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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

This is what I've been thinking for quite a while but what allot of people seem to ignore - the "AI revolution" can very well "only" hit developing nations while skipping the developed ones.

Better, smarter robots are a threat to Chinese workers, not so much to say Dutch or Canadian workers.

The west can afford and is willing to pay more even for less, just look at how many people are willing to pay 10 times the price for "Organic Fare Traded Tomatoes" or any other "artisan" goods.

The west is also not as much dependent on manufacturing and the manufacturing it does do is usually high tech, low(er) volume and highly specialized one where it both might not make sense to automate everything and where people are more than willing to pay the extra to know that something was "hand crafted".

But overall we've developed a consumer culture especially in the past decade that is pretty much focused on retro/old school craftsmanship, small scale production and "artisan" touches, it almost makes one wonder if the whole "hipster revolution" wasn't hand crafted by some cabal of shadowy figures that foresaw the "rise of the machines", because our willingness to pay 250$ for a hand crafted hemp bag on etsy is just might be the thing that would protect us from AI automation.

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The robotics and machine revolution has already hit the US.

Car manufacturing: We still build cars here, but we don't employ nearly as many people.

Logging: contrary to popular belief, the spotted owl didn't destroy logging jobs. Machines that let 1 person replace 20 did.

Manufacturing is the easiest, first place to replace workers, but AI will replace lots of people in America. It looks like trucking and taxis are on the short list - that's a few million workers - but fast food restaurants are up next (and those innovations will move up the chain to fancier restaurants).

Over the last 200 years, there was almost always a new role for people when their job was automated, but over the last 20 years a lot of those new roles were lower paying service jobs.

No way is our consumer culture actually based on small scale production and artisan touches - and not that many of those artisan touches are made by people or machines in China. That may be what you notice, but most of America's paycheck goes to the regular old normal stuff.

But this is what already happened, we talk about the next level of automation, generic automation, machine learning, and next generation robotics that could replicate the finesse and agility of humans and are flexible enough to be adapted for any task.

The manufacturing in western nations in many cases is already as automated as it can get (yes there is always a room for more optimization but industries that have been automated since the 70's will and are already hitting diminishing returns), what has not been automated are mostly tasks that we choose not to automate for various reasons, many of which are cultural.

And yes most of the stuff we buy is mass produced, generic, and already highly automated but it's also not made in the US, the US consumer doesn't care about Chinese workers or unemployment in China, and it won't buy a 250$ hand crafted anything in China unless they are caught drunk in a tourist trap. And that's exactly the point artisan crafting and manufacturing has been developing in the US and it is pretty much immune to threats from automation and the AI/Machine Learning revolution because we as consumers are making a conscious decision to buy it. And even when we do buy mass produced generic crap just look at how many products are marketed today by selling you the human story from shoes to coffee beans it's all the same.

That is not true at all. We have an entire service economy that is rife for automation. It hasn't been automated yet because it wasn't cost efficient. It is rapidly becoming so.

Car washes in UK recently experienced this effect in reverse: because automated wash machines are capital-intensive they have been partly displaced by very cheap workers, mainly from Eastern Europe, who are allegedly modern day slaves [0]

[0] http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/dozen-modern-day-car-wash-sl...

I fully agree that manufacturing is largely automated in Western nations, but I disagree with your assertion that hand crafted stuff will save us. $250 hand crafted goods are a tiny and shrinking part of our economy bought by wealthy individuals. This is not 5% of our labor force, nor is it 5% of our GDP.

Most the stuff we buy isn't stuff - it's services, lawyers, finance, insurance, health care. AI will dramatically reduce employment in every single one of those industries. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#G...)

One kind of automation usually unmentioned is counter service. Gas stations in Europe are shedding staff and being replaced by self serve card machines - 24 hours, no staff.

Self serve shops where one staff member supervises 20 registers with shoppers doing the shop work!

