We can pay workers livable wages and give them meaningful work. Cost of goods could be reduced through greater efficiency. Research into robotics and automation could fuel a new decade of American growth.
That's the problem - you don't. By definition, the kind of efficient, highly-automated manufacturing you're thinking of doesn't need many unskilled or semi-skilled workers, but it does need skilled and experienced engineers and machinists. It needs a massive and complex ecosystem of suppliers and support.
The depletion of America's industrial base has created a massive skills gap that would take decades to remedy. You can't create a new Silicon Valley with a bunch of bootcamp graduates and some wishful thinking; likewise, you can't create a manufacturing economy through sheer force of will.
I wonder if freight companies receive subsidies though - lots of airlines certainly get subsidies - that might change things in favour of more local producers. Maybe.
I can personally confirm this. Very unfortunate, and I'm positive it's helping stifle innovation. Having to go to China for your custom sheet metal needs (with the communication difficulties and shipping times involved) can be -really- debilitating.
NNSY fails a significant portion of welder applicants just because they can't lay a proper weld. They pay... a lot of money.
Driving around Newport News, Groton, or even Birmingham is like being on another planet economically speaking.
But I definitely see the point, as most of the suppliers are sized for defense, not commercial industrial volume.
And from their perspective, I get the choice. Why risk expansion, when the trend has been towards free trade and offshoring? A 100x customer who decides to switch suppliers in a year isn't a win. At least DoD is a semi-reliable customer.
You can get lucky and find someone with some brakes and benders that does cheap work for farmers, but people like that are usually extremely hard to find and mostly in rural areas.
And yes, welders do make more than someone at McDonalds or doing landscaping, but the myth of the super-high paid welder is mostly that. I just looked up NNSY welder salaries - average of 49K, and that's with a lot people there being experienced and there for a long time.
I agree that the myth of the super-high paid welder is mostly fabricated, but when it comes to shipbuilding at a nuclear yard it's a lot higher than you would expect.
Makes sense, getting it made in China seems like a bad idea
Manufacturing is a dirty, dangerous, manual business. I think the small guys will tell you that environmental regulations killed manufacturing in the west, not labour costs. We've been living in lala land with it all offshore, out of sight. If US/EU-level environmental regulations got applied and enforced globally, we'd be sent back to the stone age. Not to mention the litigation risks, intellectual property risks, trade union cartels, needing to hire an electrician to change a lightbulb, etc. (All added up, it's hopelessly calcified, but whatever...)
Don't get me wrong - I really care about the environment - but most regs here are just to look good, not actually about stuff that matters. And pushing it into the third world, where they don't protect the environment at all, is counterproductive.
I agree that in today's colloquial usage there is little distinction between the two.
It can be, but it can also be clean, safe and highly automated. Fly-by-night operators that run dirty and dangerous shops are not the basis of a sustainable manufacturing economy. China is just damned good at manufacturing. They have everything that is needed - skills, capital, logistics - at an immense scale. They don't offer a cheap but inferior substitute for western manufacturing. They offer speed, flexibility and scalability that western countries could only dream of.
Xi Jinping has a degree in chemical engineering. His predecessor Hu Jintao has a degree in hydraulic engineering. His predecessor Jiang Zemin has a degree in electrical engineering. That is the fundamental reason why China is a manufacturing superpower - for thirty years, the government has been run by people who actually know how to make stuff.
All the more reason to get started immediately.
There are many types of automation. Grocery workers (cashiers, stockers) are replaced with robotics and self-checkout (which automates pricing and theft detection) that removes them from the equation. Automobile machinists and doctors are supplemented with robotics that let them do higher-precision work and avoid mundane and/or stressful tasks.
The gig economy is driven by automation (customer discovery, billing, payroll, etc.), but the industry is set up in a way that happens to produce negative externalities and push risks and costs onto workers.
We need the type of automation that reduces mindless repetition and extends human capability. Not the kind geared at removing people.
The displaced should be re-trained, provided meaningful opportunities, or yeah, paid basic income out of the money saved by them not going to work.
Why pay them to do a less efficient job, that they're not fulfilled by, to produce uncompetitive goods at an uncompetitive price?
I keep seeing these “Cafe X” robotic coffee bars in San Francisco. Surely some baristas find their job fulfilling, and some customers enjoy chatting with their human barista instead of a robot?
Personally I think I’d have a hard time feeling good about working on something that directly replaces human labor without much benefit other than profit.
