Robots 'to replace up to 20M factory jobs' by 2030
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
But then the whole cost effective argument is from a company perspective, what it costs them on the balance sheets.
The fallout and full cost of loosing workers is very much ringfenced for companies, but the social impacts can be far far deeper and far more costly to a community than any saving made on a balance sheet.
So I get the whole workers rights perspective, equally, I'm mindful that some jobs really are not fit for humans, just because they can do them, don't mean we can't technology them away. But a balance is needed, so if they had a robot tax as many have raised and mooted in the past, then perhaps that could be used to find education, free recreational activities. Otherwise we will just fuel an endless supply of humans in production line style that feel useless in society and become statisticaly abandoned or worse.
Certainly won't need 20M robot maintenance jobs, let alone the skill set from picking fruit and moving onto robot maintenance for many will be a transition out of their reach.
So all yay for robots replacing menial jobs, but let's make sure such displaced menial workers are afforded some education and opportunity into better jobs. Otherwise it will not end well socially.
But I do not believe everyone will quickly find an even better job when a factory closes because 1) popular perception aside, that is not what happened in the industrial revolution and 2) it is not what happened with globalization 3) it is suspiciously pleasant and easy belief for those who are least likely to be hurt. It's also a bit magical thinking.
And if wage depression from globalization has caused damaging ethnic and nationalist backlashes, it's not hard to imagine the multiplying effect that will come with reckless displacement due to automation.
Because people who have a continuing or sudden drop in quality of life due to events beyond their control are not going to blame themselves forever and are not going to be convinced by a rising GDP graph that leaves them further behind.
Great would be a society that everyone feels vested in and an economy that everyone can participate in. But it's hard to imagine any such plan being invented let alone honestly implemented in the foreseeable future. Are thousands of 50 year old factory workers going to get hired as a web designers? Are they going to work as Walmart greeters thinking "sure I lost my house but national wealth is up so I don't mind". So at the very least there needs to be more adequate social safety nets.
It wouldn't be easy to implement, or popular, and frankly I don't have any idea how it could happen, but it's the only approach I can think of to address the underlying labor supply/demand issues without partitioning society into haves / have-nots, productive / not-productive, Elysium / peasants, etc.
I don't see a convincing solution other than UBI. Sure, it's untested, and the transition is going to be rough. But capitalism isn't going to stop automating jobs. The jobs are going away and I think the easiest way to prevent the negative effects of having a big chunk of unemployed young men of fighting age. When given a choice between extreme poverty and fighting to overthrow your government, the choice is obvious (Syria for example). When given a choice between a comfortable lifestyle (if you budget well) and fighting to overthrow your government, the choice is obvious.
Part of the reason poverty sucks (in a developed country) is that you have to work long hours for barely enough money and then cook and clean and take care of your kids / elders. If you don't have to work, the effective poverty line drops significantly.
Our society already has the wealth distribution issue, and seems to be moving forward without crumbling. If we can drop 40% of jobs without decreasing overall productivity, I don't see why we have to make something up for the unemployable to do.
Also I don't think the West has been progressing much in the last 20 years, especially not compared to Asia. Many parts of Europe and the US is deteriorating, even the wealthier parts, both relativity and absolutely.
[1] https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-w... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard...
The assumption that we can have productive jobs for everyone is just unrealistic
If we would scale down to only productive essential jobs, most people would be siting at home doing whatever they like.
So no, I am not happy that people do bullshit jobs just for the sake of having a job at all.
How are you going to pay for a home anyways, without a job?
For example, with UBI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
If you have a job that pays $20,000/year and you lose it to a robot, the silver lining is that the automation reduces the cost of living by $1000/year and so now you can take a different $19,000/year job with no reduction in quality of life.
A robot tax actually makes this worse. It doesn't inherently prevent the automation -- a $5000 robot that can replace a $20,000/year worker would still do so if a tax made the robot cost $10,000 -- but now to add insult to injury the displaced worker is paying the robot tax in the form of higher prices.
The underlying friction with automation is that it's non-uniform. A widget used to cost $1000, which was $600 manufacturing labor and $400 administrative overhead. Then the manufacturing gets automated and it becomes a $500 widget, but the proportion which is administrative cost has grown from 40% to 80%.
