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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.
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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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.
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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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.
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+