Thanks for writing this, I don't think it gets said often enough (or at all).
There are jobs that greatly endanger people's physical health. Mining and construction come to my mind. If automation can make these jobs safer, go for it. For everything else, we will probably end up with a balance between heavy automation and niches where artisans hand craft similar products because they love doing so. It should ideally be a free choice instead if people getting preasured into low skill/low wage/high risk jobs because they need to eat.
If it was fully automated today, we should be able to do it here. Build the same machines. Hell, buy the machines from over there, and set them up here. Then figure out how to pay everyone for the service/idea/artsy work. Whatever they wanna do, at least we can afford the masks when we need them, right? (And the healthcare, and the iPhones, and the whatever else is either absolutely necessary or has supposedly been automated.)
But it's not, so the conversation is really about how we can afford to pay people a living wage in a country with a higher cost of living when they're working as underpriced supplemental labor for not-quite-there automation.
And the reality is that we can't: we externalized that lower wage and we slapped an "automation" sticker on it so that everyone would jump on board. Then we realized that we don't own the automation AND we're eliminating the jobs that automation is replacing instead of retooling the existing jobs to ride the technology curve of said automation as its benefits start to grow.
Again, this is all a very America-centric view, but I think it applies to pockets of Europe as well. And if I was living in certain Asian countries, I think I'd be stoked as hell about the increase in wages that could continue to meet the cost of a rapidly increasing standard of living.
I should also say I'm very much in favor of free trade, and I think that mercantilism/protectionism is net negative for the global welfare of humanity. But I think there was an opportunity that a lot of short-sighted American manufacturing powerhouses missed when they agreed to sign up for the Chinese manufacturing equivalent of SaaS.
It's basically a few machines that crank them out like no tomorrow, and then the associated personnel to keep the machines running and doing some hard to automate jobs. (Some hundreds of people perhaps.) And sales guys.
I'm not a complete luddite. In many systems, specifically manufacturing, robots outcompete humans and it makes sense.
The problem arises when anything requiring the least bit of thinking is attempted to be automated. Those are nothing more than cost saving measures, and bring down the quality of service to everyone involved.
In most cases, the customer-facing self checkout systems are objectively much slower and more cumbersome than the manned checkout systems that require some training and practice to use correctly. Paid cashiers never have to slow down their scanning because of a spurious reading from a scale in the bagging area. They get real keyboards to interact with the computer, and user interfaces that are far more responsive than the typical touchscreen UI's update latency.
Then again, I'm not buying 57 individual items in a line 6 people deep who are all buying similar amounts of items. Perhaps you are. A matter of taste.
We all have difference preferences so don’t attribute yours to others.
Let me mention one then: ATMs.
I would claim that ATMs are in fact a prime example of successful automation. For anything non-mundane you still need to go talk to a human, but that's the point: ATMs have removed the need to involve a human bottleneck for a bulk quantity of an extremely mundane task: withdrawing cash. I am old enough to remember when you had to go to the bank for that too.
This hits the nail on the head, though:
> The problem arises when anything requiring the least bit of thinking is attempted to be automated.
Humans are capable of judgment calls.[ß] Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, which is not necessarily what you want them to do.
ß: environments where humans are forbidden from making judgment calls are called bureaucracies.
The less work is required to produce goods, the better it can compete (in price). This makes it so that you _don't have to_ work as much to achieve the same quality of life
Municipal water service versus hand pumped well
E-ZPass versus tollbooth attendant.
Festool Domino biscuit jointer versus me doing it by hand
Sheetrock versus plaster and lathe
P.S.: I don't miss nowadays the increase of human-induced Coronavirus infection risk when I experience human-free services.
They are fantastic. Leaps ahead of every supermarket and CVS I've been in. When I was doing a lot of housework and was very used to them, I could get through a check out with a couple of items in under a minute. Really proved to me that these do not need to be awful
A self-checkout is not automation, it's simply transferring the same amount of work from the paid employee to the customer
The people that are maintaining those skills and learning the new skills needed are increasingly elsewhere.
As with most things, I'm fairly sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle and it varies industry to industry. Yea, a lot of stuff went to china, but a lot of workers were also replaced by automated systems. In a lot of cases, I'd even venture to say maybe a majority, it was both. It's not even close to factually true to say it's JUST china or JUST robots.
Also, do you mind elaborating on how that's specifically anti-worker? Either case can be construed as such depending on your position.