These were the jobs that young people used two learn how to work at a job. I worked the register when I was a teenager and it taught me well and "can be trusted with money" is an important resume tickbox.

Most gas stations in the US have been that way for a long time. The main reason you have a human attendant is that it probably makes sense to have someone on-site to keep an eye on things/handle problems and their salary is presumably covered by the convenience store anyway. But it's often just the one person unless it's a larger store.

The main exception is the few states that don't let customers pump their own gas and the service stations that still exist.

We're at 4 double sided pumps, a roof, a sign and some CCTV. No people, no shop, no money.

I've seen those in the US but they're very uncommon. I assume the store pays for itself and it's considered a positive feature of the gas station by many motorists.

Why would they do that? There's no money in selling gas. Gas stations make all their money now selling food in the convenience store. The gas pumps are just a way to get you into the store. And they're moving upmarket, making custom sandwiches and hot meals, selling fresh fruit bowls, etc.

It's interesting that the labor cost doesn't seem to make _that_ big of a difference, compared to other variables like taxes. New Jersey has one of the cheapest gas prices in the nation but is one of the few states that forbids motorists to pump their own gas. I don't think it's due to logistics either, since neighboring PA and NY have much higher prices. I'm guessing it's just the taxes? What else could it be?

Agreed. Automation is also replacing service jobs.

Logging today: [1] No muss, no fuss, just a machine on an articulated chassis that neatly cuts off trees, picks them up in one motion, shears off the branches, cuts the trunk into convenient log lengths, and stacks the logs. About two trees a minute. From Ponsse, which essentially owns this industry, after beating out Komatsu and Deere.[2] Although you don't see it, the log was scanned for defects during the cutting process, which determined where it was cut and whether it becomes boards or chips.

No more lumberjacks.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luygMuoFnXs [2] http://www.ponsse.com

It's really ridiculous with logging. My grandfather cut wood as part of a 100 man crew, with axes and hand saws, horses, and all of the logistics involved in running a camp to house and feed that many men and animals, to cut a few hundred cord of wood a season. My father was a subcontractor who worked on a team of four, between the chopper with the chainsaw, the cable skidder driver, the guy on the landing slashing and piling, and the truck driver, and they cut a couple hundred cord a week. Now one guy with a cut-to-length system can cut a few hundred cord a day, if he's in good wood.

I think you're overestimating the amount of high-skill jobs people do in the west to be honest.

Like we've got a ton of truck drivers, who'll surely disappear within a few decades, which is just one at most two generations. In terms of policy planning this is a short-term timeframe.

Same for most people who work in retail, from clothes shops to supermarkets.

But even higher-level jobs will change massively. I highly doubt education will stay as labour-intensive. And I've got family members who are attorneys, and when I speak to them they'll tell me a ton of their workload is simply going through legal documents to look up stuff, and then preparing mostly template legal documents. A lot of this is manual work that'll disappear sooner than you'd think. We've already seen examples in this field with the automated bot that helps void parking tickets.

The amount of people that work high-skilled labour is really small if you ask me. I think a decent first order approximation is to compare the amount of people that work at the Walmart or Amazon headquarters, versus their stores and warehouses. For Amazon I've seen numbers that it's roughly 24k vs 240k, and consider that this is a tech-oriented company that's already automated a lot. For walmart it'd likely be 1:1000. Take a Facebook with 12k employees, a leader in a high-skill industry, and it's the margin of error of the employee count of a leader in a low-skill industry, not in China, but right here in the west, like say Walmart (> 1m employees) or say a franchise like McDonalds. These are also Dutch or Canadian workers.

An attorney friend of mine told me that discovery is being affected by this. Instead of having a team of higher level attorneys supervise a team of lower level attorneys (and maybe paralegals also) sorting through tons of papers in discovery, those high level attorneys train an algorithm on what documents are of particular interest from a small subset of them all (creating the training set) and then they let the algo do the work.

