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Fear of Robots Taking Jobs in the Short Term is Overblown, Says General Electric CEO (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: "I think before we go to the phase where it's only robots at every bench, we are going to go through a phase of smarter workers," General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt told reporters on March 30. GE has been investing heavily in futuristic manufacturing techniques. Immelt said that in Lafayette, Indiana -- where GE Aviation is ramping up production for portions of its new fuel-efficient LEAP aircraft engine -- "we're going to add workers, but probably not as many as we would have twenty years ago" and each worker will be "higher value, smarter, more productive." [...] So if phase one is smart workers, what's the next? "I'm not that smart," Immelt said. "I don't know exactly how many phases that we're going to go through. But I think we're going to be in phase 'smart worker' for a fair amount of time. I really do. I think we're better off as a country focusing on the smart-worker phase than going right to 'robots are evil.'"
How short term is short term to this guy? I expect robots to take over 99% of the workplace within my lifetime. That makes it very relevant and not overblown in the slightest.
...says company that makes robots for assembly lines.
What's next, an article by Wall Street about how regulation is not needed in the banking industry?
What a lot of people don't seem to get is that if a substantial fraction of labor gets displaced, market forces will tend to devalue *all* labor.
Yes, maybe *my* job is safe, but my pay doesn't have to stay high.
Suppose all truck drivers are replaced with automation. That's 1M more people on the job market. Yes, maybe they can't do MY job, but, with no alternative, they'll try to get educated and move up the labor food chain.
And with more people in general chasing ever fewer jobs, there'll always be someone willing to do any given job for cheaper--including mine.
Arguably this has already happened significantly. Do you realize that the share of corporate productivity that goes to labor has shrunk in half compared to 1973?
That if labor got the same share of productivity today that it had in 1973, that we'd all have 2x the purchasing power? I'd love to be paid 2x the purchasing power. I'd be done with my mortgage, be completely unworried about retirement and paying for medical care, etc.
I welcome automation replacing labor, but we have to find a way to distribute the resulting wealth such that the people who own things have don't have ALL the wealth and so that the people who can no longer make ends meet in a depressed labor market can live decent lives.
--PeterM
I work with a group of people who are all "smart enough" to automate most of their work, but they don't do it. Instead, they procrastinate, drag things out, and then when the deadline approaches, it's "too late" to employ automated techniques and they just hand-craft a solution and ship it. Someday, the company will lose out to competitors who do automate their work more effectively, but that will take decades before the competition can both manufacture a better, cheaper product and shift the customer base to start buying it instead of ours (10-20 year replacement cycle, strong brand loyalty, low price sensitivity in the market, etc.)
He should tell that to the people being laid off at GE Power Systems in Schenectady (home of the zip code 12345)
That's exactly what a robot would say if it had killed the CEO of general electric and taken his place.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I suspect that more jobs are lost to (and will be lost to) off-shoring than robots.
Please please please tell me you work as either an English teacher or an editor for a news paper or magazine.
don't raise our taxes to offset the job losses from our automation.
Fun fact: GM shut down production at factories for 3 months because they'd flooded the market with too many vehicles. That was due to productivity increases from automation/robotics.
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now say 20 hail Laffers and repent ye sinner!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
how do you distribute that wealth from automation without making it feel like stealing?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The word you are looking for is "artisinal", as in "hand crafted locally sourced organic free range gluten free artisinal 3mm x 16mm screw"
I read the internet for the articles.
Even if the total job count isn't shrinking any further, we're seeing a bifurcation of manufacturing labor into a small cadre highly skilled, highly paid specialists and a pool of low wage positions that only exist because it is not yet cost effective to automate their positions. Great if you're one of the new factory elite but sucks if you're the middle aged blue collar worker no longer relevant in the modern manufacturing landscape.
Trump doesn't know it, but he's Made Robots Great Again!
(Before you complain about "again", T never defined the first time in MAGA either. He deflected the question in the debates.)
Table-ized A.I.
Left unsaid is where those smarter workers will come from. The current answers are: a) Trained by somebody else's company, b) From a body shop which told me the worker was smart so I am not liable for his/her actual deficiencies. The answer we need is: Trained and retained by the hiring company from decent candidates which will be admitted through revisions to profoundly poor HR and Management filters.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
What a lot of people don't seem to get is that if a substantial fraction of labor gets displaced, market forces will tend to devalue *all* labor.
Yes, maybe *my* job is safe, but my pay doesn't have to stay high.
To be fair, Jeff Immelt is simply speaking from one of the basic fallacies. He probably learned it at management school, and hasn't spent even a moment in critical thought about it.
Specifically, modern economics assumes infinite consumption which implies infinite need for work. "Infinite consumption" comes from either the Malthus'ian idea that human population will grow exponentially until resources run out, or the idea of "always wanting more", as in bigger house, more cars, more land, more toys, etc.
Personal consumption has limits, and industrialized nation population *doesn't* grow without bounds, and productivity keeps going up, and you start to realize that the job pool is finite, and any reduction in jobs puts stress on the people who need to find jobs to live.
The US is at about $50,000 per person in production, and that's a huge amount. Note that this is per person, and not per working person. We have enough wealth in this country to let everyone live comfortably with only half our workforce - and productivity keeps going up.
It's a fallacy of modern economics, it's unsustainable (labor versus shrinking job market) and something has to give eventually.
Whether we transition to a different system that lets people enjoy our production, or whether civilization crashes and burns, depends on people like Jeff Immelt.
Specifically, whether Jeff Immelt, and other like him, can unlearn modern economics and help transition us to a different model.
> Says the man who deep throats community organizers!
I don't think robots would do that good of a job. I would be more concerned with the threat of immigrant workers.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Not only "Made By Humans". But "Buy Human" and "Hire Humans".
Of course, we could all end up fully employed by the robots, who would own everything, in order to service the robots. Because only humans would be willing to do servicing jobs that robots feel is beneath them.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
So first he says that each worker will be "higher value, smarter, more productive" with phase one being "smart workers" and then he says, "I'm not that smart," doesn't that imply that his own job is right at the top of the list of jobs to be replaced?
In the long term, you're fsck'd
The OTHER factor that idled the factories for 3 months was lack of demand.
D'you think the market would have been "flooded" if laborers had 2x the purchasing power?
And 2x the purchasing power is *exactly* what labor would have if labor had the same share of corporate productivity that labor had in 1973.
Instead, GM would be looking to build more factories instead of idling their capacity.
"Virtuous cycle: productivity increases leads to more pay in wages which leads to more demand which leads to more investment in productivity increases."
Guess what got broken when the elite started hogging all the benefits of increased productivity up to the top?
--PeterM
You seem to forget how that worked out - the Terminator was captured and re-programmed. It has no loyalty to it's owner - it's just a robot. And the more robot guards you have, the more likely that one of them is going to be hacked. (and it only takes one).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If he wanted people to trust the direction of advanced automation (robotics, AI, ML), he failed at that objective.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You laugh, but people within industrial centers do buy fasteners made locally. People know the factory names and know that their local economy is dependent on the people, not the machines.
I suppose it is not so laughable when you actually get to drive by the factory every day and are asked "how's the kids?" when filling your gas tank by someone that works in the plating department.
Thanks for making me laugh! :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.