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Robot Workers' Real Draw: Reducing Dependence on Human Workers
HughPickens.com writes: Zeynep Tufekci writes in an op-ed at the NY Times that machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who's in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. It turns out most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data. "Machines aren't used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a "good enough" job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans," writes Tufekci. "Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."
According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers' dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we've been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills. Tufekci points out that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."
According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers' dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we've been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills. Tufekci points out that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."
As an automotive engineer, we "employ" hundreds of robots at different points of assembly to replace people but the cost of anything hasnt really gone down. A car used to take 12 years to design from scratch, then 7, now 5, because we simulate most of what we're doing and machines are just so much faster than humans when it comes to manufacturing things. We use palletizer robots to stack things, transport bots to send parts from one department to another, painter bots that simulate their own paint path and are self-optimizing, and of course armies of welders that never get tired, or sick, or bored, or angry. the result is a better product and our average vehicle can routinely last 500k or more miles without any problems that would constitute buying a new car. Heck, our door lock motors will outlast the owner.
so for me, robots mean the death of not just work, but commerce and capitalism as well. our rework and repair department is one guy. What is there left to buy? who is buying it? if endless consumption just leaves peole feeling hollow and everything we have works just fine, then gains from efficiency aside you're still faced with rampant unemployment and a nonexistent place to sell a product that isnt needed. Sure, we sex up our products all the time with girls in skirts and some deadpan guy mumbling neurotic platitudes in the rain, but does anyone really buy into the idea that a sixty grand car is going to get them laid? We've become desparately predatory such that selling an SUV pushes so many unconscious buttons for ones safety and security that we're practically insisting anything less is suicide when all our vehicles are nearly identical in crash ratings.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Everyone has this odd fantasy where robots replace all our jobs, so we all learn to be machine workers and maintain the robots. 10,000 jobs lost to robots means 10,000 new machine worker jobs; or, even better, 20,000 new engineering, machinist, and so forth jobs.
That would be expensive. Cheap, unskilled labor replaced by robot labor requiring the input of twice as much expensive, skilled labor? The whole premise is that you're replacing 10,000 $8/hr sandwich makers with 10,000 robots each supplying $25/hr to engineers, maintenance people, and so forth. 10,000 x $8/hr = $80,000/hr; 10,000 x $25/hr = $250,000/hr. We're imagining robots will cost less than humans, so obviously there must be less human labor involved in the building, operating, maintaining, and fueling of these robots.
The truth is robots will take our jobs, just like in the Industrial Revolution. 10,000 workers will become 10 robots supported by 100 workers who each make twice as much: 10,000 workers become 100 workers at the cost of 200 workers. Of course, that means your goods and services suddenly carry 1/500 of the human labor cost. Now, let's assume food becomes 20% cheaper--this is a poor assumption, based on fast food service labor being rated at 14% (at McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, and so forth, 14% is a common number: if the wages of your floor staff exceed 14% of your revenue for the hour, you start sending people home early), which is wholly unrelated to most food purchase. Still, let's use that for a base assumption and see what happens.
Well, first off, the average middle-class person may spend $300/month on food; it's possible, with discipline, to get down as low as $35/month, and in fact $100/mo is a good target, and I've personally eaten lots of sushi and chicken and bacon and eggs and mushrooms at $120/mo (dry beans and ramen diet be damned). Let's use $300 and $100. a poor person suddenly spends $80, and a middle-class person spends $240 on food. Food being 20% cheaper, there's $60 more in each middle-class pocket every month, and $20 more in the pockets of the poor.
Propagate this out to other goods and services. If, on average, you save even 10%, that's a good $800 billion extra in people's pockets. There's room for another $800 billion luxury industry--video games or smart phones, for example. These industries may or may not automate well, and so you will find new jobs to create, and possibly a lot of new jobs where automation hasn't caught up. These jobs only require some cheap human labor that's difficult to automate, and so your basis of unemployed McDonalds sandwich makers becomes your new basis for the next new product or service.
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Also in headlines "Tech Worker Shortage Just Ruse to Get More Indentured-Servant H1B's"
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
noone will be able to buy the stuff made in the robot factories if we're all unemployed or minimum wage serfs.
We'll just export it all to the counties where the unions and government actually protect their workers and put the long-term common good of the people ahead of powerful corporations' profits for the next quarter.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This has long been one of my predictions with robots; that when they are actually good at something they will be awesome. So many of our manufactured goods are becoming fantastically reliable because of the reduced reliance on humans. When you buy stuff it just rarely comes broken anymore. Also if you look at the failure graphs on many goods the graph is becoming less and less a bell curve and just a giant spike at the point where some critical part will just wear out due to physics rather than sloppy manufacturing.