An anesthesiologist friend of mine went back and got his MBA because he's certain that machines will dramatically reduce the amount of jobs for anesthesiologists; you'll have one anesthesiologist supervising X machines instead of X anesthesiologists.

Quite true; my wife works in e-discovery and much more of her work is in normalizing messy data sets than doing the discovery itself.

Oh, I'm sure that lawyers will be the last to go. They make the rules, after all.

Are you sure?

    Artificial intelligence was now out-performing the capabilities of junior
    lawyers and paralegals in due diligence, discovery and document drafting.
    Upcoming predictive analytics would be able to assess the outcome of court
    cases while legal diagnostics systems analysed legal problems and provided
    advice.

http://www.afr.com/business/legal/robolawyers-of-the-future-...

One thing to keep in mind is that the demand of services is fairly elastic. If the cost of legal services go down dramatically the demand will go up quite a bit. The reason many people don't use these services is because of cost and decide to forgo/settle.

I bet there will be a lot of refinancing of mortgages if the closing costs were $500 and the process was one click.

I presume that this is the case with a lot of professional services. In that sense service based economies are better situated than manufacturing based economies.

It is not just manufacturing that is going to be replaced by AI and Robots and it will affect developing and developed countries.

Already there are a lot of junior lawyers being replaced [0].

Check out what a former CEO of McDonald's said about robots and the fast food industry [1].

> “I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry – it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging french fries,” the former US chief executive Ed Rensi told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html [1] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/25/former-mcdona...

I wonder where the senior lawyers will come from...

[edit] then again, automation of software development tasks held back the software industry at all...

I think you're missing the point. It's not that AI will replace all lawyers, it'll simply shrink the lawyer pool size due to increased productivity per capita.

Oops. That's the point I meant to make with my edit, but leaving out a word by accident I said the opposite.

Yes things like legal discovery, medical history research and many other things can (and could be for the past 10+ years) and will be "replaced" or more like integrated with software / machine learning assist. Large firms that hire 30 new associates instead of 50 won't be a big blow to the economy, even McDonalds switching to more automation won't have that much of a negative impact McDonald's can and should be the "cheapest" option, but don't expect the local diner to automate at the same time, and don't forget that we are willing to pay more for a barista even tho when you use the same beans even 25 year old automated coffee machines produces a better and more consistent product than the vast majority of barista's out there. The Restaurant industry in the US overall employs about 15M people and that figure is expected to grow by 10% in the next 10 years even with automation.

Automating good baristas in a cost-effective way is actually a pretty hard problem, but automating your typical Starbucks espresso machine button pusher is trivial -- machines that can make passable cappuccinos already exist. But people don't go to Starbucks for the coffee; they go to Starbucks for the same reason they go to bars.

I think a lot of the service sector automation that will happen in the next 20+ years is analogous. Anything customer-facing is bound to stick around as long as people have spending money, while anything that's not customer-facing will slowly become automated.

E.g. The person at the counter in a McDonalds is the easiest person to replace -- all you really need is an iPad and a couple accessories. But if I were a betting man, I would bet that McDonalds will replace food prep jobs before replacing humans with kiosks in most locations.

Why is replacing baristas a difficult problem? Not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious.

Because allot of the "marketing" of the "experience" has been focused branding the individual person behind the coffee rather than the coffee it self.

Go into any "artisan" coffee shop and the barista would pretty much look identical, many of them will engage and have their own "shtick" to make the experience of drinking their coffee "unique". The coffee it self is also going to be heavily branded and sold to you as some fantastic story with many images which again will be heavily focused on the people who were involved in the entire process from growing the beams to your cup.

This is what we are buying now, 20$> an ounce "fair traded organic beans" with some nice retro photographs of Bolivian coffee farmers combined with some 20 year old millennials inspecting the beans to make sure you get the "best" ones in your cup.