That's what puts the displaced worker in a bad position. If they have to take a job that pays less at the same time as their cost of living declines, everything is fine as long as the cost reduction is at least as much as the wage reduction. But if other costs are keeping prices high despite the higher efficiency from the automation, then there's trouble.
So they key is to make sure the efficiency improvements are largely uniform. And markets are generally pretty good at that -- if they're competitive and don't have their hands tied.
Which leads us to the real problem. Some industries are monopolistic or subject to ossified regulatory systems. So as the cost of everything else goes down, the cost of housing doesn't due to zoning rules, the cost of medicine doesn't due to regulatory requirements, etc.
The things that can't respond well to market forces become a larger proportion of the economy, which is observed as higher prices for those things relative to other things.
The solution has to be to get the cost of those things down as well.
I think that is a highly unlikely scenario. Automation is being introduced to reduce costs and so increase profits. There should be no expectation that these savings will be passed on to consumers. Even with competition, businesses are loathed to lower prices and instead will offer a better product or service for the same price. As a result the cost of living may not go down unless there is simply no market at that price. When that happens the outcome is not so clear. The company may adapt or simply go out of business.
The only possible reason why you wouldn't is regulation. If the government makes it difficult or impossible for you to buy the same robot that Walmart buys then I can see a point but that is exactly why there needs to be less regulation and taxes around automation.
You're ignoring the possibility of increasing profits by increasing volume. If you have $9 in costs on a $10 item and automation reduces your costs to $6, you can make a $4 margin on your existing volume, but that isn't as profitable as making a $2 margin on 5X your existing volume by undercutting all of your competitors and taking their customers. So you do, and prices fall from $10 to $8. Until your competitors realize they can get back all their lost business and then some by automating too and then charging $7.
The only way this doesn't happen is a lack of effective competition.
> Even with competition, businesses are loathed to lower prices and instead will offer a better product or service for the same price.
You may want to familiarize yourself with Walmart's business model.
What if your $20k/year job is in a factory making a product that is too expensive for people making $20k/year to afford? The automation lowers the cost of living for those who buy the product, not you.
The first thing to note is that this typically isn't what happens. The majority of goods are not luxury goods by definition, because most people can't afford luxury goods, so most production is not of luxury goods. And luxury goods also tend to be less subject to automation since scarcity and "craftsmanship" etc. is generally what makes them luxuries. If you can inexpensively mass produce it with a machine then it's no longer something ordinary people can't afford.
Moreover, the aggregate is really what matters. If you replace grocery clerks with self-checkout machines and bank tellers with ATMs and both Toyota and Lexus factory workers with assembly robots, the Lexus factory workers may not be able to afford a Lexus, but they can afford a Toyota and also benefit from lower bank fees and grocery prices.
Meanwhile the dentist who can afford a Lexus now has more money left over to buy whatever thing the former Lexus worker finds a job doing next.
Pretty good actually. As wages go down, demand for labor goes up.
Moreover, if "millions of people" lose their jobs to automation then you would expect that to result in more than a 5% reduction in cost of living.
For example if Apple was able to lower their manufacturing costs by 10%, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't pass that on to customers :)
It is true that I can produce a device that has some similarities to the iPhone, but with things like incompatibles that prevent the end user from being able to run their favourite app or integrate with certain cloud services they subscribe to, they are not similar enough for the customer to consider them to be interchangeable. In reality, they would be sold to different markets.
On the flip side, if I manufacture standard screws and figure out how to produce them for 10% less than anyone else who manufactures standard screws, there is a lot of incentive for me to increase supply to attract more customers to my product instead of someone else's. A competitive marketplace is necessary for that to take place.
Sure, Apple built up their brand and their pricing doesn't rely on direct manufacturing costs. And a lot of end-user stuff is the same way. Brand/ecosystem/etc is important. E.g. eating out. Clothes. Food. If you don't go for value brands, you're paying quite a bit for non-manufacturing costs.
Everybody does their own word processing now, and the world has adjusted.
In the same way, I would like to do my own robotic assembly now.
Or even have a personal factory. (Maybe a cornicopia machine in a suitcase, like charles stross wrote about in singularity sky)
maybe business will be democratized and more companies will exist, with smaller org charts making more specific things of value.
