UN Report: Robots Will Replace Two-Thirds of All Workers in the Developing World
futurism.com
futurism.com
I just had a discussion with the taxi driver on the way to the airport here in southwest China about education. He seemed to be suggesting that, given I spoke Mandarin and English, I would be well-regarded as a teacher. I had to explain that the type of thing I do is not really available in the syllabus of universities or schools in China, and that while I'd investigated opening one the government policy made it a prohibitively difficult and unstable proposition to run a non-standard syllabus. I arrived at the airport, and had a 10 minute wait to get in the door, because people were employed to manually wave an explosives-detection wand over everyone's bag. Entering the main hall, the flights display did not have my flight listed. I asked a nearby shiny sash-wearing airport employee what was up. She directed me to the right place immediately. Evidently, nobody had bothered to update the computer.
The manual-only (despite the zero luggage encouraged nature of the airline) check-in wasn't yet opened, so I went up to the F&B level, where I met some Nepalis en-route back to Kathmandu from studying computing in Korea who needed to change money to eat and couldn't, because the manual change bureaus weren't open. I then had a ridiculously bad meal ordered from a place where the lights were only half functional where neither the table nor environment were properly cleaned. During the meal, manual cleaners and their trolleys wafted about the dining area without urgency. After the meal I opened my laptop and had to go through a dated SMS code-sending procedure to get on the airport wifi.
Robots and automation would have improved the experience on so many levels, but I don't want the world to turn in to a shiny fascist utopia like Singapore. I'm literally on the way to the Pearl River Delta (Hong Kong/Shenzhen) on a project to build food-making robots - http://infinite-food.com/ - but the human question is a strong one and it unsettles me. In a wholly automated future, where is the sense of worth going to come from for the average citizen? Where does it come from now?
Somehow, after witnessing the miracle of transformation that is modern China (I've spent most of my adult life here), I can only believe that the human spirit will find a way, at least in this society. After all, on the grand scale of things, if we're all fed, clothed, housed, but simply bored... it's not a bad problem to have: onward to robotic noodles!
That's what this whole robot story is about. This is why Ball State University's oft-cited study 'accidentally' mathematically defined outsourcing as the same thing as automation. This tiny elite are trying to redirect the pitchforks at a comparatively pointless target (robots) away from the targets that are actually causing mass unemployment that they want to keep (outsourcing, austerity).
It's a good way to quell incipient union action, too ("if we unionize, they'll only replace us with a robot...").
I imagine a world where we've understood happiness at a fundamental level and how our body experiences it.
The engagement and novelty of experiences are designed for every human to maximize their happiness, while minimizing resource consumption.
Our robots working hard to make the world happier than its ever been, helping us live longer and explore the universe around us.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/m...
Besides, if we take China's cycle from wealthy and inward-looking to corrupt and despotic, through widespread opiate abuse (English-profiteering), war and revolution (Mao) to a complete social transformation (post-Mao), then isn't America at about opiate abuse, and due for a Mao?
Oh wait, Trump... :)
depends on whether that includes 45 million or so dead, i guess.
i think there's a likely middle stage of skyrocketing unemployment where nobody has a job to earn money to buy food, nor a robotic source of food. this could lead to some luddite-like activities.
businesses will pursue anything that reduces quarterly or annual expenses, but too few look at the overarching social impact of their choices. especially with the rather brittle mantra that "new jobs will be created, they always are".
Much of the west would also have plateauing or decreasing populations if it were not for the importation of foreign populations.
Even advanced economies will be unable to provide middle class lifestyles to everyone if most people are not being productive in some way. We may just have to get used to most people doing more with less. That might mean living healthy but more frugal and less consumerist lives.
Japanese birth rates didn't fall because of some fundamental, immutable law of the universe.
This doesn't really make sense to me.
If we look purely at the economy in terms of its inputs and outputs - in terms of goods and services - we won't suddenly have less goods and services. We'll have the same or more goods and services with lower costs (because robots will be cheaper than people - otherwise we'd just employ people). So you have the same end result (the goods and services) with less operating costs - seems to me like if you don't change anything you'd either 1) see business owners growing their share of wealth while the hordes of unemployed starve - or 2) you'd increase taxes and increase welfare spending and things would net out such that the average person's quality of life could be preserved.
Of course, if you're argument assumes that we're hurtling straight towards option 1, then yeah that makes sense.
But it doesn't mathematically make sense to me that automation _has_ to mean people become destitute.