This is what you can't replace, brewing the coffee and even foaming milk is something that a machine can do easily, and arguably better than most people, heck even latte drawing can probably be better done with a 2-axis drip nozzle than a barista with a bamboo stick but when you pay 7$ for a cup of coffee you aren't paying for coffee you are paying for the experience that no machine can actually give you simply because you don't want it. You want the human contact because at least in my personal belief that is a coping mechanism we have adopted to make for the isolationist life style that many of us live today in which we spend more time with our phones than with people, and so we care now more about how our coffee and burritos are being made and by whom than ever before.

> brewing the coffee and even foaming milk is something that a machine can do easily, and arguably better than most people, heck even latte drawing can probably be better done with a 2-axis drip nozzle than a barista with a bamboo

Is this true?

I'm mostly convinced about the brewing part (except that even the most meticulous machine will make mistakes, and a good barista will throw out a bum shot whereas a machine probably won't know the difference).

But I'm not convinced about the milk part. Do you have links?

(FWIW I totally agree with the tone and overall thesis of your post. And I really wish someone would deploy freshly ground-or-vacuum-sealed/fresh milk machines in airports/cafeterias/hotels/anywhere there's only a starbucks. But I also feel like better-than-average humans are still better than state-of-the-art machines.)

I'm inclined to agree with your assessment, even if it seems to drip with bile. I've not much experience with genuinely interested baristas, but those that I have known made drinking coffee more of an event rather than just a forgettable occasion.

There's still room for the human touch but sometimes you just want a decent double espresso and to be left alone.

Artisan coffee shops are like vineyard wine-tasting that way. Maybe slightly better product, but what you're really paying for is ceremony.

Screw the human contact; I'd rather pay less for my latte and get it made correctly, and more cheaply, by a machine.

For human contact, just have a nice coffee shop with comfy chairs where people can sit around and read, chat, etc. You don't need humans making the food for your human contact, you just need to be in an environment with other human customers.

You can also have a human server who brings the drink you ordered to you. One human can run the whole establishment, filling in in all the ways the robots can't, but letting the robots do the more skilled work. When I go someplace for food or drink, I want to sit down and relax, not talk to the guy prepping the food. And since the food prep necessarily has to be done someplace away from the seating area (because that's where the foaming-milk machine is), I don't see any value in having a human back there when a machine can do it better. Now I do see some value maybe in being able to chat up the girl who brings the drink to me where I'm sitting. But the person behind a counter making the drink, who I can barely even see because there's a giant milk-steaming machine in the way? No, I don't see the value there.

A good barista pays attention to their work:

* A good barista will notice when they screw up the shot and pull pull another.

* A good barista will not burn or under-steam milk.

* A good barista will make sure you have the proper amount of milk and foam. (Getting a perfectly consistent result when steaming milk isn't really possible using a dead-reckoning controller or when using simple sensors like temperature AFAICT.)

* A good barista will make sure the drink looks as good as it smells and tastes.

  * A good barista will have no problem customizing drinks.

Note that I didn't say impossible. Just difficult. You can probably get to better-than-Starbucks quality without too much AI. Auto coffee shops that beat starbucks already exist. But I'm not aware of any auto espresso machines that can compete with the baristas at my local coffee shop. And even if they could, I'd probably only use them at work, at airports, and at hotels.

I confess to not knowing very much about the black ambrosia that I love so much, but it does sound from your checklist that a lot of those qualities could eventually be automated. That said I have taken part in several 'artisanal' coffee tasting sessions and while they have given me some appreciation for the growing and roasting process there wasn't much time spent on the brewing.

> but it does sound from your checklist that a lot of those qualities could eventually be automated

Totally. But the current generation of dead-reckoning-and-maybe-a-bit-of-very-simple-sensing style of control for grinding/tamping/steaming/pouring won't be sufficient. I would be unsurprised if substantially improved sensors (perhaps even vision) are necessary before we see computers over-taking the best baristas in an abssolute sense.

And unfortunately I don't think there's much demand for that sort of investment for the reasons outlined in other posts on this thread (even if robotic baristas could smash the human competition in coffee making, they still wouldn't displace the neighborhood coffee shops.)

Yeah, but who the fuck cares? Ultimately it's an infusion made from roasted beans. I made my own coffee for years and was perfectly happy with the simple french press method. No doubt a skilled barista would do far better, just as a skilled chef cooks better than I do. But the gourmet market isn't big enough to drive the rest of the economy. We are not headed fora future where people have amazing jobs as amazing baristas and then go to be gourmet consumers of something else when they quit work, such that everyone is simultaneously an employee and an epicurean. For a tiny few, being a barista may approach the heights of being a sommelier in a top-rated French restaurant, but for the majority they'll be slinging coffee, just as most people who serve wine in a restaurant are just waiters, and none of these people will enjoy the fabulous life when their shift ends, just some discounts (official or otherwise) on the same product they serve to the customers.

Sorry, I wasn't implying that anyone cares. I even state a few times in this thread that people specifically don't care in aggregate. And even if people did care, it wouldn't have a major impact on the extent to which barista jobs are automated.

But it is just interesting, from a technical/hacker perspective, that good barista work is a pretty hard robotics problem!

A good barista is like a good bartender. Their interaction with the customer goes way beyond simply making and handing off the drink. A robot would largely make that interaction like a soda machine. Not very personal, and not really something that keeps people loyal to your shop vs the one on the other side of the street.

Considering my own ratio of canned and fountain soda bought in restaurants, grocery stores, and convenience stores (at least a couple times a week) versus soda pulled by a soda jerk (never, nada, not even a single time), this does not bode well for the good baristas of our world!

While I have bought alcohol from a bar, the ratio of my non-bar alcohol still dwarfs bar-purchased alcohol. And frankly, even with the bar-purchased alcohol, it was social events with friends, the bartender could just as easily been a serve-yourself machine.

Depends. I have been to bars where the bartender is a large part of the experience. Good bartenders joke and make you feel good at the place. Bad bartenders ignore you, don't get you drinks in a timely manner, and generally make you feel small and ignored. I would vastly prefer to go to an establishment with the good bartenders than to have a soda-machine like experience.

The goal for coffee roasters and shops is consistent coffee. With machines you could get personalized coffee.

My favorite coffee shop in NYC is The Roasting Plant, their coffee is roasted, brewed and poured by a pneumatic (well the process of sending the beans to their destination is a set of pneumatic tubes) coffee robot[0] (and handed to you by a human barista).

Really fucking cool, and the coffee is excellent, too.

0) https://roastingplant.com/our-story/javabot

> E.g. The person at the counter in a McDonalds is the easiest person to replace -- all you really need is an iPad and a couple accessories.

Except that most people are REALLY BAD at operating a kiosk. You want a person at the kiosk so that they can gently guide the SUV driving suburban wife with the high maintenance order gently out of the way of the rest of the customers.

The backend jobs will be the first to get automated.

We have a gas station that serves food that is cooked to order. It is a WaWa station. All orders are by kiosk and the kiosk is pretty well designed. My family and I don't have problems using it. We are however, all educated.

It uses pictures and text. I will have to watch next time I'm in there to get coffee and see how well people use it.

Ah, Wawa's adopted that model, too? That must be relatively new. Guess PA likes kiosks for ordering food.

These have been at Wawa at least since 2010.

can confirm ... same at wawas here in Orlando, FL

Actually, Sheetz (think fast food meets convenience store; based out of Ohio and only present in a few mid-Atlantic states) has been using kiosks for ordering food for years. Granted, payment is still at a register manned by an actual person, but it's not like that's uncharted territory, either -- Chili's allows you to pay at your table without needing to hand your credit card over to your waitress.

Right, but that's a captive market. No one goes to Sheetz for food; they stop there for gas and grab something to eat while they're stopped. So making the food ordering process a bit less pleasant is NBD.

McDonalds has to compete with other chains and prices are already bottom barrel. In McDonal's case, taking human interaction out of the equation seems like a losing proposition.

In western Pennsylvania, where I'm from, people definitely do go to Sheetz just for food.

Funny, Sheetz immediately comes to my mind too when I think about the topic of automation. It works a little too well!

> You want a person at the kiosk so that they can gently guide the SUV driving suburban wife with the high maintenance order gently out of the way of the rest of the customers.

Even if that's the case, you could still plausibly turn three to four people manning a register into four kiosks and one person to assist.

So we instead rely on the equally bad, minimally trained person behind the counter to input the order instead?

My success rate for getting my order correctly at fast food restaurants is somewhere south of 50%.

My local McDonalds already has touch screen self-service. A human still cooks it and brings it to your table, but ordering and payment is automated.

It's currently optional, but I could see it becoming standard fairly soon.

>But if I were a betting man, I would bet that McDonalds will replace food prep jobs before replacing humans with kiosks in most locations.

Panera Bread proves you wrong. Go into any corporate-owned store (not the franchise ones, they're behind), and they have iPad kiosks for taking your order. The food is still prepared by hand. They frequently even give you a bonus, like a free cookie, if you order with the kiosk instead of going to the human. And the kiosk does a far better job too: there's little or no line, you can easily look up your old orders or favorites and re-order them, you can easily make changes to your order (more or less salt/pepper, more or less lettuce, different bread selection, etc.) which you can't easily do with a human because the human won't present dozens of different options to you when you order, they just ask "what do you want?". Visual communication systems are far more information-dense than verbal ones.

In case anyone else is curious like I was about the stated figure on restaurant employment, here's a reputable source: http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/Research/Facts-at-a-...

and i'm significantly more likely to buy the fries if they weren't bagged by a human.

for essentially two reasons; a) mcdonalds treats their employees like shit. no job is better than that job ( i live in a country with social welfare) b) the person bagging the food scratched his balls just before doing so, and he sure as hell isn't bothering to use gloves now.

and they forgot the salt! again! arrrrrgh.

That's easily remedied with the little salt packets.

Too much salt on the other hand...

Robot automation can be fun as well.

Bartender on a cruise ship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBF7EE2xnN4

What about this[0] move by Adidas pulling Asian production back to Germany (but now completed by robots instead of humans). Clearly a loss for factories in Asia, but much of a win for anybody but Adidas ?

[0] http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/adidas-pulls-b...

There is a win for Germany: - more opportunities for high skilled robotics engineers, so they can stay at home, and don't move to US - tax income for country, which can be spend wisely.

Sure, it's great for Germany. Those robots don't maintain themselves.

Not just a threat to Chinese workers but also the Chinese government. Unemployment tends to foster civil unrest.

In this connected world, top elites of the world have to figure out how to tax each territory, how to maximize the profit and how to be adaptable and sustainable. China in chaos seems not a decent option within the near future.

i think this hipster revolution is happening in small circles in a few cities. to put the revolution in perspective, here are etsy's gross marketplace sales (GMS) compared to annual revenue of some mass-market retailers:

etsy: $2.3B [0]

target: $73B [1]

williams sonoma: $5B [2]

bed bath and beyond: $12B [3]

[0] https://investors.etsy.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=253952&p=irol-new...

[1] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATGT&fstype=ii&ei=ruN...

[2] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AWSM&fstype=ii&ei=EOR...

[3] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ABBBY&fstype=ii&ei=...

Another figure to add to the hipster revolution: Youtubers and Twitch streamers. It could one of but a few ways to make money in the future (entertainment).

I hope you like playing with Play Doh!

Self-driving trucks will have a significant impact on North-American workforce. Something like 6% ppl in NA are employed in the trucking industry.

IMO self-driving trucks won't displace humans behind the wheel. Trucks on public roads will be self-driving in the same way that planes are self-flying.

> IMO self-driving trucks won't displace humans behind the wheel. Trucks on public roads will be self-driving in the same way that planes are self-flying.

Not this year. Not next year. But they will.

