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.

Comments

Elon Musk, Tesla, and Robotics

[catchblue22]

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.

Re:Nonsense

[silentcoder]

You know what else they don't do ? Buy shit.

Too much automation and the savings in labour cost is outweighed by the losses in demand (demand can only exist as long as enough people are earning enough money that some of the ones who want your product can also afford it).

Now I am not panicking much. Automation is a good thing. It can create a much better society - but one thing is for certain: that society CANNOT be capitalist. A capitalist society cannot exist unless there are lots of viable means for people to earn a living - you can't have any business without customers.

So what kind of options are available ? Forget the history of the luddites, we've never seen automation on the scale that's now possible before and nothing in human history is any guide. But there are two historical events that are - they just aren't human history. The first is when cars displaced horses. Today there is less than 1% the horse population there was 150 years ago. The rest became glue.
The second is dogs. Until the 19th century every dog on earth had a job. There were even dogs in restaurants running on a treadmill to keep the spit turning. Today ? The only dogs that have a job now are bloodhounds and seeing-eye dogs. Yet there's still a dog in almost every home. We've kept them around, in a life that's basically a 20-year holiday, while raising their standard of living and their life-expectancy - and without expecting anything in return. We did it, just because we like their company.

The question before humanity is: are we going to treat each other like dogs or horses ?