Manufacturing Jobs Aren’t Coming Back
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
That reality seems more likely to me in the present climate than a maybe more ideal solution like basic income - though I think the most likely outcome is huge (and increasing) swaths of the population languishing in permanent poverty.
I don't think so. You cannot only outsource manufacturing labor to robots. You can do with policing as well. So you don't have to worry for uprisings. These people will simply starve or being killed by robots.
Economically, it's equivalent to those rich people and their robots just not existing at all and their estates being filled with impassible mountains.
Do you believe the "not rich" wouldn't want to cross the wall?
In Elysium (the movie you are referring to) the answer is clear: Earth is full of sick children, Mexicans and lovable criminals. For reasons I didn't quite understand, those Mexicans are unable to build a functioning economy (perhaps because the lovable criminals cause too many problems).
Do you believe that this is an accurate reflection of reality, namely that the non-rich can't organize themselves into a livable society without the aid of the rich?
Why didn't the people on Earth start their own farms? Because the robots came and killed them if they tried.
I don't recall robots preventing people from starting farms or providing medical care to the sick children, and that's missing from the wikipedia summary of the movie. Why would they do that? How would it benefit the space station to prevent earthers from building a functioning society?
In reality we generally just ignore our low productivity areas, and perhaps make sure the folks from there can't cause problems elsewhere. The NYC and SF elites occasionally try to feel good by pointless throwing $100M at local problems that money can't fix [1], but mostly they ignore Newark. The Mumbai elite don't impose social control on the rural hinterlands, they just don't go there.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-failed-100-m...
This is wandering dangerously close to the definition of social control. It might be efficient, disinterested social control, but it's control nonetheless.
In any case, this is very different from what you postulated happened:
Why didn't the people on [Newark] start their own farms? Because the [NYPD] came and killed them if they tried.
But I agree, your scenario doesn't match up well with my interpretation of the movie.
Tell me why the farmers in north korea can't just start a functional economy?
Or african refugees that pile up on italian islands?
Why is america walled off? Literally towards the south and figuratively towards the rest of the world? Why is america so afraid that I may actually contribute to society that they can't allow me to type out a single line of code while I'm on their continent?
Why is china wrapping all their seaside cities into special economic interest zones while a billion farmers have to be subjected to quasi stalinist idiocy?
Why are mexicans trying to enter the US? It surely cant be that difficult to start a reasonable economy on their own terms?
Why did the east germans try to jump the wall? East Germany was shit by comparison, but it certainly wasn't compared to other parts of the world?
The people in Elysium depended on earths resources. They turned all earthers into de facto slaves. This may be a bit of a stretch compared to reality, but in principle, it is what we are doing all around the world.
You wake up, drink your gluten free soylent, take a shower, sit down and begin to type words into a computer that literally change the world. They will be deployed on machines you've never seen and maybe don't fully understand, but in doing so you can take important jobs away that feed families, build spacecraft that will colonize mars, etc.
Your instacart delivery will pop up around 2pm. You call an uber to get to the gym because you would turn fat if you didnt regularly exercise. You spend an hour in the bathroom to groom your hipster beard and then head out to have an ironic pabst with all your hipster friends who live similar lifestyles.
And you didn't even realize how many people you virtually ran over that day.
Maybe not you, but that could be a typical day in the life of your average hackernewser.
Do you really think you have all that much in common with a Louisiana coal miner who fears for the well-being of his family? We may as well be aliens to them.
We are already walled off. We are masters over the machines. They are not. We have already "won". People are free to enter our society, we won't judge, but all those people out there who voted trump because they're scared of US are real. People who drink pabst because they can't AFFORD non-ironic brands of beer.
Its not that the poor can't organize themselves. Maybe they can't, I don't know - but throughout history, the poor were usually oppressed into varying forms of slavery.
In the US, for example, the womb you pop out of decides whether you're going to public school or real school. Maybe in principle, these people have a fair shot at social mobility, but what if modern society requires a level of education that they just never had a chance of achieving? I wouldn't be so quick to judge.
