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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

> 3) Rise of robotics outsourced a good portion of typical physical jobs to machines - iRobot, Kiva Systems, Tesla's car-manufacturing robot arms

This is really of no consequence. Do you know any janitor who lost a job to roomba?

CNC have been there en mass since 1970s, and robotics since 1980s. A robotic assembly line is featured in final scene of Terminator (1984), and it was very much state of the art then.

However, contrary to doomsday prophecies of the time, what replaced American jobs were not the soulless machines in Japan, but penniless workers in China. The future never seems to play out in the coolest sci-fi way.

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> However, contrary to doomsday prophecies of the time, what replaced American jobs were not the soulless machines in Japan, but penniless workers in China.

This is, for many industries, clearly not the case.

Electronics used to be hand soldered. Now hand soldering is rare and machines are common. Those machines have clearly replaced human workers. A teeny tiny old pick and place machine can place 4,000 components per hour. That machine is easily available to small business. You need three staff (3 shifts of 8 hours each) to run that machine.

IC stuffers (a machine that takes through hole integrated circuits and places those into a PCB) have existed since 8" drives were common.

Look at the newspaper print industry - thousands of workers have been replaced by technology.

It is trivially easy to find people who have lost their job to technology.

It might not have happened as quickly as predicted. That doesn't mean it's not happening at all. http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/13/foxconn-allegedly-replacing...

It's just the matter of cost. Soulless machines are just more expensive to design and slower to roll to market. Some of the technologies (like self-checkout registers at supermarkets) make no economic sense until a certain price point is reached.

Interesting question: is it cheaper to use a low-skill, uneducated workforce for low-skilled work, or a smaller but somewhat higher-skilled and educated workforce to maintain the mechanized workforce replacement machines, as well as the smaller set of workers to design and program the machines? It's usually easier to point a guy to a corner and tell him to sweep, than it is to program a machine to do it and to get politely out of the way when a customer walks by.

Who pays for those higher skilled workers?

Can you get enough of them?

There's a lot of overhead (liability, benefits, dealing with people) that's removed when using machines.

Benefits are easy: don't offer them, or make sure you structure the work week so the employee doesn't get enough hours to qualify.

People deal with unplanned for interactions with people better than a machine, they're much more flexible.

Liability, you can go either way on that.

I think it's an open question still, when you get down to low enough skill and pay.

Edit: People are the ultimate low skilled contingent worker. A pre-programmed AI-equivalent in every box.

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