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Robots Appear To Raise Productivity Without Causing Total Work Hours To Decline

Posted by Soulskill on from the kinder-gentler-skynet dept.

Hallie Siegel writes: We often read about the economic impact of robots on employment, usually accompanied with the assertion that "robots steal jobs". But to date there has precious little economic analysis of the actual effects that robots are already having on employment and productivity. Georg Graetz (Professor of Economics at Uppsala University) and Guy Michaels (Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics) undertook a study (abstract) of how robots impacted productivity and employment between 1993 and 2007, and found that "industrial robots increase labor productivity, total factor productivity and wages." And while there is some evidence that they reduced the employment of low skilled workers, and, to a lesser extent, middle skilled workers, industrial robots had no significant effect on total hours worked.

This is important because it seems to contradict many of the pessimistic assertions that are presently being made about the impact of robots on jobs. What I am especially curious about is post-2007 data, however, because it's just in the past few years that we have seen a major shift in industrial robotics to incorporate collaborative robots, or co-robots. (Robots specifically designed to work alongside humans, as tools for augmenting human performance.) One might reasonably suspect that some of the negative impact of industrial robotics on low and middle skilled workers pre 2007 could be offset by the more recent and increasing use of co-bots, which are not designed to replace humans, but instead to make them more efficient.

7 of 391 comments (clear)

  1. No decrease does not mean an increase by duckintheface · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The study concluded that productivity increased while hours worked stayed the same. As the human population grows and automation increases, it's not enough that jobs are not lost. New jobs must be created.

    In the absence of robots, the higher level of production would have meant new jobs, but that is not longer the case. In effect, a job not created is a job lost.

    --
    "He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
    1. Re:No decrease does not mean an increase by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In the 1950's the United States was one of the few countries that wasn't completely devastated from the recent War. If so much of Europe wouldn't have been so ravaged by the war and focusing on rebuilding, the prosperity Americans experienced at that time wouldn't have existed. There were also a lot fewer (approximately about half the current population) people, which also means lower demand for housing in prime real-estate areas. Medically speaking, there was no treatment for many of the diseases or conditions that are either manageable or completely curable today. Medicine is so much better now that the average life expectancy is up over five years even though our country has a massive obesity problem. In the past, you'd just get your diagnosis and die for a lot of things, whereas now we can keep you alive, albeit expensively.

      The 50's are gone and the world has changed so much that it's probably impossible to get back to that point without massive amounts of wealth redistribution or a significant investment in changing education to be capable of producing the kind of work force that can lead that lifestyle.

    2. Re:No decrease does not mean an increase by gtall · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "If so much of Europe wouldn't have been so ravaged by the war and focusing on rebuilding, the prosperity Americans experienced at that time wouldn't have existed."

      Nope, the American economy at that time was very insular. In fact, the U.S. went into a recession after the war because it had too much excess capacity now producing things that neither the American or any economy needed. It took until 1950 before gdp hit the same level as 1945 (figures adjusted for inflation).

      Exports didn't start making up a big part of the U.S. economy until the free trade agreements after 1970. One of the things that caused the inflation during the 70's was the 60's. Johnson thought he could have guns and butter. It turns out you can, for awhile, until the extra cash in the economy caused it to overheat. Reagan, but mostly Paul Volker as head of the Fed, wrung it out of the economy....errr...but not the deficit spending, that increased under Reagan. The dot com bubble during the 90s soaked a lot of that up, and caused the budget to balance. Clinton had little to do it with. The bubble burst about 8 months before his presidency ended and thus ended Al Gore's chances to be president. The U.S. then went into a recession from the burst dot com and then 9/11 happened which depressed economic activity further.

  2. The pessimists totally ignore history. by GPS+Pilot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Every new tool or technology has ultimately enlarged the economy, and increased the number of jobs -- after causing temporary disruptions, like putting buggywhip makers out of work. For every buggywhip maker who lost his job, thousands of jobs have been created in the auto industry and other supporting industries (paving roads, transporting fuels, R&D of improved airbags, etc.).

    There are more people employed today that at any earlier time in history, and most of the people who are employed today can thank some recent technology without which their job wouldn't exist.

    The more disruptive the technology, the more jobs it ultimately creates. It's pure ludditism to think that robots would be the first exception to this rule.

    --
    That that is is that that that that is not is not.
  3. Here's the problem... by erp_consultant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Robots do increase productivity. Often it opens up jobs in higher skilled areas, like QA people that check the jobs that the robots do to ensure quality. We see this a lot in the Auto industry.

    The problem is what happens to the lower skilled people that get displaced by the robots? They may not have the skills, or the aptitude to learn those new skills, to do the new jobs that the robots make available. Now you have a bunch of people that used to be productive that are now unemployable.

    What do we do with them? Sure, some of them might be old enough to retire. What about the person that went to work for GM right out of high school? Now they are 40 or 45 with no real skills other than what they learned on the assembly line. They probably earned a pretty good living on the assembly line. Now they are unemployed with no college degree.

    Whose responsibility does it now become to support these people? The company? Not bloody likely. They put the robots in to save money. Robots don't get sick or go on maternity leave or get pensions or 401K matching. The government? Society at large? Who knows.

    1. Re:Here's the problem... by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I met a guy (he was around 17) who was working for a pulp mill. His job was working on a machine that debarked the trees. They would run through the machine and then appear in front of him. He had two cords ending in a button which he held in his hands. One button would send the insufficiently debarked tree around for another cycle of debarking, and the other button indicated that it was good enough and could continue.

      He indicated that this job was mind numbing to the extreme but that it paid very very well for someone not yet finished highschool. If he worked there long enough his hourly pay would be actually pretty good for the rural area he was in. He told me that many people who worked at the mill never bothered to finish high school and few went to University because even with a degree it would be hard to beat a job at the mill.

      I am pretty sure that I could build a bark detecting optical system in under a week to replace him if the mill were still open. But it isn't through a combination of far lower demand for paper product because of the electronic age, combined with far higher efficiencies at the existing mills.

      But all one has to do is go to the early seasons of the show "How it's made" and see that even fairly automated assembly lines usually had people doing things such as quality control, packaging, and the occasional odd procedure in the middle. Now, if you watch the recent seasons, about the only thing people do is to load crap into the machines at the beginning, and forklift large boxes of the final product in the end.

      One of the final job killers are the pick and place machines.

  4. Missing ingredient: consumers by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It essentially allows the same worker to do more per hour. However, unless somebody actually purchases the output, the factory is limited to the amount of extra widgets it can actually sell.

    The bottleneck in the cyber-age economy is consumers, so far. The same or fewer workers can produce more, meaning the proportion of jobs that increase to absorb the extra products are not there to match the output increase.

    Nobody has figured out how to get more and bigger spending-consumers. Most of the revenue and profits are log-jammed at the 1%, who don't need 500 iPhones each.

    Taxing the rich seems the only known way to free the revenue and profits to flow back into the middle- and lower-class consumer. If you have a another way to balance that part of the system of economic flow, I'm all ears.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.