It's going the other way. Automation increases the return to scale.
Your grandparents probably performed a lot of non-robotic assembly: making food and clothes at home was basically the same process as in a factory. The gain from having 1000 people making chairs under one roof was modest.
But a massively automated factory that turns trees into Ikea chairs isn't something that makes one a day, more like one a second. So there are fewer.
Most consumer product companies are lawyers, buyers, salesmen and accountants. Drive by the headquarters of a brand company, they usually are about the size of a small/medium bank HQ. The products are designed and built in some factory in China or elsewhere. Maybe there’s an industrial design consultant.
Capitalism finds the most efficient way to produce a thing. The price competitive nature of markets tends to pass that efficiency on to consumers in the form of lower costs. We probably shouldn't mess with that.
I think that society will evolve in many ways in the coming decades. That may or may not involve jobs and careers as we know them. If humans are good at anything, it's adapting and changing. No sense wringing our hands over dystopian scifi fanfic that might not come to pass.
Capitalism finds the most efficient way to extract rent from that process.
One way to evolve society would be to find out how to leverage market economies for efficiency without having all that rent extraction ending up in the hands of a small elite.
Imagine an economy where competition for efficiency is based on actual contributions and cooperation and not on anti-social behavior like guarding trade secrets and patents, or other hostile attempts at securing a market share
The only thing we know for sure is that they will continue to vote, and if things aren't going well for them they will vote in the most disruptive way they can.
For all these 25 decades, people have worried a lot about what will happen to everyone losing their jobs to new technology. It's always turned out that new jobs kept appearing as the old ones disappeared, and the result of the increased productivity the "lost jobs" represent has manifested in proportionally increased wages. It's hard to compare directly, but we're about 30x richer per person then 250 years ago. And also a lot more people.
Right now we're supposed to be in the middle of a Job Automation Holocaust. THIS TIME IT'S (as usual) DIFFERENT! And yet if you lift your gaze from the theories and look at real world indicators, unemployment is extremely low.
Now, it's of course true that this time it actually can be different, and I don't mind people making arguments to that effect. I have less respect for those who argue like this is a brand new disaster falling from the sky, not the prevailing trend since centuries.
When we replaced, say, horse drawn wagons with trucks, yes, we killed off a lot of jobs associated with wagons. Wagon drivers, wagon builders, horse trainers, horse feed suppliers, etc., might have lost some or all of their work.
But trucks needed drivers, truck makers, mechanics, fuel supply, and so on, so a lot of new work was created.
Now suppose we replace human driven trucks with self-driving trucks, getting rid of a lot of truck driver jobs, and also a lot of jobs related to supporting truck drivers.
Yes, the self-driving trucks will create some new work. But a self-driving truck is pretty much just a regular truck with some extra sensors, a computer, some actuators to let the computer operate the controls, and some software. The sensors, computers, and actuators are all commodity items or close to it.
So rather than create new jobs sufficient to counter the lost jobs of truck drivers and those who support truck drives, switching to self-driving trucks just increases demand a bit for some commodity hardware, and requires some extra training for truck mechanics to maintain the new equipment.
We're starting to transition from a type of industrial revolution where people using machines are replaced by people using very different machines, to a type where people using machines are being replaced by very similar machines that require fewer or no humans to operate.
My laptop does more number-crunching than all the human computers of last century every morning, but we don't count this as work taken away from anyone.
Humans find new things to do, providing services (or amusements) to each other which were not previously thought necessary. The entire services sector of the economy is things that basically weren't done 100 years ago (or were done on such a tiny scale as not to matter). And we all work hard to afford these new things, by making other such new things (like websites!), partly as a game of keeping up with the neighbors, rather than being content with our great-grandparents' living standards.
If anything, those numbers are underwhelming. Having worked with industrial robots it's not surprising that they won't be taking over the world any time soon.
Robots are a large up front investment in a company's immediate processes. This investment is only good if the processes remain mostly static for a very long time. Even then, there is a major cost when processes finally change. It's stupidly similar to software development in so many ways.
Mass automation already happened, at least in my country (USA). The data shown in the article seems to indicate most of the increased use will be in countries like China. Rising wages are likely the dominant factor driving increased adoption in that situation, not new technology.
