Both CEOs and journalists, as well as most readers of MIT's Technology Review, understand that you can get more labor by raising the price. The implicit understanding is that a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living, and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap. This is an ongoing problem in agriculture and has been for decades.
Nobody from any country wants to do back-breaking manual labor for a living.
But the whole "jobs Americans won't do" is nothing more than a political slogan/talking point.
The reality is that Americans will do any job, provided they are fairly compensated.
More than once, it's been in the news that a factory/food processing plant/etc... has been busted for having illegal workers, paying its workers below minimum wage, or both. A week later, the factory has to hire legal workers and Americans for the previously under-paid jobs, and there's a line around the block of people willing to now work for a fair rate of pay.
I've never heard that, could you provide a couple of concrete examples?
I remember there was a meat packing plant in Colorado a few years ago. I tried Google News, but it's apparently incapable of showing anything but the most recent stories.
https://www.denverpost.com/2013/01/14/fear-from-swift-plant-...
To the extent this is true, I think it's tautological.
At some point, much of American labor was manual. People's notion of a fair wage for that was not high, and the work was accepted as normal. But now there are a lot of people who work in offices, and much manual labor is now way easier than agricultural work. There's also a broad (but not universal) societal expectation that people shouldn't have to destroy their bodies at work. So I think the perceived "fair" compensation for this has risen dramatically. And I think the number of people willing to spend 14 hours a day, 6 days a week [1] doing that work at any price is much smaller than before.
And honestly, I think that's great. We should find ways to turn every job that people don't want to do over to robots.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/nyregion/in-harvest-seaso...
Even if you had policies that firehose-flooded the labor market, that still only saves you a trivial amount on the price of farm output. (I'm guessing most of the cost of apples comes from the price of the land and capital.)
It just doesn't look like there's this huge tradeoff we're facing that could justify massively increasing the labor supply.
A better explanation would be that, if everyone else uses unauthorized[2] labor, then you have to do it yourself to keep up.
[1] https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/make-money/side-gigs/like-wo...
[2] "illegal" is apparently taboo now, but "undocumented" is Orwellian.
This makes me wonder...
Autonomy is the biggest hurdle for these technologies and manual labor is the reason they are needed. Why aren't we meeting halfway and using remote controlled robots instead of autonomous ones?
That way workers could do the job from anywhere in the world without having to break a sweat and you'd only need a fraction of the investment to get it running.
I assume it's not very hard (for experts) to build an AI that would push the right buttons at the right times.
Telesurgery is a bit of a myth. It's been done a few dozen times.
It doesn't make that much sense economically. It's actually cheaper to fly a surgeon or a patient around for the few occasions when it really needs to be done.
Most surgery still isn't done with Da Vinci robots or whatever. Surgeons with their hands can do many more things. That's not to say those robots are not amazing, it's just that they don't do everything.
The military is the one area where it might make sense, but have a close look. They don't do it either. Instead the US military has an amazing extraction system where someone injured in battle in the middle east can be at Rammstein within hours.
It is extremely material to the narrow profit margins of farms, so you see a race to the bottom with importing slave labor, terrible practices, etc.
But enforcing labor standards and minimum wages wouldn't add much to the average American's food bill, even assuming farms couldn't avoid some of the hit by using less or more productive labor.
It is BS.
> a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
No. Most american don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for peanuts. As maerF0x0 said, raise the wages and watch how many americans love back-breaking manual labor. It's strange how the tar oil fields in south dakota are able to attract workers from all over the country.
> and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.
Don't all humans?
>there's not enough people to actually do ...
IMO there are plenty to do the work. There are not enough people who are sufficiently incentivized to do the work at the wages that farming pays. This is in comparison to other choices people have be it easier work or higher paying.
Unless you have a greater point or suggestion to make, why waste time on pedantry?
Combine these and you're right. Most Americans don't want to do back-breaking labor for a pittance. Grocery checkers (union) make $18.50/hour. Bus drivers (union) make $29/hour. Journeyman (union) electricians make $50/hour.
Try paying more than $15/hour for farm labor and you'll have more applicants than you know what to do with.
If it was just some cultural thing, then we'd have more than enough immigrants to correct for most Americans not wanting to do it. The problem is that there exists no cultural group that wants these jobs, native born or otherwise, at the pay and benefits offered. People switch to better jobs as soon as they find one.
> Americans also want food to be cheap
I assume everyone would prefer if everything is cheap? This is a problem that effects any business.
What robots do is reduce all that ripple effect of societal load on all the other aspects of sustaining the labor force and their human needs.
Focusing on simply labor and it's price for the task at hand is stupidly myopic.
And reveals the greater impact autonomous robotic labor will really have.
Let's assume California's Central valley in 50 years time is vast swaths of robotic farms.
All other human infrastructure in these places die. Restaurants, stores, schools, housing, police fire etc fall back to early 1900s levels (or some smaller density level of the past)
Are the margins that slim that the owners can't afford to pay their workers more?