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.

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Re:Do Something!

[bluefoxlucid]

It is productive human effort that CREATES wealth

Human effort is made more productive by technological growth. In the early 1900s, 60% of United States laborers were agricultural workers; we invented tons of new farm technologies, and now 2% of United States workers provide food, fiber (clothing), and biofuels for the US and an export market--and half their output is global exports. Just in 1950, middle-class American families spent over 30% of their household income on food; with advances in agricultural technology replacing humans with technology produced using fewer humans than the technology replaced, people now spend under 12% of their income on food.

Human effort doesn't create wealth; output creates wealth. Technology increases output. The single, simple danger is removing jobs too quickly to replace them: once you've deployed new technology and eliminated the corresponding jobs, wage-labor costs go down, and the minimum price drops; it takes time for market forces (notably inflation pressure and competition--both directly with producers of similar goods and indirectly with *anything* *else* consumers might buy instead of fancy Uggs or tablets or paperback books) to leave the money back in consumer hands, and then laborers have to compete with machines on wage-labor costs.

Minimum wage hikes exacerbate this by speeding the replacement of labor with machines WITHOUT a corresponding reduction in wage-labor cost, thus without increasing consumer buying power: instead of costing $40, a Toaster suddenly costs $55, but we replace the high-wage humans with lower-cost machines to make a $50 toaster. Consumers are no more wealthy, and thus can't buy more stuff, thus can't create new jobs (and, in the case where the cost of labor-replacing machines exceeds the pre-wage-increase cost of human labor, the consumer base becomes *less* capable of sustaining existing jobs, and so more people go unemployed). At the same time, with wage-labor being more expensive, it's harder for consumers to supply the purchasing power to create new jobs for the displaced: your economy gets poorer.

This is why economic policies such as non-wage standard-of-living systems like a Citizen's Dividend need to replace minimum wages. It's also why sales taxes are horrible, payroll taxes are bad, and progressive taxes are the best currently-known tax: sales and payroll tax increase consumer expenditure, thus creating a poorer consumer class and reducing the number of available jobs per consumer; while progressive income taxes allow you to reduce taxes on the working class consumer *without* raising taxes on the rich upper class as the income gap spreads, thus creating a more powerful consumer class and increasing the number of jobs available per consumer.

We need an increase in the take-home pay per wage-dollar expenditure: when your employer spend $1,000 on your salary, you should come home with something closer to $1,000. If you come home with $600, you still have to buy products at prices reflecting a portion of a wage-laborer's $1,000; if you come home with $800, that price is still based on a portion of the same $1,000 of wage-labor, but you're both taking home 1/3 more money out of that cost, and your ability to buy products is increased by that much.

Such policies are not very hard to design; transitioning onto them is the difficult part.