But where I see them really kicking ass and taking names is in agriculture where you could have a robot sweep down a field of fruit and only harvest that fruit that is perfectly ripe, then to come back hours later and harvest the now ripe fruit, and so on for the entire harvest. The same with earlier phases of growing, such as diligently picking the weeds every day, or watering and fertilizing only those plants that exactly need it. Can you imagine some working walking along taking soil samples by each plant and then making the correct adjustments. Or picking the bugs off each plant and crushing them?
Then there will be things like road construction, landscaping, building construction, road maintenance, etc. With these I can see a situation where not only are the robots cheaper at doing these things but they do them with such perfection that people would take any suggestion to use people as just foolish. For instance right now my city is filled with potholes and cracks in the road that will pretty much certainly become potholes. I would love a robot that went around filling these in to perfection. 50-100 of these robots could probably keep the streets in my city basically perfect. The same with sidewalk/park/road cleaning robots as the streets in my city are filthy. The occasional large sweeping machine is just not enough. Again 50-100 machines could make my city Truman show perfect.
Which'll put all those people in other countries out of work, when what they sell costs way more than what you sell. Again, they won't be able to buy your stuff, and you won't be able to sell your stuff.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
India and China were devastated, they had no clue of what was hitting them, they were reduced abject poverty and penury, to less than 5% of the GDP. The high paying jobs were created in Europe, and the number of higher paying jobs created were far less than the number destroyed if you take a global view. Only if you limit yourself to Europe you would see comparable number of new jobs being created. The Luddites were right.
Now finally it is lapping up the shores of the so called developed countries too. Finally it is affecting the upper middle class. Upper middle class are the real henchmen for the super rich. Without the upper middle class professionals siding up with the super rich, they could not stack the system in their favor. The super rich got too greedy and now they are taking from the 99% to 99.5% too. As long as they took from the bottom 95% and left enough for the 95% to 99.5% they could continue to grow. But when the life time earnings of a surgeon or a dentist or a CPA or midlevel MBA does not put them in the top 1% by net worth, they are going to rebel. And they are the ones who would succeed in such revolution without destroying everything else in the process.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."
It's sounding more like oppression to me.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The goal of capitalism has nothing to do with removing human workers. The fact that sometimes efficiencies lead to fewer workers does not mean that is a goal. Cranes and pumps replaces having hundreds of people passing buckets of concrete or lugging steel beams around on their back. I think those efficiencies are good.
The problem will come because people still want to retire at 65 and live to 165; problems will come because people will keep breeding when there is no work and then expect others to pay for their offspring; problems will come because they expect to keep the same inefficiencies in place and will resist commonsense changes (Example closing Post Offices that no longer pay for themselves); problems will come because they expect the government to restrict competition because it means their job (or their company).
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
That was the authors point: "Optimists insist that we've been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills. Tufekci points out that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "
In the past, machines replaced "manual labor." Today, machines are replacing "white collared labor." Getting more education won't help you anymore.
capitalism is about increasing profits by any means possible
if people could be worked 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, for no pay, capitalism would be very happy. just look at the cruelties of the gilded age before the labor movement shut down most of the viciousness
the ideal society is capitalism with social safety nets and market protections. otherwise capitalism will lead to worker abuse and monopolies/ oligopolies where consumers are ripped off and smaller competitors squashed
you need to protect society from capitalism's extremes. if some of those protections and regulations have problems, those problems are tiny compared to no protections or regulations. protections and regulations can be cleaned up and refined, but never removed. to not understand why less protections and regulations is far worse is to not understand the topic
capitalism is like a great beast. properly harnessed and controlled it can plow your fields and give you great riches. allowed to run roughshod, it will knock down your barn and eat your crops. and what capitalism is most certainly not is some sort of fundamentalist religion, the end-all be-all of existence as some assholes conceive it to be. such fools represent our destruction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is the end result of the current path we're on. But those profiting from this change now don't care about the next decade, nor even next year, if they can cash out theirs this year.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
i would love to see a return of intelligent conservatism like Buckley. the idea of having an intelligent rational exchange with a conservative is an exciting prospect
unfortunately, in the USA at least, the right seems to have been taken over by its idiots. there are of course many, many morons on the left. the difference being the right seems to have put their morons in charge
