Wal-Mart's Dallas optical lab loses over 90 jobs to automation

Not discussed: where are the machines made, where are they supported from and where is the actual production expertise? When lessons are learnt about manufacturing where does that wisdom accumulate?

My opinion (just an opinion) is that these factors matter a lot more at a national level than whether people or robots end up shaping a lens.

Alternative headline 2: a small number of jobs kept onshore by robots, most walmart manufacturing still overseas.

Seems to me like walmart is supporting workers by investing in manufacturing tech to keep them competitive with offshoring. From this perspective, the article has an unwarranted negative spin.

To be fair, in a more supportive company the workers would probably be retrained rather than shed. It looks like walmart are encouraging internal placements for them but it can be hard to tell how sincere such efforts really are.

We've already seen this with jobs that are impossible to outsource, like retail. That self-checkout machine may have been expensive to develop, but it's a lot cheaper than employees. (The machines aren't perfect, but one employee can now check out 10 customers simultaneously.)

In some ways, nothing will change in America. The jobs were already gone, so nobody is going to lose their job to a robot. That said, it's time to start coming up with a real plan for unemployment. We aren't taxing automation. We aren't considering a world where labor demand is less than labor supply. We have no plan for the future, and the future is not going to be coal mining and making cheap flip flops for Wal-Mart. We are going to have to fund basic income, or some sort of welfare system without a social stigma. (All the foreign investment driving up housing prices isn't helping either.)

Of course, we aren't immune either. Most software isn't actually needed; as we improve off-the-shelf software, custom software will be in lower demand. (Ever pay anyone to write you a custom image manipulation program? Nope. Photoshop is fine. Really not sure why we aren't "done" with HR databases or shopping carts yet.) And, of course, machine learning will help fill in the one-off customizations that are sometimes necessary. And, maybe it's going to start creating art, music, literature, and whatever else we consider "uniquely human". Pretty sure I'll be dead by then, but someone should probably start planning. You thought "peak oil" was a problem... but we're already past "peek labor".

https://consumerist.com/2010/08/31/sunglass-hut-to-customer-...