Everyone I know who actually buys robots views them as a trade off, not a panacea. As robots' capabilities slowly improve, their use will increase a bit, but operator guided machinery (ie CNCs, injection molding, task specific machines for things like packaging) glued together with flexible human workers isn't going anywhere until we hit something resembling AGI.
Can't speak to the use of robots outside of manufacturing, but that's not what the article is about.
Thoughts on how this might change the equation?
The big robot will survive in large scale manufacturing for the same reason Java survives in enterprise; it's part of the culture at this point. It does its job well, it hardly ever fails, and it's relatively easy to bring someone up to speed on working with them. Like Java, you'll probably see a number of companies pop up that prefer a newer technology, because it fits their use case well. But I'd expect the bulk of total money spent to continue to be on the kinds of industrial robots we work with now.
The place I can see small robots making an impact is knowledge work, such as laboratories or design. And realistically, in those fields we've never been time constrained. It's more common, in my experience, that the limiting factor is the number of good ideas a person can come up with. There's no way to reduce "hours formulating an idea" short of AGI. Scientists have to read papers, designers have to study a company or product to make all of the branding coherent.
All of that said, the newer, low cost bots will probably move the needle, but they won't accelerate the pace of automation significantly. More likely, they'll contribute to maintaining the current acceleration.
There are funded companies already trying to get rid of all of that. Here's one - https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613743/relativity-space-3...
Give it a few years. It's going to happen.
1) Human labor will no longer dominate COGS--global shipping and logistics will. There will therefore be a massive onshoring of manufacturing back to the developed world. As a result, we will stop subsidizing human rights abuses and substandard living conditions around the globe.
2) In developed countries, this massive onshoring of automated production will make it clear that low-skill, high-paying factory jobs are forever a thing of the past. Simultaneously, xenophobia--"they took our jobs"--may cease to be an effective political tool. Perhaps this will trigger an honest discussion around UBI and revamped social safety nets.
It's possible to resent someone who shows up and works hard. (Harder than you'd like to, because he's more desperate.) It's much easier to resent someone who shows up and simply collects a slice of your inheritance.
And in addition: The guy who stepped off the boat in 1900 and then spent a few decades working long hours in a factory, spent a lot of time interacting with other people in his new country. It was unavoidable. (Possibly he got drafted, too, another great way to spend time with the locals.) One of the reasons integration is not going so well in Europe is that this is no longer the story.
Not sure if I agree with the xenophobia claim, although perhaps you've seen studies or statistics that I haven't.
Do you think substandard living conditions will cease to exist the moment we remove relatively high paying factory jobs and external revenue from impoverished countries?
This is bad news for most of the Southern Hemisphere with young populations which will continue to grow till the end of this century.
Unless something changes economically or in pop growth, there are going to be massive economic problems.
The problem will be that we are used to matching supply and demand by rewarding productivity, not real shortages.
Ironically, the very best jobs in extremely productive economies like the US are detached from productivity and linked to perception and politics and the like (or do people believe that every $10 million CEO is that much better than the next guy on the list).
It might even be true that robots might not be cheaper than human labor but have other advantages that make them preferable.
I think you have this exactly backwards.
In a highly automated factory the main cost is capital, i.e. the machines might cost decades worth of payroll. So having them sit idle is extremely expensive, or to say it another way, producing nothing saves you almost no money.
A low-automation factory is the opposite. Big traditional garment factories are basically just sheds with some tables. Almost all the cost is workers, and in many places & times you only hire them when you get a big order.
The automated garment-sewing machines (if we get there) can't do anything else. Factory robots aren't very C-3PO. Whereas the sweatshop workers can be assembling cellphones (or building rice terraces) next week.
Did we ever stop and consider that increasing production/consumption might not be beneficial ? I have a hard time imagining that all that matter is consuming more things and cheaper things.
Look at where web development was not that long ago. It used to take a few people and many moving pieces to put together a website. You needed a designer to design it. A developer to code it. A hosting company to host it. A maintenance person to keep updating and make changes. Now, anyone can fire up a webflow site in under a day. No coding needed, no hosting, do your own maintenance.
