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Robots Appear To Raise Productivity Without Causing Total Work Hours To Decline
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.
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.
Mainly because work is not a set amount. We don't need X, and never need X+1. The amount of work that we want to be done so far exceeds the amount of work we need to do, or can do, that if we replace every single job in the entire world, in twenty years, all the new people will have created new jobs.
Give clothing to every single person in the world? We want more than one outfit. Give us 100 outfits each? We want to each have a unique, handsewn outfit. etc. etc. etc. Give us all sex bots and we will each want two sex bots for a threesome.
That's the nature of mankind.
No jobs? No talk to me when mankind has terraformed every planet in the solar system. Till then, stop being a ludite.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
And where's the pay raise for increased productivity?
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
The owner of the robots got a very nice pay raise. The robots are the ones who actually increased the productivity, so it's only natural that the owner of the robots would get to reap the rewards. Why should the human workers get a pay raise, they aren't the ones who are actually increasing productivity.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"crappy, boring, mind-numbingly repetitive tasks"
You might be surprised that this is the extent of the ability for a great number of workers out there. It's easy to forget when you're in an all-white collar environment that there is a large portion of the population which has close to zero independent problem solving ability, and an overlapping portion which has almost zero reliability. As someone who deals with these people on a regular basis, I can tell you that they are some of the nicest people I know, and yet sometime during their lifetime there will be a robot which can do their job better and more reliably at a fraction of what it costs to feed, clothe and house them.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Jobs have been automated millions of times. Every time, it's the same cycle, with on variation that happens often, but not always. The demand for goods and services is not perfectly elastic, so increased productivity for a specific task very often results in fewer people being employed at that precise task. As an example, milking machines mean that fewer people are needed to milk cows.
However, prices ARE somewhat elastic, so as the increased productivity reduces the price of milk relative to substitute goods, more milk is purchased. That increases the demand for dairy inspectors, milking techs, cheesemakers, etc. The net result is that a portion of the workforce moves from the simple job which a machine can do (and which is low paid) to the jobs which require human judgement, such as dairy inspectors.
We've been through this for every machine we have. The industrial revolution is the period in which many, many tasks formally done be humans began to be done by machine. And the standard of living improved by an order of magnitude.
For hundreds of years now we've been getting more and more machines every month. We've done, and the results are in.
The first electric programmable computer was installed in 1943, and now there pretty ubiquitous. Give robots another decade and they'll catch up.
Or you could say they're already here. I have a robot which washes and drys my dishes, another that washes my clothes, two that make me ice. Several which play video content. One which opens and closes my garage door. Heck, they're everywhere.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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.
Two factories make toilet paper, one introduces robots and doubles its production and also profit margins, the number of employees stays the same. There is no impact to those employees, but the other factory goes out of business. That is where the jobs get lost and that is what the study does not measure. Same amount of toilet paper is produced at twice efficiency and half of the jobs get lost in the overall economy.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
If you were to poll people who once worked in bulk goods packaging you might find that they are working even more hours at their minimum wage jobs because they lost their jobs on the assembly line that barely kept their families fed. Since 2002 something like 85% of jobs in the bulk packaging world have gone. This, with a huge increase in bulk packaging output.
Redistributing wealth arbitrarily is distinct from socialism/communism in what way?
As to being a luddite... you're saying that the robots should not be permitted to automate industries IF "reasons"... Standing in the way of that at all for any reason is opposition to the most efficient means of producing something in the economy.
As to the notion that there will be a "workers revolution"... that is literally right out of Karl Marx.
So... you're almost certainly a marxist. Which is cute because the ideology is obsolete. It was applicable to the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution is being eaten alive by the information revolution just as the industrial revolution ate the agricultural revolution.
Your entire world view is getting consumed by the future. You're working on an outdated play book that lost reverence before you were even born.
Your position is as absurd as Don Quixote's dream of becoming a noble knight in an age long past such things.
Marxism lives only in the minds of bitter academics and anyone malleable enough to buy the concept without any real consideration. As a practical ideology with relevance in the world... its already dead. And the robots amongst other things killed it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm not talking about automobiles, I'm talking about robots.
You know all those millions of jobs you were talking about? Nearly a million of them were good paying jobs making those cars and parts for those cars in factories that were not automated. In 1970, when automation started entering the auto plants, the starting salary at one of those auto plants was about $17/hr. And now, with all the automation and robotics in those auto plants, the starting salary is $13/hr. And I'm not adjusting for inflation. Do you know any other job that pays less today than it did in 1970?
