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Drones Could Replace $127 Billion Worth Of Human Labor (businessinsider.com.au)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: A new report from PwC finds that drones could replace $127 billion worth of human labor and services across several industries. Infrastructure and agriculture make up the largest chunks of the potential value -- some $77.6 billion between them -- including services like completing the last mile of delivery routes and spraying crops with laser-like precision. Economists seem to agree that robot automation poses real threats to human labour within the next few decades. Drones are a cheap, versatile first step toward that future. According to the new PwC report, they're also a solid cost-cutting measure. Along with infrastructure and agriculture, drones will help tech giants like Amazon deliver packages, allow security companies to better monitor their sites, help producers and advertisers to film projects, allow telecommunication firms to easily check on their towers, and give mining companies a new way to plan their digs.
and 250B in lockup or 150B in UBI to cover the job losses.
It is productive human effort that CREATES wealth. I agree that there are an awful lot of people who simply don't know what to do, don't want to learn how to do something new, feel entitled, or need someone to tell them exactly what to do. To all those excuses, I say "tough poop." DO SOMETHING!
And Amazon isn't going to be flying packages to a world of people who were unemployed by robots. Nor is the drone farmer going to sell much food to unemployed field workers. All those people WILL find something to do after a brief period of adjustment because that has happened since the beginning of civilization.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
It sounds like drones can do a lot of the dangerous or super mundane/difficult jobs which is great and effective. I don't see much downsize in using drones in those situations.
About time all humans started reaping the rewards of productivity not just the royalty/aristocrats/rich.
How about one is expected to work only from age 40 to age 50?
Basic education 0-20. Family 20-35. Job specific education 35-40.
Work 40-50.
Post Work 50+
but from what I've seen here on /. the past few years, all it will take to screw it up is one bad actor and *boom*. So while I also express some discomfort for the thought of the adjustment period, I do wonder how all of these new robot pals are going to be secured against turning them into weapons (dropping packages from unsafe heights) or avoid industrial sabotage (by having their blades chop the crops they're supposed to be dusting or reporting they've dusted the crops when no such thing happened or being hijacked to go dust the local busy shopping center instead of the crops).
I don't expect things to be perfect out of the box but if the US military occasionally has trouble how are we going to be protecting ourselves?
So what is the human labor doing without the 120-something $ Billions do and who gets it?
I always like those numbers, it costs $ xxx amount or xxx $ wasted, xxx $ budget overrun etc., the other side, who benefits is never mentioned.
The most common usages of drone are for Predator-type vehicles used by the military and battery powered multicopters used by hobbyists and others for short-range, low-payload close in flights.
The former are extremely expensive pilotless airplanes backed by a large ground infrastructure with unique capabilities (like their own satellites). The latter are relatively inexpensive, but for the most part can't carry more than small video camera and can't travel all that far.
Based on the breathless summary of this article, they make it sound like we already have the equivalent of the former in the packaging and cost of the latter, just waiting to take off with a hundred or so gallons of pesticide or able to travel 10+ miles delivering heavy packages with precision.
Do we? Are there available commercial civilian drones that can be operated by 1-2 people able to actually do the job of a crop duster? That's about the number of people it takes to keep a crop duster flying -- a pilot and a mechanic, and they can carry enough chemicals to spray a many acres in a single flight. The Amazon thing sounds even more ridiculous, the equivalent of a small helicopter in terms of range and lift capacity.
To me this reads like wishful thinking or science fiction. "Robots could do these jobs.." Sure, but first show me the robot you've invented that can do them. I don't doubt the pilotless cropdusters are technologically possible -- you could just put in remote controls in an actual plane or helicopter, but probably not cheaper and easier than you could just hire someone to fly the thing.
Drones are very good for things that are dull, dirty or dangerous. Like, hunting terrorists. However, fi you think, just a little, about systems engineering, you'll quickly reach the conclusion that drones are more complex than manned aircraft, as you're adding a layer of complexity between the aircraft and the pilot. Next, ask yourself, what, exactly, does a pilot do in a modern fly by wire airliner that wouldn't have to be done in a fly by wire drone. How, exactly, then, by making the system more complex will we make it cheaper?
But drones are better, you say, because they're autonomous. Sure, they can be autonomous, but then they require a level of system safety that meets current aviation standards. All of the sudden, it will dawn on you that the only way for drones to be cheaper is to throw away the safety requirements levied on aviation. Drones will not be cheaper, they will be more expensive. They will be safer, eventually, once properly regulated. They will be, most certainly, safer for dangerous tasks like ag spraying, pipeline patrol and high tension line work. They will be much, much safer for wildfire fighting and will allow us to do things that haven't been considered with aircraft because currently they're so stupid dangerous that nobody would try it. However, they will not be magically cheaper or remove the roles and responsibility of pilots.
Soylent Gypsy ?
So the US postal service make more than they cost, but by fiat their income pays for other government agencies. Profitability is punished in the US government.
They keep cutting actual headcount, services, and costs while raising prices. This is the strategy to drive the service into a collapse. Math says it.
A way to "fend off the wolves" would be a clean system for using drones to bring mail from the "truck" to the "po-box". The large majority of carrier man-hours are put into that activity.
Shouldn't we perhaps understand that this is a technical matter and recognise that economists are not really equipped to determine what may actually work in the future? Last mile delivery is just a pipe dream at this point and its fundamental problems have no solution. Flying drones directly over the roads will be prohibited due to safety concerns and low flights over property will not be tolerated no matter how much Bezos wishes they would be. I believe that drone use will slowly enter the real world but like everyone else it is just belief. Speaking as if all imagined drone use is matter of fact is a complete abandonment of rigor.
Luddites,start smashing the looms!
they factored in the costs for upkeep, maintenance and operation of said drones. A military drone might cost X, but I doubt they ever bother to add in the actual costs of the infrastructure on the ground, the pilots, the satellites in orbit, etc. etc.
While it may be replacing one form of labor, it introduces another form of it in order to make and keep it operational.
Until we have drones that can fix or operate other drones I suppose.
Hey now, the bright automated future is Closer than We Think!
I like this one, where they completely overlook any potential downside.
Also, they totally miss that we could have 40 years of productivity improvements that capital decides to keep 100% and share 0% with labor.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just once I'd like to see a technological revolution where the CEOs are replaced by technology *before* the labor pool.
You won't see robots outlawed until robots start replacing lawyers. Lawyers tend to control the law in their favor, so, once you have technology replacing lawyers, that's when the revolution really comes.
But I always find it funny that technology replaces every person, except the most useless person in the entire organization, and that's the overpaid, underworked CEO who's only concern about the company is what the stock price is at that very second.
Half of the CEOs in this country can't even tell you what their company *does* -- and yet they get paid more than the entire labor force of the company combined; and continually look for ways to increase their income while decreasing the income of everyone else.
Replace CEOs with a chatbot that can play golf, and you'll notice no difference in the running of the firm. And save million of dollars in compensation.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Of course, if you move costs from paying for one job to another job, the number of jobs doesn't change.
But if some of that wealth which is freed up was not paying for jobs, it's now available and could end up funding jobs.
Of course, what we really want is not having to work at all, while still being well-off. Having to work is bloody awful.
Look back at circa 1900. Much travel and agriculture was by horse. Horse manure in city streets was a constant presence and problem, causing disease.
Today, horses are much reduced. Horse population in the US peaked at 25 million in the 1920s, then began a steady decline. By the 1960s, the population was down to 3 million. Since then the population has grown to about 7 million today, a far cry from the peak. For agriculture, tractors have all kinds of advantages. Not least is that the tractor can be shut off and forgotten when not in use, for long periods such as the entire winter season. The tractor eliminated one of the major uses for horses. The weren't needed or wanted for agricultural work any more.
What happened to horses will happen to jobs. We'll have to adjust. I've been thinking that calls for a guaranteed minimum income, rather than raising the minimum wage, may be the way forward.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Even more angry people.
When we no longer need very much productive human effort? What happens to the ditch diggers when they're obsolete? If you're OK with them starving to death in a gutter then man up and say so, but don't fool yourself into thinking you've done any less. You can't become the next Einstein just by wanting too and working hard no matter what movie montages told you. In the real world people have limits, and we've got billions of them on they're way to planned obsolescence and mass starvation.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I thought they were a web-to-home retailer.
captcha: currency
Forget your pesticides-spraying drones flying over open farm land. This is just a patch over an old method.
The future of farming is enclosed systems. More food, better quality food, faster, with less water and less (no?) pesticides.
These things WILL fail in the most catastrophic ways possible, more than once, and will cause tremendous harm to someone you love. That statement will be true for more than one of us. These are mechanical devices that have failure modes that can't be mitigated 100% of the time. So, what happens when your teenage neighbor takes control of one of these flying over grandma's backyard and the safety logic only partially kicks in and it dives at maximum speed into little Charlies playpen and kills him.
Oh, and who will be reviewing these things for security risks, bad interlock programming, safety protocol logic, etc? And, will they have physical safety measures just in case the software is programmed poorly? Remember the x-ray machines that had the physical safety measures removed and replaced with software only measures to save money? Several thousand people were over-dosed and many of those died due to a programming mistake.
We have enough history to prove that this will cause front page accidents that could be easily prevented if we acted prevented drone delivery in spite of the profit desires.
Flippin' sweet, thats 127 billion dollars worth of extra labor avaliable for other things.
Just ask Emperor, I mean Senator Palpatine.
i will hire a robot to have sex with my wife
This isn't going to happen anytime soon because of the energy requirements. It's not like cellphones, tablets, and laptops that can be made more efficient with better chips and even profiling the energy requirements of the software. Moving mass around has long-known energy requirements and today's batteries simply can't deliver that kind of power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Thank you liveleak: Spear that drone.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Drones aren't just Predators, Global Hawks and those terrible little quadcopters Maid in Chian.
Maybe it's time the non-Luddites wake up and small the machine-made coffee! I'll give a few examples I came up with for jobs that can be droned out -- just by looking around me.
1. Fast Food Workers. Instead of a surly cashier taking your order and then a surlier worker bee behind the counter putting it together -- badly -- you'll walk up to the customer service touchscreen, and punch 1 for Big Mac, 2 for Quarter Pounder, etc. Or make it voice-controlled, it can't be any worse than a drive in today. Point is, a machine will take the cardboard-like patty, put it on a bun, dress it, put the other bun on, grab the fries, put them in the cup, put the whole mess in a bag and slide it out to the customer. No flying required! Unless you do the flying for Rule of Cool -- people would pay extra to see their burger fly to them at the table.
2. Shelf Stocker at the grocer's. Mobile automated mini forklift with grabbing "hands" on "arms", barcodes, some logic to deal with misplaced and stray items, and boom! Done! How many stockers y'all see on your typical visit to the grocer's? One machine could do that. Take it further - a brand-new supermarket with shelves that stock themselves from central conveyor belts under the floor. No drone required!
3. Teacher. "A is for apple. B is for Buy N' Large, your very best friend." It's coming.
Our future is either Mad Max -- a total collapse, Idiocracy -- barely functional mediocracy, or Wall-E, a less insulting version of Idiocracy.
Point is, the droids are coming. I'd rather see them used to help humanity - think of a semi-sentient or fully sentient droid like Mahoro, C3P0 or Persocoms like Chi, rather than taking the lowest-end jobs which keep people employed, even if they need to work 3 jobs to make mortgage or rent. If there's no McJobs, then what?
I don't see how this coming Drone Revolution will make for more jobs. I really don't. Maybe I'm suffering a lack of imagination. This isn't like the buggy whip maker (who could've survived by making car horns, sirens, etc) or the Industrial Revolution. This will make for just two classes of people. Those who have, and those who have not. Guess they'll have to invent hunter-killer machines to keep the proles in check, because such machines will be cheaper than having cops or military on hand to keep the proles in check.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Like what? I'd like examples of something that is not at risk of automation and/or offshoring. Programming and managing server farms can and is being offshored. As soon as you reach a certain age, corporations toss you in the trash like a 90's PC found in the closet anyhow. They don't value IT skills enough to keep you past Logan's Run age, so why should that be considered the safe haven from change?
I agree one has to be adaptable these days just to stay in the game, but it appears to be a race to the bottom, to borrow a popular phrase.
If everybody OD'd on caffeine and worked 70 hours a week to "keep up", that's just more intensity chasing a fixed number of positions. It don't see enough slots for each person even if everybody were super smart and super competitive and super-caffeinated.
3rd-world countries subsidize labor to keep their citizens from rioting and overthrowing the leaders. They are thus de-facto slaves. Do we have to turn our country into a 3rd-world dump to compete with 3rd-world dumps and slaves via deregulation and pollution? That's solving the wrong problem: our goal should be a better society, not a society where we compete with subsidized slaves wallowing in gunk by becoming slaves wallowing in gunk.
Table-ized A.I.
The preferred non-normative term, is "Soylent Roma."
Shitlord.
Farmers have been using GPS to automate tractors and farming for a long time.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
Economists seem to agree that robot automation poses real threats to human labour within the next few decades.
Which economist are these? Citation please. I'm not aware of any credible economist who has a blanket view that robots will replace human labor substantially within the next few decades with no alternative work being available. There has not been a single instance in human history where automation has resulted in a long term labor shortage. It causes some short term dislocations in specific industries but those affected always eventually find other work.
Most economists I've ever spoken with and read think that quite a lot of jobs are actually wasteful to have a human performing. What value is there in having a human drive a truck to deliver goods? Unless you think of truck driving as a make-work jobs program (which is dumb) it make sense to automate that when we can and have those people doing something more economically productive. Something that actually is worthy of the human brain and faculties. We only have people driving trucks right now because we lack the technology to put them to work doing something more valuable. And there is no lack of more valuable jobs to do. There is however a lack of people who are well trained and available to do them.
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It's indeed been the past pattern, but it's still NOT guaranteed to continue indefinitely. It's not necessarily an inherent Law of the Universe, hard-wired into the stars.
Machines have been pretty dumb for most of history. There may be a tipping point whereby if machines get smart enough, prior patterns no longer apply. The warning signs seem to be indicating we are reaching that tipping point.
Table-ized A.I.
the increasing horde of the desperate, hungry, jobless underclass that will still be scolded by CEOs and their lapdog politicians to stop being bums and pull themselves up with their own bootstraps instead of selfishly eating them.
Having a machine mow your lawn may be all well and good but if some kid down the road wants to make some money you may be inclined to pay them anyway because it's for a good cause. Machines may be able to plant community gardens but the residents may opt to pay humans to do it instead to get the community involved.
You can learn from books all day long but there's still a market for good teachers.
What will more likely happen is what happens with all "kept" people since the dawn of time: they pursued the arts and their own creative interests.
Robots build cars. Humans also build cars because humans can inject creativity that robots can't.
Ada Lovelace wouldn't have been Ada Lovelace if she had to spend all her time making a living for herself.
There is always something to do and humans with ambition will figure out what to do and be well off for it.
Work Safe Porn
HURR HUMANS ARE OBSOLETE
OMFG fuck the fuck off. People need to WORK if for no other reason than to keep them out of trouble!
HURR UBI
Yeah no fuck you and your free money bullshit, TANSTAFL!!! Your free-money-never-work-again fantasy world will never exist, you'll be REQUIRED to do SOMETHING, even if you are required by federal LAW to have registered, documented, monitored hobbies to keep your hands busy and YOU out of trouble! You can forget about it though because NOBODY wants to pay you to sit on your fat asses all day every day fucking around and playing; you have to WORK and always will so get used to the idea.
There will NEVER be a 'UBI'!
There will NEVER be a 'UBI'!
There will NEVER be a 'UBI'!
There will NEVER be a 'UBI'!
There will NEVER be a 'UBI'!
Friend of mine was an absolute wizard in a darkroom - amazing colour perception and memory, an instinct for chemicals/timing combinations that would bring out contrast in bad images. When most darkroom work was automated, his was not - developing large-process prints of airphotos in false colours, that kind of specialty work. But finally all that was gone too, when electronic images started to beat the best that chemicals could do even for specialty needs.
He was past 50 by then, a death-zone for a career break, much less starting an all-new one. But he managed it! Those airphotos led him to the people who make them, and he wound up running the 80-lb supercamera in the plane, certified to all the electronic imaging high-tech of that, plus had to be certified as aircrew. It was actually a better job than his old one...and lasted just a few years before that work started drying up.
Drones can't hold a level flight as well as a human pilot, and they thought that would keep human crews going another decade, but image processing now lets them take an image taken at several degrees off-level and straighten it out again, even to the high standards of airphoto imagery. So his SECOND career just got overtaken by technology at 57.
The sad thing here is that the benefits to society are very diffuse indeed...the cost of taking airphotos affects planning of many things and planning-costs are a part of a lot of overall societal costs. So a whole long list of things become a percent (at most) cheaper out of this...but a whole bunch of easily identifiable people lose 100% of income. In many cases, like my friend at 57, replacing that borders on impossible.
But nevermind drone airplanes. Drone vehicles are going to be the *gargantuan* job-killer.
There is no doubt that drones could do many things more efficiently, which would add to the corporate bottom line. However that $127B is predominately paid out to human beings as workers. While it would first appear that the change to the economy is $0, the wages paid out no longer go to the workers, but instead the shareholders. However, the workers use those wages to purchase goods and services that the shareholders typically don't
Normally, it is figured in economics that wages paid to workers are multiplied seven times through the purchase of goods and services. Therefore, that $127B savings for the companies and transfer to the shareholder has an $889B decrease in purchases, thus causing potential economic contraction.
In short, replacing workers with drones, can boost short term profits, but will erode the purchasing power of the middle class ultimately causing long term decline. (This isn't new to drones, it has happened in other areas, but then there were ample jobs for the displaced workers to go to. It is happening now, in similar fashion, with offshoring)
As long as the system and it's preachers equate population with economics we will have a downward cycle until it becomes so bad some element of it falls apart and then there will be huge efforts to restore the cycle during the collapse (remember the last crash?)
You have to transition from over population to responsible and sustainable population SOMEHOW because everything today is built around growth.
I RTFA and didn't see anything about replacing human labor. It suggests the value to businesses as $127B. Business Insider, on the other hand, came up with the clickbait headline about replacing human labor with drones.
that's a lot of propellers at human level. The tiny drones that people use to do video have plastic low power blades but the larger ones have metal\fiberglass\carbon fiber blades that are really dangerous. as they are right now, they really need to redesign them safely with cages and such to keep people from getting slashed up or losing digits.
I've developed a DRONE that can TRACK every BRAHMIN in the World;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Casteism