There's no miracle. It's merely the communist party stopping 40 years of criminal abuse of its own citizens, and deciding to rent them out for pennies to the foreign corporations, and making billions in the progress (then allowing its members to escape China with the money).
The miracle actually is that Communist party, with its massive debt, crashing economic policies, authoritarian policies, censorship, human rights abuse, trashing of its environment/food supplies/water supplies, is still standing.
Also why would countries move to democracy when US (face of democracy) is turning out to be a bad example?
It is a fair point that a lot of stolen money escaped the country, though it's generally recognized that this process is slowing now. However, it is not fair to suggest that the Chinese government abused its citizens for personal profit when quite clearly the entire population has benefited greatly from the country's transition to widespread modern material wealth.
The miracle actually is that Communist party, with its massive debt, crashing economic policies, authoritarian policies, censorship, human rights abuse, trashing of its environment/food supplies/water supplies, is still standing.
If you replace Community party with US or UK government, the same is also true.
The thing that always scares me reading any of those "X% of workers losing their jobs to automation" stories is thinking about what proportion of the (100-X)% of workers have jobs that (to a lesser or greater extent) depend on the idea that the X% are employed and have surplus income to spend.
Nevertheless, the guy in charge of the fully robotic organic farm only needs to trade with the guy with the fleet of robotic mechanics and both parties have realized a profit. There was no need for a bunch of consumers and their cash to make this transaction.
If robots ever get cheap enough to replace sweatshop labor, that will mean a substantial increase in the number of people in the developing world that will be able to afford these robots. The same way smartphones were only found in the developed world a decade ago, and now are owned by over two billion people in the developing world, hundreds of millions of people in the developing world will be able to afford robots if prices come down enough.
This will profoundly increase the number of businesses that people in the developing world will be able to operate, and improve the quality of life of the average person there.
It is plausible to implement UBI (assuming political will to do so, which is debatable in most places) or some other wealth transfer solution in an advanced, wealthy technological society, where you tax the mostly automated production of goods and services to provide basic needs for all those people who are not necessary for economic production; even as the math of UBI doesn't IMHO really work out right now yet, it's plausible that it will in the coming decades with growing automated productivity and all those people becoming actually economically unnecessary. Especially with the re-shoring discussed in the article moving lots of production capacity back to developed countries, reversing globalization and international integration, making them more self-sufficient.
However, it seems quite implausible that this re-shoring will result in the developed world funding an UBI for these two thirds of all workers in the developing world. I don't see the political will being there for at least a generation if not much more - there will be painful debates about doing UBI for their own people, where in addition to moral imperative and nationalism you also have a practical reason for the elites and producers to spend a small fraction of their wealth for 'bread and circuses' to ensure local social stability around their homes; but any proposals to do the same for the whole world simply won't fly.
It seems far more believable that these countries will rather choose to invest some resources in "building a wall", literally or metaphorically. Currently, importing labor is economically useful for many developed countries for demographic reasons; but as labor becomes useless, we can expect them to follow their interests and restrict migration even as the desire for migration grows.
historical precedent tends to be relatively narrow, centered on the use of human physical labor. traditionally this has reduced the demand for such, and moved people into forms of work requiring some amount of thought and decision making that was not (yet) automatable.
once automation begins aggressively competing with human thinking, decision making and creative efforts... we'll be facing a distinctly new challenge.
If everything is free, then we're post-scarcity and work doesn't matter anyway.
Similarly, when horses became less valuable then the cost of feeding them, they were taken to the glue factory.
it's something that could very well happen in a depression and extensive structural unemployment.
the problem with economic events is time. most simple models and equations don't "balance out" instantaneously, so to speak, due to the temporal lag between decisions and consequences.
as businesses pursue better quarterly profits and shiny year-over-year results through automating the previously un-automatible and reducing the labor force, they risk creating unemployment but not zero or near-zero cost goods.
the consequence of unemployment isn't felt immediately, which is why it can be very hard to stop things from spiraling out of control. but at some point purchasing power drops off, reducing sales... and on it goes.
at some point we might reach "free shit made and delivered by robots", but there's a substantial, possible rather brutal gap between here and there.
As mechanical minds become somewhat equivalent but cheaper then real minds, there won't be anything most humans can offer where it won't be more efficient to do something roughly similar with machines instead.
Agriculture was 83% of US employment in 1800
Now it's 2%
It just happened that most found other jobs over the slow 60 years it took to drop from 80-50%. Questionable how quickly people will adapt now.
[1] http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=11&...
Robots are a convenient villain.