So here's where we start: You show us statistics on how robots have improved the lives for a large percentage of regular people and then we can talk.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
It seems to me that the real problem with this is immigration. Our immigration system now--specifically lack of enforcement--encourages bringing in lots of low skill labor. The next is all IMHO, so take it cum grano salis! Big agra and big business (aka republicans) likes this because it keeps labor costs down. Democrats like this because it's importing new democrat voters, and the idea of America as welfare state to raise up the poor from around the world. Economists like immigration because all they care about is economic growth. People care about individual or per capita economic growth, economists care about aggregate growth.
Can we afford something like a basic income while at the same time allowing in hundreds of thousands of low-skill workers every year?
I prefer to take the view that the US could be like a really selective college--say a Harvard or Yale. Harvard or Yale could fill up their freshman class with absolutely anybody they wanted. All 1600 SAT scores--no problem. Asian engineers only? No problem. People with 4.0 GPAs who graduated 1st in their highschools classes and took 18 AP classes--get in line. The US could be equally selective about who we let immigrate in. I don't understand why we aren't.
Redistributing wealth arbitrarily is distinct from socialism/communism in what way?
There are many systems to which attribute socialism and/or communism was attributed in a reasonable way accepted by intelligent and educated people (this excludes most of US population I am afraid) - all of those systems indeed redistributed wealth one way or the other and did many other things. However I know no functioning society that does not engage in some sort of distribution of wealth. That is human and societies that would not do it would need quite some oppression and/or propaganda machine to keep the less fortunate at bay - something that is also a way of redistributing wealth (to oppression workers&media workers and owners). Looking at imprisoning rate in US - the land of the free is walking this path already.
As to being a luddite... you're saying that the robots should not be permitted to automate industries IF "reasons"... Standing in the way of that at all for any reason is opposition to the most efficient means of producing something in the economy.
I looked up GP and GGGP posts - nowhere there there was a desire to put automation on permit. Besides that if I go on and proceed to automate each and every activity that you are trying to start&execute - will you be happy? There is a limit to everything to automation too.
As to the notion that there will be a "workers revolution"... that is literally right out of Karl Marx.
There are different types of revolution - The guy whose work made that word popular was certainly not a marxist (do you know who that was?). Besides people not happy with being evicted from their homes because often hit the streets and one need military or military like force to stop them. That happened with and without Marxist ideology and quite frankly a foundation of some states is based on that awful idea of revolting against economic oppression (USofA come to mind too by the way).
So... you're almost certainly a marxist.
How relevant is it, what political view GP has? Does it bother you that other people are allowed to have views that you dislike? Would you prefer to put them into reeducation camps? Actually that is normal way of dealing with enemy of the status quo. The winners usually have a chance to explain why that is good etc. thus shaping our morality and ethics. Still calling somebody a marxist makes no valid argument. It either only releases the tension or serves to intimidate your opponent in a discussion. I could call you 'stupid Murican' too but neither I know whether you are stupid nor that you come from USA - it just looks like you are one of those 'Muricans' - not sure why would that be relevant to this discussion except that people from other side of the pond have strongly biased views of the world which often makes them look simple minded.
Which is cute because the ideology is obsolete. It was applicable to the industrial revolution. .. robots amongst other things killed it.
By which you want to say that oppression and associated poverty ceased to exist? They just changed the way we all change. This is other progress than technological -- the moral and ethical progress that prevents us from enslaving, killing, maiming etc. It is also telling us (well most of us anyway) that letting fellow humans rot in ghettos for instance is not the best for our society. Not sure why it would be that a robotic revolution resolves all the issues that plague our societies from the start - would their use abolish property rights thus relieve us from haves-havenots dilemma (are you a marxist by the way?) - there is no sign of it yet and I think the struggle will continue and will continue changing. At some point we will possibly stop killing and imprisoning each other but I doubt this will happen soon. I am also not sure if I like the way this may be achieved. We shall see. What I am
Redistribution of wealth is inevitable. The only question is if you want it done in a controlled, orderly fashion (socialism) or by violence.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Looks like you didn't study history very well. Eventually those who amass wealth are always overthrown and the wealth redistributed. It's inevitable, because wealth accumulates and eventually the majority decide that they are better of risking a violent overthrow than continuing to live off the crumbs that are handed down to them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC