Slashdot Mirror
America May Miss Out On the Next Industrial Revolution (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Robots are inevitably going to automate millions of jobs in the U.S. and around the world, but there's an even more complex scenario on the horizon, said roboticist Matt Rendall. In a talk Tuesday at SXSW, Rendall painted a picture of the future of robotic job displacement that focused less on automation and more on the realistic ways in which the robotics industry will reshape global manufacturing. The takeaway was that America, which has outsourced much of its manufacturing and lacks serious investment in industrial robotics, may miss out on the world's next radical shift in how goods are produced. That's because the robot makers -- as in, the robots that make the robots -- could play a key role in determining how automation expands across the globe. As the CEO of manufacturing robotics company Otto Motors, Rendall focuses on building fleets of warehouse bots that could eventually replace the many fulfillment workers who are hired by companies like Amazon. "The robots are coming," Rendall said. "After the Great Recession, there was a fundamental change in people's interest in automation. People started feeling the pain of high-cost labor and there's an appetite for automation that we haven't seen before." While Rendall described himself as one of the optimists, who believes automation will, in the long-term, improve society and help humans live better lives, he said there are changes afoot in the global manufacturing scene that could leave American industries in the dust. "China is tracking to be the No. 1 user in robots used in industrial manufacturing," he said, adding that the country is driving "an overwhelming amount" of growth. The difference, he added, is how China is responding to automation, which is by embracing it instead of shying away from it. This is in stark contrast to industrial advances of the previous century, like Ford's assembly line, that helped transform American industries into the most powerful on the planet.
We heard the exact same arguments in the 1980s about Japan. It didn't happen.
What is the same is that Japan's population is going to crash soon. China's population crash will be in the next few decades.
Both countries are extremely xenophobic and don't allow much immigration. The US should learn from that.
But most likely, the US will lead it. (despite fake news pronouncements)
I think the next big thing are self driving cars. After that, self driving drones.
We already have automated production lines as far as is useful.
Who's going to replace the money not being spent on those "high cost warehouse workers"
The Robots?
As for Costly warehouse workers? I'm I.T. in a warehouse, and those workers are looking forward to the new minimum wage rules.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
He who innovates/invents first has little effect on 5 years later. If that long.
Look at Yahoo. The first, and for some time the best internet search engine. Now dust.
Economists, and the like, keep using 20th century (some even 19th century) models. Intellectuals cling to the past as badly as others. And the fools who like what they say pay them. Sadly the factory workers have no such benefactors.
If American robots had their own economy it'd be bigger than Switzerland
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
who's posting america-sucks stories?
we'll just skip the part where the wealth generated gets equitably and humanely distributed. Was at a doctor's office in a nice part of town today and overheard somebody pining for the recession when they didn't have to pay people so much money...
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The big news is that everybody may miss out on the next industrial revolution.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We are already robots. We don't need other robots. Didn't you read the memo? You have to wake up by 6, get coffee by 8, push buttons until 5 and hibernate by midnight.
Everything else is either a bug or a feature, including this comment which is a bug. Maybe someone hacked my coffee... I'll get the reset button.
That America might not exist in the next industrial Revolution. Even odds that it will collapse in the same manner as 1989 USSR. Popcorn and Tequila party a-brewing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
and china is going to face lot's of people out of work + Apple to start India manufacturing due to rules to curb the activities of foreign companies.
So the USA may have to add import taxes. Also having local manufacturing cut's down on shipping costs and customs issues.
But Don't worry he is going the full Republican-good-for-business ticket, what more do businesses need?
The U.S. government will spend a trillion dollars for new nuclear weapons.
War is very profitable for those who design it because they can hide what they are doing from the taxpayers.
It's easier to be protectionist. But shipping costs are trivial for just about any product nowdays.
Which "people" were feeling the pain of high-cost labor? Certainly not the high-cost labor.
I guess there won't be any pain when the robots take all those peoples' jobs.
It's funny how some of the same people who decry immigration and H1-B visas think their lives will be made better when robots take their jobs.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I briefly read that as.
Miss America May Be Out Of the Next Industrial Revolution
But she worked so hard to win! ;)
I may have some mild dyslexia. o_o;
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I don't see any mention of Elon Musk and Tesla in this discussion. Musk is bringing a new level of automation to his car factories. The interior of the new Model 3 will be designed for full robotic assembly. For example, typical wiring harnesses that appear in other cars will be avoided as they are not suitable for robotic manipulation. Instead, wiring connections are likely to be more pluggable by robots. Their new cars feature full glass roofs. I suspect this is because it will leave the top of the car open for robots to work until close to the end of assembly. Most cars weld their roofs on during frame assembly (which is typically robotic for most car manufacturers). This limits access to the interior during final assembly.
Musk has talked about the machine that makes the machine as the most important engineering challenge to be solved in manufacturing. He says the final version of his factories will look like an "alien dreadnought". Humans will be involved only in maintaining the robots, and not in the actual assembly process, since they slow the entire process down to "human speed". I'm not sure how many people are aware of the level of innovation that is occurring right now in America at Tesla's factories. There is no company in the world that is doing what Tesla is doing in automobile manufacturing.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
If anyone else feels like contributing their 2 cents as well, you may do so in the comment section.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/03/15/1829202/if-american-robots-had-their-own-economy-itd-be-bigger-than-switzerland
Well, on the bright side, this does sort of imply that there is not one single overlord controlling Slashdot's narrative. Which is more than I can say for most news sites. Or at least, the local overlords are somewhat less than omnipotent (lol)
Twenty years ago circuit board manufacturers faced the choice of spending millions to retool for RoHS compliance or outsourcing to companies that were already compliant, and often were willing to buy up no-longer-needed PCB assembly line equipment as part of the deal. Those outsourcing companies quickly consolidated and suddenly Foxconn became the juggernaut we all know and love today. While regulations like RoHS are essential to preserve a healthy environment they most definitely create an environment of winners and losers, and the workerbees are almost always the losers. Those writing regulations need to create incentives to help those they will displace. How many states will allow automated delivery trucks and driverless taxis without a plan to retrain the drivers whose jobs will disappear? If history is any sort of a guide that number will be infinitesimal. Do you think you will be any better off when your job becomes automated? As for myself I'm quite certain I could code up a bot to post an even better snarky response to this post than the one you are cooking up right now.
You know what England got during the Industrial Revolution? Riots, maimed workers and filthy rich aristocrats with a starving underclass.
If that's all the next Industrial Revolution has to offer I'm going to throw in with the Luddites and smash some machines.
The Onion nails it again.
Table-ized A.I.
Indonesia is part of Asia. There were multitudes of successful entrepreneur. you guys can check anybody here. https://rogerwho.wordpress.com...
and China robo factory may make acid rain to in acid downpours
Chandra Ekajaya a successful businessman in the field of photo albums https://rogerwho.wordpress.com...
We can just hide behind Trump's Wall and extort money from the rest of the world by using all the weapons we're going to buy.
Why is Snark Required?
It's a race to the bottom. Remember, if you don't screw over your workers then the competition will.
Maybe, just maybe, it's time to revisit the economic model.
It's the next Industrial Revolution. And we're the world leader!
When the cost of labour drops, manufacturing will return to the USA. Maybe that's how Trump should bring back the 'jobs'.
The question is, how will government handle the reduction in tax revenue and how will society handle the reduction in full-time jobs?
It's been postulated that robots 'pay' taxes, just like employees. Of course, the government could (and should) tax corporations directly, but that is a very unpopular idea in the USA; the popularity of neo-liberalism prevents minimalist, simple policies.
As long as the situation continues, no matter what happens in these fields America will not be shaken. The largest economy, largest consumer base, most trusted currency.
Playing fast and loose with debt ceiling, threatening to default on t-bill payments etc are graver threats to America. Such instability and uncertainty at the top might force others to swallow the differences and form an alternative or at least a competing reserve currency. China would really love it if it could import its raw materials for in yuan. It is investing so much in Africa and Australia trying to lock up raw material supplies in non dollar denominated trade.
But it is not coming anytime soon.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
and china is going to face lot's of people out of work + Apple to start India manufacturing due to rule's to curb the activity's of foreign company's.
So the USA may have to add import tax's. Also having local manufacturing cut's down on shipping cost's and custom's issue's.
FTFY
who's posting america-sucks stories?
It's not that you suck, it's that you make people hate you, sadly.
I was thinking about this earlier, the seemingly endless stream of stores about automation and robots taking jobs, particularly self driving cars that are supposedly going to absolutely destroy the trucking industry. Why are so many seemingly intelligent people propagating these stories, when there is zero evidence that these predictions are going to come true?
I think we have reached peak intelligence. It happened some time in the 80's, when we were just starting to invent the technologies that now dominate our lives. Since then, we are getting collectively less and less intelligent. We don't remember things like phone numbers or birthdays because our devices remember things for us. We don't commit facts to memory because we can Google those facts when we need them. We don't plan social activities in advance because we can text our friends while we drive. We are becoming less intelligent, and some people at the fringes are starting to suspect this, so if there ever was a time for self driving cars to become a thing, or for a robot factory to become the model for manufacturing, we had better get this stuff done NOW, before we get too stupid to figure out how it would actually work. The computer scientists at Google and at that sketchy downtown startup are the last generation of computer scientists who can get this done, if it can be done at all. If you read enough of Iain M. Banks' Culture series you might notice that his post-scarcity society relies upon a network of artificially intelligent entities to keep things going, so not only has the culture moved past the limits of physical resources, they also have unlimited intellectual power. Here in 2017 the fear is that we will fail to reach the goal of unlimited intellectual power, and we will fall into a new dark age.
Unlike a lot of other slashdoters I'm a proponent of patents (sane ones that is). It's hard to get competition going in the US with robotics due largely to patents owned by other companies and countries. Poses a question - do the countries that ignore patent law (China) have a large advantage here? Even if embroiled in litigation they still win.
The next Industrial Revolution will be about energy, not automation. The automation one happened already and this is only a refinement.
In the 90s, it seemed that the answer to high wages was to outsource to third world nations. Now that China has rising wages, it sounds like the answer is robots. Why didn't American companies invest in robots in the 90s instead of outsourcing?
FTA:
People started feeling the pain of high-cost labor
"High-cost labor" is corporate-speak for people who want to eat. Heaven forbid they get enough money to feed themselves.
Don't trust any concentration of power.
You take a roughly 100% IT outfit like yahoo and extrapolate it to industrial manufacturer. Hu. No. Industrial manufacture does not have such a short effect. Innovation can take much more than 5 years to spread, if only because of patents. New IT stuff is the exception rather than the norm.
It means when the robot uprising comes, those countries with the greatest robot population will be taken over, while we in the USA will escape relatively unharmed. We will be the headquarters for the resistance, which slowly takes the world back. Robot overlords indeed...
- Mike
We have Trump setting us back 50 years back with insane military spending on top of already insane military spending.
And robbing from the poor and sick, I wish I could say it is the final Republican shit sandwich we have to eat.
But far from it because you cant fix stupid.
Well maybe missing the next industrial revolution isn't so bad. The first one actually created a boom for America in human jobs. It's why so many migrated to America in the first place. Nobody has really thought this through on how robots and technology could actually bring a depression to fruition with its elimination of jobs. The answers as to what happens to all the displaced workers is being ignored.
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Ignore it.
The ironic thing is that the US is actually known as a leader in robotics. Car assembly lines are almost completely automated, for example. Chip making, pick and pull machinery is a common staple. CAD/CAM is a part of everything and anything in the US. Want to be able to design a new widget? Better know Solidworks, AutoCAD, or similar.
The talk about the US losing the robotics race is unfounded. In fact, contrary to what a lot of people believe, the US still doing manufacturing, and is definitely not going anywhere. Robotics will definitely be a part of how new plants are done, period.
Author just pontificates truisms as if they were true: "People started feeling the pain of high-cost labor and there's an appetite for automation that we haven't seen before." Not since 1975... increases in productivity have gone to corporate profits, there has NEVER been a high cost labour problem in the last 30+ years ANYWHERE. Its the opposite they have deliberately undermined purchasing power and are worried about their falling rate of profit. The great recession was a financial collapse coming to a head with the worst possible policy response creating a real recession that for many has not really ended. It could be fixed with correct policy decisions and by keystroke but that's ideologically opposite to the wishes of the elites. http://bilbo.economicoutlook.n... The latest fad is to hype up the 'robots are coming'. Notwithstanding the larger context that automation has to make profit so further undermining spending equals income will make it hard for automation too. Civil engineer core in the USA says they need to rebuild all the infrastructure 50+ year old bridges. Bring on the robots and the people. The whole paradigm of automation is that it transforms jobs for workers and creates as many as it eliminates by aggregate. All those warehouse robots have electronics and sensors which break often so there's a whole industry of service/repair that will expand. As much as its the job of places like slashdot to inform its readers it does stoop to the hyperbole or 'fake news' level vested interests saying that their vested interest outcome in inevitable.
Not enough people there? Only about a billion, isn't it?
Or perhaps it's the quality of the LAND MASS itself! That's it! If you stand on certain countries' land, you magically become capable of building robots!
Or could it be genes...
1) Bring manufacturing back.
2) Automate manufacturing.
3) We control the robots producing things instead of being at the mercy of another nation begging for free merchandise with nothing to offer in return.
America has outsourced manufacture to China, reaping the benefits of a great trade advantage: with under 5% unemployment, we have access to cheap goods and have a smaller export economy than import economy. We go out to people who make crap cheap, get that crap from them, and sell them relatively little.
When robot automation--the tag we're giving to the next visible step in technical progress--takes over manufactories, one of three things will happen.
If that automation comes at a pace the economy can handle, then the purchasing power increase will turn over jobs at a non-critical rate. China's manufacturing labor force, as a particular example, will experience a small nudge upwards in unemployment, and will recover those jobs as prices come crashing down and export markets dramatically expand to create new demand. They'll end up needing 10 Chinese workers where they previously needed 50, and selling 50 products where they could only sell 10, getting a net zero loss of employment.. America and Europe will end up wealthy as all hell importing Chinese goods to the same specifications as always (which, face it, is typically a WalMart supplier demanding cheap-cheap-cheap, although there are plenty of high-quality goods coming out of China), but at a fraction of the cost.
If that automation comes at a rapid pace beyond what the economy can handle, China will experience loss of employment exceeding expansion speed of its exports. Unemployment will soar, and it will take years for China's economy to recover. The goods produced will still be cheap, so America and Europe stay wealthy--and the export market to those continents will at least help China recover.
If that automation makes it cheaper for America to produce goods at home than to import them from China, then China's export market collapses. America ends up with locally-made goods because Chinese goods are more-expensive than USA-made goods; meanwhile America is insulated from loss of export markets because its export markets are small, as it has the great advantage of an import trade without the risk of an export trade.
America's market is self-sustaining, in large part. We produce a lot of economic activity servicing domestic needs, rather than exporting; we're insulated from global market shifts in that way, so anything that boosts the productivity of foreign nationals just makes us stronger, since we can import their stuff and make something else here for ourselves.
Imports make us strong. Exports make us the lap dogs of other nations, subject to their whims lest they embargo us.
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Robots are already a fixture in manufacturing in the US. Robotics is already a factor in every large factory and even many smaller ones. What the US did was mistake economy for foreign policy and governance. On the back of the taxpayer the oligarchs were allowed to fill the US universities with foreign nationals and then replace citizens in the workplace with temporary aliens all so they could pad executive bonuses. This was a critical error because in an information economy the US gave away all of its IP.
"automation will, in the long-term, improve society and help humans live better lives"
"When one door closes, another one opens". If you die in the long hallway between the doors, that's YOUR problem.
Enjoy the decline!
The worst part of this whole "Not made in the U.S.A." problem is that cheap shipping was in part due to an American invention: the standardized shipping container.
#DeleteFacebook
The robots have been coming all my life. Are they here yet?
It wasn't working 'people' that felt the pain. Can we finally openly acknowledge that we live in a caste society in America? The oligarchy 'felt the pain', not us. We just felt fucked over.
Just build factories of robot-makers. Boo-ya, solved.
We going to get coal miners their jobs back in the holes. Nevermind that most lost their jobs to robots because the work is dangerous and dirty, and because burning coal to generate power is too dirty. Hell, we 'muricans love to breathe air that we can see. And don't worry, if you're priced out of the health care you're going to need to treat your black lung- we going to loosen up regs on alternative healers. We'd prefer to invest in digging up more coal than developing alternative, cleaner technologies like wind and solar- we'll leave that to the Europeans and Chinese. Yup, we're making 'murica great again!
We're going to make 'murica the world's car supplier again (again?) by scaling back emissions requirements. But the ROW isn't, so all those new, dirty cars will only be sold in the US and a few other 3rd world countries that love pollution. We could instead get out in front of it by investing more in electric car development, but we prefer the faster, easier approach of pulling pollution control junk out of existing designs because it's easier than developing electric or fuel cell vehicle technology. We're 'muricans, dammit, and that's how we do things.
Now can we please do something to help the families of the buggy whip makers who lost their jobs when Ford invented that damned automobile?
The us makes more than ever. It's just advanced machinery, not toasters.
Consumer spending isn't the source of money. Labor automation is the sort of game changer that can have the net effect of eliminating the need for consumer spending (at least on the scale that it has been needed in the past).
It is a hard concept to get one's head around, just because it has never been seen before at this scale.
The way our economy works is not a constant. Historically speaking, it is rather recent.
We'd better bomb them back into liking us.
As a small business manufacturing a fairly niche product, in the past few months I've noticed that vendors are less willing to to small production runs of custom parts. Last week I had a CNC milling vendor tell me, and I quote, "Well, you haven't done any business with us in a while so we're unable to work with you." This week, I had a pallet company tell me that they could no longer make 25 custom pallets for me and are only taking minimum quantities of 200. Another vendor, who I always thought was quite busy, suddenly closed their doors. Other vendors are pushing out their schedules because they're getting more work.
As for making things in China, they have gotten to the point with quality and mass production that they are no longer willing to take on small jobs. One company that made custom cast & milled aluminum wheel hubs used to do short runs of 40 pieces but they have gotten contracts from major auto companies and are no longer doing the piddly stuff.
Shipping costs are trivial, but increased lead times are not. To say nothing of 2nd shift 'unlicensed production'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
China will automate until people start having issues there finding work.
At that point, the social contract for "allow us leaders to be dictators in exchange for you having a rapidly increasing income" will break, and you'll begin to hear chants for throwing the robots out.
America is not missing out on the next industrial revolution, exactly. They are deliberately skipping over the robots that make the robots, focusing instead on the robots that make the robots that make the robots. They are manually building prototypes now.
Sometime in the future all our U.S. jobs will have been replaced by robots. Shortly thereafter, they will be outsourced by cheaper Indian or Chinese robots.
It will be to laugh as out of work U.S. robots join us on skid row looking for a spare hit of oil.
Tracy Johnson
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BT
This is 100% true. It's a virtual certainty that the US will NOT be part of the "next big thing" involving manufacturing precisely because so much leading-edge manufacturing has left the US. I know this personally because I've watch my industry ebb out of the US and I've had to follow it to Asia in lieu of starting over completely. I know manufacturing well so the latter is a stupid decision. The critical thing: 1) ALL innovation in high tech is manufacturing innovation, and 2) ALL innovation builds on the shoulders of the prior manufacturing technology. If you aren't manufacturing you have neither the means nor the incentive nor the knowledge of the problem space to ever be part of innovation. What I knew 20 years ago would be useless in dealing with most of the current manufacturing problems faced by my industry, and yet it was 20 years ago when the industry started to outsource and race out of the US. There is no way in hell the US will ever be a player in my industry ever again.
This article reminds me of one of the factors that aggravated the removal of steel industries and automotive industries from the United States' we didn't get bombed out in WWII.
Timeline 1960s... The Japanese and European automotive industries and steel industries were going full blast using automated techniques designed and installed in the 1950s. Meanwhile in the U.S. labor unions were on strike fighting tooth and nail to retain the labor intensive 1930s vintage technology and block automated systems totally.
Being first doesn't mean you are the best. The U.S. was the first in codifying many standards (ANSI). But, in the modern world one of the biggest handicaps in marketing U.S. made hard goods is that they DO NOT comply with International Standards Organization (ISO) standards. Heck, U.S. goods often don't even use the same fasteners that the rest of the world uses.
The U.S. doesn't need to be part of some "One World Government" but, dang it, we need to be using the same rule book as the rest of the planet if we want to compete. Acting as if our local tribal customs are some universal requirement is just going to leave U.S. industries farther and farther in the dust.
NRRPT/RCT