Once the elites have ascended, they have no reason to care much about pesky non-elites using resources outside their enclaves. Observe how little effort contemporary humans put into keeping monkeys from enjoying monkey resources.
Recall that we are discussing a high inequality situation where a tiny fraction of humanity walls itself off into robot enclaves where they satisfy their own needs without human labor. I.e., not enough people to crowd out anything.
Nota: steel is cost-effective in the US given a modern (and automated) enough plant. As of 2015 the US are the #4 largest steel producer in the word[0], #2 being Japan (the top 10 is China, Japan, India, USA, Russia, South Korea, Germany, Brazil, Turkey, Ukraine). Though part of that may be existing tariffs (US steel production is mostly internal, it's the #11 exporter and #1 net importer of steel)
Global steel employment has fallen like a brick since its heydays, even China's rise in steel jobs and production since the augths haven't compensated for the jobs lost to automation and efficiency increases (at mostly constant production outside of China).
[0] country-specific, excluding the EU block
(You also need a lot of coal, but you can produce it locally if you have enough room to plant a big forest nearby.)
When you have to move iron around, you'd calculate how much it costs you to move the iron vs steel, since steel would have more value. Or if would be better to produce a car and move the car...
However, I do generally agree with your diagnosis that the anger isn't so much about automation per se, as about changes in post-war economic structures finally starting to reach some tipping point, whether perceived rightly or not.
Wage growth for example has been flat overall:
https://frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker/?panel=1
Half of Americans make under 30k a year:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/goodbye-middle-class-...
Yet the cost of goods has been increasing steadily:
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infla...
I suppose the US's experience is not typical of the world's... after ww2, the US alone was something greater than 50% of global gdp, and its manufacturing base equally huge in comparison. Life is good when you are so far on top, even for the common worker, who with minimal education and no experience could find a job that supported an owned home, a homemaking wife, kids, a car, and two vacations a year. A couple of decades of that, and it starts to seem normal. But it was always abnormal, a result of fortunate post-war circumstances, and now that the rest of the world is catching up, perhaps we are returning to normality.
So higher tariffs will be a boon on robot-makers, not necessarily the working-class people that expected to take those jobs.
China is a currency manipulator for example, which is well known, but I learned it in the free documentary 'Death by China'
He does need a person to watch over the robot for theft and most especially sabotage, but even then, it's much cheaper than a trained welder (and welds more cleanly).
The construction syndicate here in Uruguay is very big and very radicalized, making construction costs ridiculously expensive compared to average wages, I fear for the first person to bring the bricklaying robot here:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a22082/wat...
Edit: the robot I'm talking about is a robotic orbital welder, something like this one:
https://www.robots.com/articles/viewing/a-round-the-edge-orb...
At least in my country (Uruguay), the lower earning 8% have 30% of the children, placing a huge strain on society and services (I don't see robots replacing medical and social services anytime soon).
So, to enable a sustainable society like you propose, something like a two children per couple rule should be enacted (hopefully nothing so harsh as the Chinese version).
If we don't do that (and human society is really good at staying on autopilot until problems have gotten truly severe), we'll just end up with a mostly-automated society where the robot owners have everything and everyone else lives in a ghetto.
Bringing back things we used to do is looking in the rear view mirror. There should be investments in technology, education geared towards that and visionary things for us to accomplish for the future.
That isn't to say that the types of jobs have a huge impact. If McD paid $25/hr with full benefits, nobody would give a shit. Kind of hard to make that sustainable without clawing back real jobs from the 3rd world.
Germany seems to do a fine job with their auto industry, robots and all. I think this article is very flawed as that $8 task is but one of many and also one of the few perfect for a robot. "Spot welding isn't coming back to human manufacturing" is more accurate.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/labor-force-...
Here's a good start.
What is bad about our labor environment and why? And compared to whom?
Where I was going was that it appears looking backwards to want to bring jobs back that were outsourced for mostly cheaper labor. If US companies could do those things here profitably, they would.
