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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.
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?
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.
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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.
I wouldn't worry about who gets the most money, the problem is the lowering income of the lower and medium wages:
https://hbr.org/resources/imag...
Which is also really bad for the economy, because medium wages are the largest spenders
New things are always on the horizon
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.
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"
Yeah, we should ban cotton gins, and combine harvesters, and horse-drawn PLOWS, for God's sake!
Think how many more people we could employ if we didn't use horses to plow the fields, or allowed men to pick cotton seeds out of the cotton by hand the way they were meant to.
It's always interesting seeing the Luddites using a technology that didn't exist 50 years ago to natter about how some new technology is going to destroy civilization. I mean, it's not like the computer industry didn't put MILLIONS of telephone operators out of jobs...as well as millions more in other businesses....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
20-30 years ago we gave up manufacturing for the "knowledge economy". Now we're offshoring that work, but I haven't heard what the politicians will be replacing it with this time.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
You forgot if output is not sold it doesn't really count.
Inventory build up will only count on value added up to the point that no more value is got.
Output is potential wealth, but is only realized through transaction, so people need to have resources to buy that output.
Productive robotic effort that works 24x7 and doesn't need potty breaks CREATES it faster.
Automation does require routine maintenance to perform at peak efficiency. As the bean counters have proven countless times, skimping on the maintenance budget is to increase profits is perfectly acceptable. Sooner or later, something breaks in an extraordinary way and fixing the problem becomes an expensive, time consuming issue.
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.
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"allow security companies to better monitor their sites"
Nobility lives in the lap of automated luxury and you and me live in an automated prison camp until they decide to terminate us. After all, we aren't humans, we are human resources, and those are no longer needed. Just look at how much resentment social security is currently getting.
I wonder if that's the Great Filter: not war but simply the logic of industrial capitalism taken to its conclusion.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
I love the way you simply dismiss that "brief period of adjustment", as if it's simply nothing.
50 years ago, technology replaced a lot of farm workers. We pushed for more humans to obtain education and learn a skill related to technology in order to move on and survive. Today we are finding that technology is being used to replace technology so there are not too many other avenues to turn down or even invent for humans to actually go DO. Robots will build the PC you work on, displacing thousands of jobs. Automation will build and control the car you used to have to drive, displacing thousands of jobs. Drones will deliver all of your sustenance to you, displacing thousands of jobs. AI can and will start replacing teachers, displacing thousands of jobs. Without teachers, you really don't need an army of redundant management, displacing thousands of jobs. (wait, what exactly are we teaching humans to go DO in the future? Uhhh...)
Even something as simple as helping humans communicate with each other will be displaced by the electronic babel fish.
And before we start rambling on about the technology disrupters of yesteryear, buggy whip manufacturers being made obsolete cannot even remotely compare to replacing teachers all over the world. And do not dismiss the speed at which disrupters are coming. Apple's Siri is not even five years old today, and Tesla's all-electric supercars aren't even a decade old yet.
I should note that these coming innovations are not necessarily a bad thing. Humans have a finite amount of time to live (at least as it stands now), so it becomes rather pointless to force a human to drone on for 80% of their life working WAY more hours than humanly necessary. That said, society is not even remotely prepared, and will continue to champion the broken concept that humans must work 40 hours a week doing SOMETHING, else they are considered lazy and non-essential.
Oh, and let me remind you as to what this generation considers "productive human effort". We pay YouTube stars six figures and the Kardashians are worldwide celebrities compared to royalty. I wouldn't exactly label abject narcissism as something that should CREATE wealth or hold value in the future.
Yeah, anarchy (or pure capitalism) would be a perfect government... if people were perfect. Just like monarchy or absolute rule would be perfect... if leaders were perfect. Since none of us are perfect, we have an imperfect government with checks and balances to try to handle our imperfect people and leaders.
When you find perfect people, let me know. I'd love to see their government in action.
Those virtual newspapers aren't selling themselves.
Better lay off some more reporters, then.
20-30 years ago we gave up manufacturing for the "knowledge economy". Now we're offshoring that work, but I haven't heard what the politicians will be replacing it with this time.
Well, in that period of time, their favorite industry seems to have become Gridlock.
You just need to find a way to monetize that!
2 problems with that. An informed market is hard to create when there is a profit to be made by hiding information from people, e.g. credit default swaps. The next problem is that unregulated markets have a natural tendency to becoming captured markets i.e. monopolies.
Regulation and intervention are absolutely necessary to maintain a healthy market.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Well, in that period of time, their favorite industry seems to have become Gridlock.
You just need to find a way to monetize that!
Well there are plenty of hookers and coke dealers in DC already so there goes the low hanging fruit.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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.
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.
Think about this seriously for a minute and I really want you to answer. You've got some 50 year old guy who along with 20 other people at the same company have been replaced by drones or some other form of automation. It is very easy to say: "DO SOMETHING!", much harder to actually accomplish. Since his company is not the only company replacing workers like him, the chances of getting another job with his current skills is virtually none.
What are he and others like him really going to do? Go back to school, and incur more debt at a time in their lives when they should stuffing as much money into their retirement accounts as they can? At 50 they only have 15 to 20 years left of contributions before they need to start drawing it out. That assumes they remain healthy. Let's say he goes back to school and learns to code (no small feat for a 50 year old blue collar worker). How easy is it going to be for a now 52 to 54 year old guy with no experience to get hired as a programmer?
