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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.
If robots don't cause total human working hours to decline, then what the fuck good are they? Are we really automating the work force so people can work more? If so, then please stop with the robots.
Or, maybe we can just dispense with the "robots will make human lives easier" BS and just go straight to "robots will increase profits for people who already have all the fucking money".
Rule of thumb: If there's a human endeavor that doesn't make human lives better, then it is not worth doing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"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?
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.
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.
"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.