However if the drop is in people who want to or need to work that's obviously bad.
My question is this: what would you suggest as a way to "robot proof" herself from the inevitable automation of the welding trade while staying true to her craft?
/used to hire a vacuum welder
One thing I've noticed over the years is that despite how good your interview/hiring process may be, you always end up with some hires that don't work out which lead me to believe that you probably turn away a near equal amount of applicants that would have been great employees. It's just very difficult to evaluate someone over the course of a few interviews. For entry level positions this is even harder since you may not have much professional experience or reputation to go by.
I've always thought it would be interesting if companies would run a kind of tryout phase of employment, say 1-3 months, paid of course, at the end of which the top performers would be given permanent employment. This way a company might be willing to take on more marginal applicants with the knowledge that it will be very easy to terminate them. I'm sure there are negative aspects of such a system that I'm not considering, but as a person working in aerospace doing manufacturing/skilled labor and without any formal education beyond high school to fall back on, I always thought such a system might be a good way for someone like me to get their foot in the door.
Some european countries make it difficult to fire people, with the unintended consequence that companies become very reluctant to hire in the first place.
That worked so well the first time.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702036331045766237...
[1]http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2015/05/08/u-s-com...
Which to me raises an important question. Why aren't these huge cost reductions showing up in the prices of products from competitive industries like autos?
I took the time to investigate a few months ago and came up with this (UK-centric) example:
Let's take a cheap car from the 1960s, an Austin Mini Cooper.
A 1960s Mini Cooper was about 500 pounds. That's 10.000 pounds in today's money.
Today you can buy a Dacia Sandero for 6.000 pounds. That's almost half of a Mini Cooper.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12551017
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-2232885/Top-...
I don't think customers demand more features as much as governments mandate more [safety] features. Well, maybe some features are mostly market driven like power windows replacing crank windows and keyless entry. But I believe car companies would build bargain basement death machines if they were legally allowed to.
Here's some inflation adjusted average car prices for the US - http://whnt.com/2016/04/25/the-average-car-now-costs-25449-h... Cars were the cheapest in the early 70s.
To be honest, we have some "bargain basement death machines" on the road here in Uruguay... but they sure beat the alternative (unsafe motorbikes).
In particular, the Chery QQ (cost in China about U$ 4000) is huge here.
It's interesting that Apple and others closed ultra modern robotics factory in the US and now essentially assemble most stuff by hand in China.
It argues that robotics is not always a no brainer choice under many circumstances (which admittedly would be difficult to create in the US)
> Apple is the world's largest owner of CNC milling machines and swiss style lathes.
And honestly everyone should be having fewer kids, but the well off already are. Turns out that evolutionary and economic forces of selection don't favor people reproducing beyond their means. People can mistake this emergent property for a planned eugenics program and blame the messenger whenever somebody speaks the truth, but better to realize that wanting all human life to have some intrinsic market value does not make it so and plan accordingly.
It's not a particular new thought -- the mythical Ned Ludd (and band) were concerned about how the transition happened, not (as they are popular portrayed) simply committed to stopping any kind of progress.
It's naive to imagine that we can will away any kind of technological progress, simply because our parents believed (and indoctrinated us into believing) that we are all entitled to work 9 hours a day, 5 days a week, 45 years of our lives ... and that any attempt to infringe on that ersatz freedom is a personal attack, and any discussion around alternatives is akin to calling someone's god(s) a fraud.
Consider the ever erudite John Ralston Saul's comments from his fantastic work The Doubter's Companion:
" 'Luddites' - Highly trained individuals whose careers were destroyed by technological progress. This progress was treated as inevitable and uncontrollable. The Luddites therefore occupied the only remaining intellectual position, which consisted of rejecting technological progress.
"This reduction of attitudes to two extreme positions was accomplished between 1811 and 1830 when the introduction of Watt’s steam-engines and water-driven wool-finishing machines made hundreds of handicraftsmen redundant.