Now this is only efficiency we are talking about. What happens when we get to a place where you just pick some parameters and any website imaginable is spot out on your screen for you? Imagine how many websites exist already, what’s to stop that data from flowing into a large dataset where design is no longer needed, code is unnecessary, updates are done through a cms. Algorithms already draw art, ok, let’s modify them to make illustrations, logos, anything creative. We just displaced 2 professions. Why stop there? Feed the machines every imaginable font and let it create new fonts for us. Font designer gone.
This is only the industry I’m aware of. I can imagine others are no less prone to automation and complete efficiency disruption.
What will people do when to get a basic job requires 20 years of education? Are we to believe all humans will have advanced degrees to do those jobs? What about those who simply can’t or won’t like doing that job?
What happened to displaced workers during the industrial revolution?
Job automation isn't a single point in time, it's a gradual process that's been happening for as long as work existed. And as long as we run our current economic system there will be jobs to replace automated ones. Currently it seems like services are the new factory jobs (uber, food delivery, &c.).
> Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The techno- logical developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.
- Guyd Debord, 1967
https://www.reddit.com/r/BSG/comments/76z43l/help_with_all_o...
20 million robots to produce one developer job by 2030?
Government agencies i’m familiar with dropped about half of their processing and tabulation staff in the 90s. An agency with 12,000 employees in 1989 has 5,000 today.
About another 50-75% will be gone in a decade or two. Most of the case management, IT, program staff and big legal shops are bloated with legacy paper processing and old business process. As that disappears, so will the jobs.
At the same time, at some point if all 'jobs' are no longer needed that would either mean humanity no longer exists or that scarcity no longer exists. In all other cases we'd still have some weird mix of what we have today and what we may have in the future.
Will two million people per year give up tasks they currently do to robots? Probably. That doesn't seem unrealistic at all. Will two million more people per year find themselves in the unemployment line? Probably not.
What's interesting is that (in the US), while manufacturing represented a larger share of the workforce in the past, the absolute number of people involved in manufacturing is relatively unchanged. The so-called decline of manufacturing is more a result of population growth than anything. Automation has allowed individuals to produce more, but it hasn't eliminated the people. The jobs that they do have no doubt changed considerably due to automation.
http://resources.oxfordeconomics.com/how-robots-change-the-w...
The question about approaching full automation is whether all that wealth will be for humanity or for some selected rich people.
The minute you overspecify a law to apply only to some products you are creating opportunities for loopholes. See this classic story about vans vs cars, and import taxes: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45875405
Is a John Deere tractor a robot? What about a roomba? A 3d printer? What about a disassembled robot? The wheels of a robot? How do you define robot?
What do you tax, the purchase of a robot? The use? The ownership?
There are very tricky questions that try to fix an artificial problem. Tax the company or the person behind x, be x a robot, a field, or a brand that generates money (or not, if you are against taxes). This is not a new problem.
Or more palatable for HN: Universal Basic Income.
Not that it matters if Earth is a flaming hellscape by 2050 thanks to the ongoing pollution that will likely only be made worse by this automation.
Way to bury the lede, Rory.
I think there are other less impersonal, more policy driven reasons than robots why the middle class is being hollowed out, but it sure feels like they'd rather we believed it was robots.
It turns out financial limitations are the easy factor to solve. Other, non-financial limits to social mobility are so much more stubborn.
The only requirement is to pass the entry exams, which anyone can take
[0] https://statisticalatlas.com/place/Texas/Austin/Household-In...
You're comparing household income to individual income. If you look at individual income, $100k/yr in Austin is much going to be much higher than 80th percentile.
I don't think that's a good definition for the middle class. There's strong support for the fact that income distribution is an exponential distributions - just google "income distribution exponential".
A exponential distribution is not symmetrical, so its mean or median is not a great centrality measure, it does agree with intuitions developed from observing, say, a normal distribution (like the weight or height of persons). The mean or median are very far from the mode (the most frequent individual) in an exponential, whereas they're almost identical in a normal.
Because humans have an infinite amount of wants/desires they'd be willing to pay for if they could afford to hire someone to do it. Practical example in Australia: aged care. The baby boomers, the richest generation, is rapidly aging, so one of the biggest growth industries is aged care/nursing.
The same thing happened with the tennis industry 30 years ago -- Boomers loved tennis until they aged out of it.
“Up to 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world could be replaced by robots by 2030, according to analysis firm Oxford Economics.”