Machines replace migrants as Maine blueberry harvest blooms
miamiherald.com
miamiherald.com
This particular issue is of less concern to American workers and if anything it's a good thing in that no one has to do backbreaking labor. It's like decrying the loss of coal mining --yes, it's a loss for the people losing those jobs, but society as a whole and the labor force as a whole is better off without those kinds of thankless and really hard jobs.
The sad part is that we have unskilled people willing to do these jobs.
I hired someone from Mexico on a visa into a 6 figure a year job who's father was literally a farm laborer. He was quite capable to do his job. Expecting nothing from people is a self fulfilling prophecy.
It's true that a good many could transition to other higher level jobs, but at that cost of labor, jobs will go to the domestic labor force. I.e. If I have a job where the going rate is 25/hr, why would I go thru the hoops of sponsorship in one case and on the other hand running afoul of immigration law by hiring a worker who can't legally work? Foreign migrant laborers are on special visas and don't transfer to other sectors.
So, for example, if Brazil is doing particularly well, I'm sure the citizens will want to fend off workers from places where jobs have eroded more quickly.
We are only now recovering from agriculture.
Now, that might not be entirely undesirable, from the perspective of the legislator (I.E. Move people up the feeding chain to more productive, better paying jobs, and automate the drudge work like raking berries) - but at the very least, they need to be aware of the impact of what they are doing.
While moving to a basic income might require a shift in society's values, it's no more likely to cause criminal behavior than the ever increasing income disparity here in the U.S. A basic income would also likely usher in a new age of entrepreneurship once members of all economic classes can entertain the thought of doing work they love rather than forced to take any work they can get.
But I guess it's better to just quote a folklore and pretend the idleness is bad (of course Donal Trump got an education because he could readily afford it, didn't make him less wrong).
It will be a shame when such an entry level job is no longer available to teenagers to learn about doing a job and working in a team.
The key reasons to automate, is it allows us to make this type of food available to masses for fractions of the cost of what it would take for a human to grow it.
There's nothing wrong with people doing low paid work. Those of us who can't stand it impose our values on others. I worked a lot of manual labor while studying. I worked on mowing crews who spend their lives mowing the same pieces of grass over and over. You'd think they hate it but they were happy to work a low stress, secure job and just do their hobbies in their off time, whether coaching kids or building model railways. Of course that's not everyone but it's wrong to pretend we can walk in everyone's shoes.
You will have difficultly securing quality education for your children, either because you can't afford private schools, or because you can't afford to live in a location where the public schools are of high quality.
You also are likely to be living pay-check to pay-check (sometimes even less, with pay-check lenders taking their vig), and only a small health-emergency away from becoming bankrupt, and quite possibly homeless.
So, no - I think there's a lot wrong with people doing low paid work. It might be okay for the young, or students, or the retired, but for most adults, low-paid menial work on a prolonged basis in the United States is a financial and personal disaster.
As long as that US system of inequality exists, I suggest we work hard to automate, eliminate, and as quickly as possible banish labor for adults that won't secure them a reasonable living for them and their household. Educate, Train, and move them up the feeding chain to something more sustainable.
Twin studies suggest educational achievement is highly (over 50%) heritable. If you succeeded at replacing labor with education as a source of human dignity it would be surprising if the relative amount of dignity with which one was imparted did not depend on one's educational achievement. Combined with the first point it would lead to the formation of a kind of hereditary estates of the realm; you'd have the clergy (the academics), the nobles (the highly educated) and the commoners (everybody else). Would you find such an outcome acceptable? (Just to be clear, I mean this as a genuine, not rhetorical, question.)
1. I am not counting home gardens as these are a fun hobby (I miss having a garden).
It does highlight to me that we are getting closer to the point of needing to rethink labour distribution, because the non-technical jobs are the easiest to replace with machines.
The minuet you think Central planning can override natural market forces you run into much bigger problems that usually end in catastrophe for the people you were trying to 'help'.
Corporations are central planning. Just on a smaller scale. (Though, companies like the old IBM were bigger then some small countries.)
No, they're not. Corporations plan their production and allocate their resources based on market information within their industry in an attempt to capitalize on the market signals they observe.
Central planning is a process by which a central government attempts to control and direct the output of a nation's economy by deciding what to produce and when, ignoring market signals.
These are vastly different concepts.
eli_gottlieb sibling-comment is spot on.
Only the Luddites want to smash machines and keep a shirt costing a days wages.
As long as that food is not then exported to consumers who are willing to pay more for it than the poor are able.
Automated strawberry picking is still hard, but Agrobot makes a robotic strawberry picking machine.[1] This is an vision-guided multi-arm robot system, which is rare in agriculture. These more complex machines are still marginal economically, but the electronics can only get cheaper.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/video/agrobot-automates-the-work-of-berry...
I think bananas are one of the hardest to automate, but I can't find the old reference I had on this.
The same people who pay the taxes (i.e. everyone) will also get the money, only distributed differently.
The biggest problem will be accounting for pollution embedded in imports, and refunding taxes for exports. Otherwise you will have what's going in on in Germany where they export all their pollution to China.
Your Excel analogy is apt -- just as a tech investor or startup founder in 1990 needed to be aware of the revolutionary impact programs like Excel were having on the world of business, or one in 2010 needed to be aware of the ways software is eating the world, in 2015 they need to be in touch with the ways mechanization et al are on their way to changing everything.