"Industrialization was spreading from sector to sector and quickly eliminated most crafts along with tens of thousands of jobs.
"The Luddites (named after an imaginary leader, Ned Lud) broke up and burnt factories. Their revolt ended in a group trial in 1813. Five were hanged. The attitude of society towards unrestrained technological progress was made perfectly clear. The judge said the Luddites’ actions were “one of the greatest atrocities that was ever committed in a civilized country.”1
"This was a classic case of provocation and order versus despair and disorder. Wilfrid Laurier described the nature of this type of conflict when he spoke in 1886 about the Riel Rebellion. “What is hateful…is not rebellion, but the despotism which induces that rebellion; not rebels but the men who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone.”2
"What society misunderstood early in the nineteenth century when faced by the industrial revolution was the full nature of the change. The debate should not have been over whether there should be technological progress or not. It was more accurately a question of progress in what conditions: what progress, when, in what circumstances? Market extremists would argue that what happened was inevitable and eventually brought general prosperity. Their view ignores the social disorder, followed by suffering, followed by serious social disorder that this approach towards change brought on. Communism was the direct result. England, France, Germany and Sweden suffered recurring internal violence throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of it expanding into civil wars. Most of these countries passed within a shadow of revolution.
"The question is therefore not whether technological progress was necessary, but whether it was necessary to go about it in a barbaric manner. It can be argued that the Luddites were wrong in 1811. But society spent the next 150 years rendering progress civilized and thereby proving that the infuriated craftsmen had been right at least in spirit. Did these decades of wasted time, effort, lives and money represent an intelligent use of human talents?"
> Technology should enhance quality of
> life of people. when it replaces people,
> chaos ensue !
There's no 'should' with technology - it's merely a (set of) thing(s).
Replacing people, in the sense of doing away with Bullshit Jobs <tm> is entirely the goal of new technology - so that those people can do something else. Ideally that something else is something they want to do (and that may (but not necessarily does) improve the world).
I think your prediction that people will be replaced by technology is a little naive.
The idea that the pointless activities of some people will be replaced by the vague category of 'technology' is entirely palatable to most people.
This is a common belief but it isn't true.
Actually, government plays a huge role in deciding how technology is developed and broadly adopted by society. There is a should with technology: in the sense of achieving a desirable or expected state.
> Actually, government plays a huge
> role in deciding how technology is
> developed and broadly adopted by
>society.
Outside of Singapore, I don't know of (m)any governments where administrators are even passably proficient in matters of technology.
Generally governments are hostile towards any new technology until they can work out how to turn them into a benefit to the state (water catchment tanks, internet, bitcoin, solar generators, uber, et cetera)..
> There is a should with technology:
> in the sense of achieving a desirable
> or expected state.
The other (bigger) part of my point was that we need to start having civilised discussions about how we integrate technology into our society now, rather than half-way through revolutions / civil wars.
This is just wrong. Author does not know much about welding or car manufacturing.
- Car welding is a best case for robots. Single task repeated many times exactly the same way. Try different case and you get $1M/hour.
- $25/hour human cost is too low. With pauses, errors, delays... $100/hour would be more reasonable.
- Germany is exactly in this situation, but does not have problem with unemployment.
Next time you want to see if you trust a certain source for any of your information, pay close attention when they report on a topic where you have a lot of experience. As someone with a professional aviation background, watching CNN cover any aviation topic causes me physical pain.
(that would make them highly task specific, but it would reflect the difference in welding costs for producing cars on a high volume line)
> A human welder today earns around $25 per hour (including benefits), while the equivalent operating cost per hour for a robot is around $8 when installation, maintenance, and the operating costs of all hardware, software, and peripherals are amortized over a five-year depreciation period.
So human cost does not include total cost, just labour. Comparable cost would be around $100
This is fact! /s
Reads like another partisan puff piece griping about the election to me, which is a shame because the underlying concept (automation) is interesting to me, but the conclusion (manufacturing is doomed) is hyperbole.