in today's cllimate Buckley would quickly be labeled a RINO, a moderate, a flip flopper (to be intellectually honest and be able to change your mind is considered wrong), or even socialist
not because Buckley ever espoused socialism, but because since the end of the cold war 25 years ago, the insult "socialist" has degenerated to mean nothing more than "bad word to call scary person i don't like"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i'm sorry, i stopped reading there
this comment causes me instant rage and instantly makes me disrespect the person. i can't interact with you any further
it's a constant comment, you see it all the time on the topic of government
it's like "correlation is not causation"
a phrase originally meant to be about keeping an open mind, but now a phrase constantly kneejerk parroted by morons to close their mind against proof that contradicts their prejudices. correlation is actually the first step in establishing causation. correlation does not mean causation does not exists. but that's how people use the phrase! it's incredibly stupid
likewise, "the usa is a republic not a democracy" is similar. a constant comment by low effort low iq people who want to seem discerning and knowledgeable but only reveal themselves to be fucking dumb
it's like saying "the usa is a mode of transportation, not an automobile"
we're a republic that elects our representatives democratically you dumb fuck
we're BOTH
it is completely accurate to call the USA a democracy. it doesn't mean we are not a republic. these are different descriptors for different aspects of our government structure you stupid shit
to not understand that, and to think saying this kneejerk dumb comment is important or wise, instantly makes you completely not worth any further interaction
please mod this comment +500 insightful and burn it across the front page of slashdot
still won't save us from the steady rain of "the usa is a republic not a democracy, the usa is a republic not a democracy, the usa is a republic not a democracy" from dumb assholes for years
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's called an aristocracy, and it's gell-ing together. Call it "Techno Feudalism". Most of us will be serfs indeed.
The Middle Class will be viewed as an oddity of human history. But a simple and brief blip on the radar. A have/ have not society has ALWAYS been the norm; and for much of the world, still is.
Life is not for the lazy.
As part of the past not being an indication of future results, I think people need to stop looking at the mid-20th century as the only model for an economy.
The 20th century saw the creation of the middle class as we think of it today. The wealthy needed a more skilled workforce to produce the products new technologies had made possible. The middle class was simply a byproduct of this need. Industrious people found a way to benefit from this more affluent working class and an entire new class of consumer was born.
The late 20th century saw the creation of the upper middle class. Additional advances in technology now meant the wealthy needed an even more skilled workforce. The upper middle class was simply a byproduct of this need. This upper middle class has much more disposable income than the middle class, so you start to see a shift in the type of products that exist in the economy. Instead of bargain food and bargain products, you see more fancy restaurants, Whole Foods, iPads, etc. It appears that an entire new class of consumer has been born again.
I see no reason why the economy cannot keep humming along selling its products to the upper middle class. The most profitable company in the world (Apple) sells almost exclusively to the upper middle class. The buzz created by selling to this market also makes the middle class stretch their dollars more to buy these expensive goods and services to "keep up with the Jones-es" (households with $60k income probably shouldn't spend money on iPhones, but they still do). The shrinking of the middle class hasn't seemed to hurt companies at all because they have this new more affluent market to sell to.
Over the next 20 years I expect the top 10% of households to have even more wealth than they do today, and the range of luxury products sold to them will be remarkable even by today's standards. The rest of the population will likely take on service related jobs for very low pay relative to the upper middle class, and will probably be very dependent on society for covering basic living expenses. I don't see this as a utopian world by any means, but it is what I expect to happen.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
There will be plenty of money out there. It just won't come from the proles.
I feel like eating oranges this year. Maybe I'll spend $20,000, that should get me a crate. Or I can spend the $21,000 on a set of orangebots. I'd try buying a second set and sell the surplus, but there's just no buyers; everyone just gets their own orangebots. Oh wait, I own my own bot factory on one of my islands, brb printing a set. What do I need money for again?
It's 2015 and I'd say it's already too late to be a name in this arena, but I'll be keeping an eye on the Foxconns of tomorrow so I can at least get a cut of the pie. It doesn't solve the future economy, but it might buy my selfish ass a ticket out of terrafoam.
Welcome to the End Game of Capitalism. Capitalism itself has only existed for a few hundred years. It is time to retire old Yeller to the backyard and shoot the poor dog down. We can come up with a better paradigm, an evolved solution. But most importantly, let us not continue down the dumb path of repeating tired catch phrases concerning capitalism -- aka "the best worst solution available." Because it certainly isn't. Many, many solutions are available. It's just about stepping on the toes of those who profit from the current social structure.
We can do so in a peaceful manner or do so in a manner that more resembles the French revolution. I wonder what a technology focused guillotine looks like? Is there an App for that?