The reality is that there are fewer and fewer jobs that pay a living wage available for people without specific skills. Those skills take time and money to acquire. The industrial revolution replaced agricultural jobs with manufacturing jobs that didn't require a lot of training. Mostly the manufacturers provided it but worker abuse, long, hours, low pay, and dangerous conditions where common. It wasn't until unions and government regulation came along that your everyday worker started to really benefit from the technology behind the industrial revolution.
Over time companies got around this by both increasing automation and moving production to places with cheaper labor and weaker labor laws. That trend continues and not surprisingly, the middle class in this country is shrinking at an alarming rate.
That would be a fantastic idea if it didn't, oh, fly completely in the face of reality.
How about you take a walk around in some of the worlds slums and see what happens when a government basically gives up on you.
If the gov't didn't do education, who would? Nobody, that's who. Individuals don't have the resources for such things.
There would be no police. Only armed mercenaries working for the wealthiest people who can afford them.
All the possible consequences are too numerous to list, but it boils down to this:
If you yourself aren't already really rich, or part of a rich family, you're screwed. You'd be, at best, nothing more than a serf grovelling in the dirt. There is no in between.
Anyone who thinks "they have a simple solution to a complex problem", is a fantastic example of the Dunning Kruger effect.
Note though that over-regulation and well-intentioned but ultimately destructive intervention in markets are also detrimental to a healthy economy.
The best outcome arises from a balance of regulation with a free market. Not too little, not too much. Unfortunately, this being an open-ended problem, the "right amount" of regulation is different for each field, and frequently is different at different times. So the system has to be flexible enough to increase regulation when needed, but reduce it when things seem to be running smoothly. And you may even need to overhaul the existing system if it doesn't seem to be working on a particular market.
One-size-fits-all solutions (trying to regulate everything, trying to regulate nothing, and trying to apply the same amount of regulation to everything) don't work.
I didn't forget; the big wall of text is big enough without me describing the entire span of non-fucked-up economic theory, much less the history of economics and how it's evolved to where it reached today.
Inventory build up will only count on value added up to the point that no more value is got.
I don't use the term "value" when describing economics. It's a personal quirk, stemming from having synthesized economic theory in a bubble and then gone back to check against modern theory--a process which gave me a whole lot of useful terms and pinned my own theories to more robust theories, and also confused the hell out of me since modern theory is kind-of broken.
The degree to which I consider it broken has lessened since I've figured out *why* it's broken: my theories are for understanding the functional behavior of economies; modern theories are concerned with *measuring* that behavior, which creates some broken ideas. In particular, modern Solow-Swan models are *great* for separating the technological growth from the population growth function of economies; and they divide economic inputs into land, labor, and capital. "Land" includes natural resources such as gold ore in mines, and "Capital" includes machines; one is a labor modulator (we synthesize Molybdenum and Cesium by nuclear fusion--essentially alchemy--but turning lead into gold takes more labor than digging gold out of the ground), and the other is a roll-up of labor (human labor time builds, maintains, fuels, and operates machines; claiming that building and maintaining is not labor is ... weird).
The divided theory produces a lot of strange conclusions about how economics works, while the labor-common theory produces a theory of scarcity which predicts other economic theories (notably, supply-and-demand, demand-side economics, broken window concept, and so forth) and explains a lot of strange behaviors and exceptions to theory which economists scratch their heads about. At the same time, the divided theory allows you to *measure* an economy in a meaningful (but not entirely accurate) way, which the labor-common theory can't do. Different tools.
Output is potential wealth, but is only realized through transaction, so people need to have resources to buy that output.
That's too abstract for me to want to approach--not necessarily wrong, although it's a detail I think markets handle on their own. You've hit demand-side economics, though: the jobs are in place to produce things, and they exist based on consumer ability to buy those things which are produced.
If you have 100 people working to make 100 pounds of rice, moving 20 of them to doing nothing means you only have 80 pounds of rice. If they're all still getting paid (i.e. those 20 aren't unemployed; they're administratively employed in a way which does not increase output), but there's only 80 pounds of rice, then *all of the income* can only buy *80% as much rice*. You've lost some wealth because there's less stuff per person, and you can make up some monetary theories about inflation because rice apparently costs slightly more (let's not go there).
The overproduction you cite is not sustainable, because you're producing rice at a higher cost than the next guy: you're piling up tons and tons of rice, non-stop, meaning you've got to get an income flow to pay all these workers, which means you have to charge more than someone who is *not* stockpiling up so much rice and thus isn't paying as many labor-hours. If it's actually true that nobody *can* buy that output, raising your prices won't work: nobody can afford the new prices (buying that output, but not receiving it), and so the jobs making excess must go away. Put these together and you realize markets tend to not pile up tons of stock for no reason (a stabilizing stockpile is useful; an infinitely-growing stockpile is not, unless you're infinitely producing oil from atmosphere and pumping it into the gr
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How does a new person enter this system? Say a new baby is born and the baby eventually grows up but has no income so how does he invest into the system to become an owner? For the sake of simplicity let's say this is a child whose unknown mother died during childbirth so he's an orphan with no way of inheriting anything.
That's awesome for you. Are you planning to stay single and childless for the rest of your life? Most people aren't.
I'm not single. Moreover, I expect to spend much less than the average on child expenses in the same way I spend much less than the average on all my other expenses. For example, I anticipate using cloth diapers, clothes from thrift stores (or maybe even freecycle), having a stay-at-home parent instead of daycare, etc.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz