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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.
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
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Robots worked well for Japan. 3rd largest economy, far larger than its population could do without robots, and even it is tiny island.
Also population crash isn't a problem, worst thing that happens is lower quality of life.
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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Surely this guy has noticed Amazon is already the leader in using robots for fulfillment work, going so far as to purchase their robot supplier (Kiva is now Amazon Robots) so they could ramp up production in order to purchase everything they could make...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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.
Better hope not, because if America goes down you can be sure it'll take down the rest of the world with it. Not necessarily talking nuclear hellfire here, but you can rest assured that the collapse of one of the lynchpins of the ballyhooed "interconnected global economy" will drag everyone else down with it.
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)
All the big American companies already have their headquarters in Europe or Bermuda and the like so I think we can cope.
-- Cheers!
Well, in Japan, many of the people have gone to the services industry... entertainment and high-class "waitressing" and the like. When there's nothing to produce, people will just have to get, er, creative on how to extract money from those that still have it.
We got along way as economically we are nowhere close to where the USSR was in the final days when people lined up for hours for a loaf of bread and milk or waited 10 years for a car.
However, I do imagine if a democrat gets elected next some nut right wingers will use guns and try to start a civil war. Not all republicans but 10% of the population for sure in my opinion as I read 1/3 of Republicans really do believe Obama was a muslim born in Kenya as fact!
Not an insult to conservative or Republican readers here. Just the 20% in the party with militant tendencies who read fake news
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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
Hey, look on the bright side. For once the USA may actually show up to a world war on time...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
Everyone enjoys a race to the bottom right? Those service industries you're talking about were over-saturated 5 years ago.
Om, nomnomnom...
Cutting down or even eliminating a Federal Dept of Education which didn't even exist until 1978, is not defunding public education. Rather it's eliminating needless bureaucracy and returning the funding to where it belongs, the states. Which will result in more money getting into the classrooms, where it does the most good rather than funding ever more bureaocrats.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Well, in Japan, many of the people have gone to the services industry...
Well, in Japan, they have just about the highest suicide rate in the developed world. Maybe we don't want to emulate them too closely.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The answer is "VC hype". These endless stories about "AI" and "machine intelligence" and "autonomous cars" and now suddenly robots (again) is just hype from people looking for investment dollars. It isn't based in reality, and we won't have "AI" or self driving cars any time soon (if ever).
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.
Even at this time the Japanese corporations had an implied contract where if you dedicated yourself wholly to the corporation, the corporation would see to it that you would always have a job. It had been this way for sometime so robots replacing labor were more readily accepted.
I've always thought that the people who want less population should lead by example.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
You do realize that the fall of the Roman Empire threw Europe into what is commonly known as the dark ages, right?
"Surviving the fall" is always a lot more pleasant from the perspective of a few hundred or more years.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.