Something I never hear when discussing automated trucks is the 10% of truckers that are owner-operators. Won't they just slap automation onto their trucks, and continue to own (but no longer operate)?

Won't displaced truck drivers become motivated to be owners themselves? It doesn't seem as bleak as everyone makes out. I don't really think most big companies want to own and maintain their own fleets of trucks.

Economies of scale seem like a large win, here. If you own a thousand trucks, your per-truck maintenance costs are less than if you own one truck. Companies that don't want to own and maintain a fleet of trucks will outsource to those who do, but it's simpler to deal with one external entity that can supply trucking than ten or a hundred such entities.

That’s where cooperatives could come in – what if the owner-operating truckers would just start a cooperative and own the fleet together?

Where are they going to get the money to become owners if they don't have a job anymore, but still have to support their family?

I'm not sure why you're being down-voted. People driving their own truck for a living are probably not swimming in capital, and outfitting a truck with self-driving capabilities (or buying a new truck) is likely to be expensive. Furthermore, they are more likely to lose out to bigger players who can aggregate inevitable software/sensor upgrade/repair costs across an entire fleet.

The idea that everything will work out because working people can just become capital owners ignores the obvious fact that working people work precisely because they don't have capital.

I'm being downvoted because people don't want to think of these things, or that access to capital is largely based on luck. They want to believe in a Just World, which means that their success was all due to their hard work, and if these people can't have that level of success, then it's clearly because they didn't work hard enough.

Most "owner" operators are running equipment that the bank still has the title on. Not exactly swimming with liquid cash to perform upgrades with.

There are knock-on / 2nd order effects in other industries, as well. E.g. if robotic trucks lower the cost of over-the-road shipping by removing a big cost component (the driver), then it might affect the breakeven point at which rail shipping becomes more desirable than OTR (currently around 500 miles for most types of freight). And if taking the human drivers out lets you run trucks nonstop for longer, overall cargo velocity could increase, which makes various types of just-in-time logistics easier. It'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

That is the scary part. If you include other dependent jobs like service industries (hospitality/truck repair etc) related to trucking/transport it might be north of 10%.

I think the point is that robots will do the shitty low-margin jobs like drive trucks, bag french fries, and change tires, and humans will get to do more enjoyable jobs like creating "artisan" goods as you refer to them.

With what money?

Robots are happy to work for free (minus operating costs) and there won't be enough work left to occupy all adults for 5 days a week. I think the economics of all this are the hardest question to answer right now.

Robots work for free. They aren't developed, assembled, and maintained for free. So that brings us back to the original question: With what money is that former truck driver supposed to start their robot trucking business?

The laws of supply and demand mean that the artisinal jobs will in turn become shitty and low margin because of the oversupply of cheap labor.

Well I'm also assuming people will also spend a lot less of their lives working. Otherwise you're correct, there will be a huge oversupply of labor.

There are still applications for computerised "assistants" outside of manufacturing that can have a direct impact on jobs in the west. Eg self service checkouts at supermarkets, automated car washes, and we're increasingly seeing robots and drones being tested for delivery services.

The problem isn't so much east vs west. The problem is technology is cheaper than people so unskilled labour is easily replaceable.

There are a lot of assumptions in your response as it relates to manufacturing and the "west". How can you say this will "skip" developed nations in light of current statistics about the US middle class. The US started moving in this direction a long time ago because labor cost more here. We are realizing the effects today and will continue to see worse effects in the long term. You don't see too many of these articles in the US because firing 60,000 people in favor of robots is not viewed as a badge of honor. FoxxConn is using this as a puff piece to appease foreign buyers.

It'll affect developing countries more only because their labor force is dominated by low value added manual labor which is easiest to replace, so they will face the brunt of it. On the other hand, developed nations have been on this trajectory already, so the hit will be much more buffeted and gradual, but it will eat at the more automatable jobs like driving, harvesting, and jobs involving paperwork/discovery, fast food service, education, etc.

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