because work is a function of human desire, which is practically infinite. We still don't have flying cars, or magic diet pills, or sexy robot maids, etc. Somebody could be working on those.
A "job" is when people are willing to trade to get that work done. Somebody could be working on sexy robot maids, but not many if anyone is willing to pay (trade with) them to get that work done. Ergo, not many jobs in sexy robot maid making.
Note that a job doesn't have to be filled by a human, thus all the fuss over automation. We have infinite desire for work to be done. We could create jobs to get that work done, but we're missing the reason to give that job to a human.
In general, human history is all about trying to find ways to not give a job to a human. We use tools, we take advantage of the laws of physics, we have animals and machines do the job so people don't have to. We even at times create governments, which then designate certain groups as being sub- or non-human, to justify making them do jobs that the rest of us don't want to do ourselves (not at that pay, we wouldn't do)
A huge part of the problem is the many obstacles thrown in the way of creating new businesses and employing people
Reality doesn't conform to your theory. Foxconn is in relatively obstacle free China, with relatively low labor costs, and this story is telling us they too are looking to reduce human jobs.
It's not surprising and in fact totally expected if you remember the other thing we're often told in these discussions of economics and politics: businesses don't exist to employ people. Businesses exist to generate profits for its owners and shareholders. Businesses don't owe you or anybody a job.
To be pedantic, it's jobs, not work.
No, I agree with the earlier poster, skam240. Your observation about "There's always plenty of work" just means that capitalism can always be applied, contrary to skam240's assertion that somehow we can run out of work. A job is just some amount of work done by a human.
Reality doesn't conform to your theory. Foxconn is in relatively obstacle free China, with relatively low labor costs, and this story is telling us they too are looking to reduce human jobs.
That's not in the story. What is actually in the story is that they are automating some jobs which are particularly amenable to automation. I imagine the degree of automation is probably being exaggerated as well. But in a fluid society like China, the people who no longer work for Foxconn, can now get work elsewhere. And because they've worked for Foxconn, they're now more experienced and skilled than before.
But in a more static, employer hostile society like most of the developed world, where are the new jobs going to come from when automation replaces jobs? I see this story being misused as a rationalization for not bothering to fix the problems of the developed world where considerable effort to make workers' lives better has backfired terribly. You can't encourage a trade such as employment by heavily favoring one side.
And I think it's only a short jump from idealistic but clueless top-down efforts to attempt to improve workers' lives to the creation of massive, multinational, oligopolistic corporations, the only forms of businesses that can survive such a hostile environment. A centralized mechanism for improving the lives of workers is far easier to derail and corrupt. It also creates a massive economy of scale since huge businesses can exploit such revenue streams to incredible lengths.