Automation: The Exaggerated Threat of Robots (flassbeck-economics.com)

It will take quite a lot of time before robots become cheaper than workers in emerging markets such as Africa, argues Nico Beckert of Flassbeck Economics, a consortium of researchers who aim to provide economics insights with a more realistic basis. From the post: All industrialized countries used low-cost labour to build industries and manufacture mass-produced goods. Today, labour is relatively inexpensive in Africa, and a similar industrialization process might take off accordingly. Some worry that industrial robots will block this development path. The reason is that robots are most useful when doing routine tasks -- precisely the kind of work that is typical of labour-intensive mass production. At the moment, however, robots are much too expensive to replace thousands upon thousands of workers in labour-intensive industries, most of which are in the very early stages of the industrialization process. Robots are currently best used in technologically more demanding fields like the automobile or electronics industry.

Even a rapid drop in robot prices would not lead to the replacement of workers by robots in the short term in Africa where countries lag far behind in terms of fast internet and other information and communications technologies. They also lack well-trained IT experts. Other problems include an unreliable power supply, high energy costs and high financing costs for new technologies. For these reasons, it would be difficult and expensive to integrate robots and other digital technologies into African production lines.

Comments

Re:So what?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Africa will never be big as a labor source. African nations have weak rule of law, weak courts that can resolve business disputes, weak safety for the businessmen traveling about, poor infrastructure, anti-business governments that see foreign businesses as something to squeeze money from, the list goes on. Until this changes, African labor won't happen. Even the Chinese have to bring their own workers along and insist on immunity from local laws so they can build their own trains.

Re:What kind of premise is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

So we still have a lot of apples to pick. The solutions are to get Americans to do it for much lower wages than they currently find acceptable, import labor that will accept the prevailing wage, or do it with robots. As you and the article note, the robot thing is just magical thinking.

You missed the third choice, which is only made possible by the existence of mostly free global markets: Plant apple orchards in countries where labor is cheap, then bulldoze our apple orchards and replace them with food crops that can be mostly harvested by automation (wheat, corn, etc.). Then, import the apples while exporting grains.

More magical thinking. Agriculture simply doesn’t work that way.

OTOH there is no real reason that high paying STEM jobs can’t be much more widely distributed across the globe and that is exactly what is going to happen.

So America will never be rid of the need for apple pickers, but there will be fewer tech jobs. Especially if America continues to throw tantrums and elect idiots to pursue broken ideas like punitive tariffs and isolationist immigration policies.