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Comment by ashishgandhi | Hacker News Reader

Efficiency DOES NOT purely kill jobs, it transfers them. When robotic arms replace factor workers:

- Factor worker jobs are destroyed.

- Robotic arms designing, manufacturing, shipping, etc. are created.

There may be temporary unemployment because factor workers may not know how to design, manufacture, ship, etc.

EDIT: Found an article "Technology and Automation Create, Not Destroy, Jobs" that is relevant. http://www.innovationpolicy.org/technology-and-automation-cr....

PS: Don't understand why someone down voted me. Never realized down votes are for disagreement.

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But how many factory workers were there, and how many robotic arm designers are there now? Something tells me that's not a 1:1 relationship.

It's not 1:1. It seems there would be more jobs created because of the robotic arms business (and business related to this business). Updated parent comment to include a link.

I think more importantly than the ratio, is the qualifications needed for each job. You might be killing jobs for the less intelligent people of your society and create jobs for intellectuals.

One has a hard time going from a manufacturing job to a programming job.

That may be true initially. While adoption is low, the overhead labor costs per unit are relatively high. But even here, as you scale out, your overhead costs per unit get much lower. Eventually the labor cost to build one robotic arm will be less than labor cost replaced by the robotic arm.

If this doesn't happen, then its not more efficient.

I'd suggest the opposite: it's entirely possible that a factory of human workers can create robots which massively scale the production capability far beyond the original size of the factory's employees.

How much education do you need to screw caps on toothpaste as compared to designing robot arms? How many people just can't attain that level of education?

This is the problem, I agree more jobs are created and people can retrain but a certain sector of society will simply not be able to do so.

We need to make sure they are looked after.

That's not the problem. That's the fallacy.

Sure, right now it's ridiculous to think that some tooth-paste screwer is going to go and get a robotics Ph.D. However, that will not be the case in the future.

Using a computer at all used to require advanced training. Not anymore. We grow up on them, and things like "data entry" are low skilled jobs. The same will be true of building robotic arms.

The problem with this is that if you can dumb down or break down the process of building robotic arms so that unintelligent people can do it, so can those same robots! This is the point that some people seem to miss is that we're in completely uncharted waters here. The old rules of "more jobs will be created" just don't apply.

Two data points:

There is a robot manufacturing facility , i think by KUKA, that is totally run by robots.

A robotics company is talking about producing a factory robot for $5000. if it's possible, it doesn't even makes sense to invest too much time in fixing these robots.

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