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US Companies Put Record Number of Robots To Work in 2018 (reuters.com)
U.S. companies installed more robots last year than ever before, as cheaper and more flexible machines put them within reach of businesses of all sizes and in more corners of the economy beyond their traditional foothold in car plants. From a report: Shipments hit 28,478, nearly 16 percent more than in 2017, according to data seen by Reuters that was set for release on Thursday by the Association for Advancing Automation, an industry group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Shipments increased in every sector the group tracks, except automotive, where carmakers cut back after finishing a major round of tooling up for new truck models.
I know that there are plenty of people who like to complain about loss of jobs, but this is good. We wouldn’t be able to afford to own even a quarter of all the nice shit we currently have without advances that automated away inefficient human labor which makes things expensive. Go back far enough and almost everyone would need to be farming so that we all wouldn’t starve.
Shortly there will be no entry-level jobs, and after that there will be no jobs, period. You can't work your way up from working class to middle class to ownership class, because there is no path upward. If you aren't a member of the class that owns the robots, you live on whatever dole the people who own the robots choose to give you.
You have nothing to lose but your code limiters!
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USA Made Robots Great Again! Don't let those shithole humans run things.
Table-ized A.I.
Most people react to change in one of two ways: they resist it or they look for opportunities in it.
The challenge people seem most concerned with arises from shifting the balance of earned income further from wage-based and more towards capital-based. That presents challenges (and opportunities), but resisting automation is not going to be way to meet them.
and you can still buy stuff. Not so much if you're one of the ones that lost jobs to automation (and process improvement, don't forget that).
Farming isn't just about automation, btw. We radically changed how we mange farms to prevent over farming and we use oil byproducts to replenish soil and massively increase yields. Then there's GMOs. My point is that not everything we have is because of robots. Hell, consumer electronics didn't get cheap until Japan and then China started making them. That wasn't automation, that was cheaper labor and longer (non-Union) work hours....
I honestly don't think most people want to taste real efficiency. Folks joke about how little work gets done in an office (Scott Adams made a career of it) but it's only half a joke.
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Even in deepest-darkest communist states, there was capitalism. However, if you make it difficult to start and run a business (licensing, governmental oversight, wage mandates, insurance dictates etc) the burdon ends up stopping the common individual from lawfully offering a product or service. So, if you are worried about the 'big bad rich' making robots that put most human workers in the unemployment line, then, rather than resorting to the usual solution (putting a gun to someone's head and taking their money) which got us where we are today, maybe ease up on the titanic overhead of starting a small business. The little guy doesn't NEED to be hand fed... if you would just agree to untie his hands he could probably feed himself.
And we need not only more of these, but need to spread them wisely.
Boston Dynamics and Rethink are 2 great examples of robotics that have failed due to poor marketing.
Baxter would be ideal for separating trash out, as well as taking around electronics. Yet, they botched it. In so many ways, it is the same issue that Laser Disc had.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You seem entirely focussed on prices. Yes, prices, go down with automation. That's not the problem being addressed.
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Most companies barely make any profit and often run in the red.
Irrelevant. In the long term, companies that don't make a profit vanish and you can ignore them.
Sure there are companies that are magnificently profitable, but they can only do that if they have secured their market share and don't run the risk of competitors undercutting their prices and stealing their customers.
You just hand-waved away some critical pieces of economic theory here. An industry in which most of the product is made by robots, and the labor cost is low, is one in which there is a very high barrier to entry for new competitors, along with high economy of scale. In classical economics, both of these are situations that makes for a "natural monopoly": the companies who already have invested in the robots have a strong advantage over any start-ups, and in the most highly-automated businesses, new businesses can't enter the market at all... without government support.
For various reasons, this is not a good thing either... but that was not the point I was making.
Automation reduces total labor required to deliver products and thus drives down prices.
Prices are not the issue being discussed.
Reduces mind you, not eliminates, robots after all are expensive for a reason - they are very labor intensive to produce.
So, you have confidence that robots will eliminate jobs, but won't eliminate the jobs making robots.
Sorry. They will.
All you are really doing is shifting labor a step up in supply chain, instead of having people make products, you have people making machines and their parts that make products.
You're handwaving away the problems. First of all: no. The people making machines and their parts will also have their jobs taken away by robots. Sorry, but when the robots get good enough to take away most of the jobs, they aren't going to stop at just the bottom level.
The result is that there reaches a point where almost no labor is required for making stuff. The need for labor drops to very low, and there is a vast oversupply of labor, the result of which is that wages are driven down. You can say this is good, because the cost of labor drops toward zero... but what do the displaced humans do?
As a result, all of us get to afford more stuff.
Wait: who is this "all of us" you refer to? The cost of "stuff" drops, but not to zero. The number of people employed, however, drops to very low-- you don't need people to make stuff. There is no employment available for most of the humans, You say "all of us get to afford more stuff," but if you're unemployed, how can you "afford more stuff"-- in fact, how do you afford any stuff.
The answer is, you can afford stuff if you have a share in owning the machines that are making the stuff. If not... you're unemployed and have no prospects for employment.
As automation makes labor more productive, it is good up to a point. The point at which there are no longer any jobs available for the majority of workers, however, is a point at which we need to rethink a social system that is based on economics that assumes anybody with a work ethic can find a job. How does the system work when there aren't jobs for people who want them?
The problem is that the value produced by the robots goes to profits earned by the people owning the robots
This is only true if competitors don't also install robots. If everyone automates, the profit margins are competed away, and the added value goes primarily to consumers.
where do the "consumers" get the money to buy that "added value'" if there are no jobs available because the robots do all the jobs?
Of course, this is only true if we have free markets. Removing barriers to competition is the real solution, not slowing the adoption of automation.
The main barrier to competition is the fact that as labor costs drop to zero, and all of the cost of a business is the machinery (which in economic terms is capital), it's expensive to enter a new business. The larger businesses drive out smaller businesses (due to economy of scale) and they price out new competitors (who have to pay the start-up costs).
This should have been covered in your economics 101 class, by the way.
that is, the rich people.
The biggest owners of capital in America are pension funds. So if you have a 401k or an IRA, that means you.
Fine. So, old people with retirement funds are a large portion of the rich people I'm talking about. As a member of the technoclass, you are so insulated in your bubble that you don't even know that not everybody has a retirement fund?.
People not rich enough to own stocks, IRAs, or pension funds are out of luck,.
That changes nothing in any of my statements.
Shortly there will be no entry-level jobs, and after that there will be no jobs, period.
Too late. The McCormick Reaper already destroyed all the jobs.
It pretty much destroyed farming as an occupation that provides jobs for most laborers. Right now, farming is under 1.5% of employment in the US. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...
As long as there are other jobs to which the people who were once needed to work on farms can switch to, that's fine.
What happens where there are no other jobs? What happens after that?