Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Finance, the economy & Economics Robot in Your Future? Or, Robots are the Future?

it's worse than that

i am reading 47% as the totals after ancillary jobs are accounted.

So if companies buy their own robots/automations, and huge numbers of folks are not working i.e. have no money to buy anything, live anywhere, then how do companies stay in business??? and it obviously gets worse from there ... with reduced demand more folks will be laid off, until there is only a core number of folks left who can afford to buy anything ... what is one to do?

perhaps the solution is to rethink the current labor paradigm ...

A car company can buy a robot and replace an assembly-line worker, but somebody still has to redesign the line for robotic assembly. Somebody has to deliver that robot. Somebody has to install it in exactly the right place on the line. Somebody has to program it for the particular task. Somebody has to maintain it on a regular basis. Then somebody has to reprogram it for the next year's car model each year. Somebody might have to reposition it on the line when they decide to change the assembly order or use it for a different task altogether.

Going to robots for some tasks may make the company more efficient, but it may not result in fewer jobs. Maybe fewer low-skill or difficult jobs, and higher quality output. But its nothing like "shell out X dollars, and get an assembly line with no humans involved".

IMO there are many factors driving current employment trends. Robotics is IMO a very small part of the problem. A far larger portion of the problem comes from all of the jobs being created in other countries that at one time would have been local. For example virtually no clothing us mfg in the USA.

There is no way to put the technology genie back in the bottle. Would we outlaw tractors on the farm to increase employment? Would we tear out. Digital phone switches and hire lots of operators?

These are of course absurd examples. But but. We cannot freeze the world now any more than we could have frozen it 25. 50 or 100 years ago

Otoh. We could refer the employment question to free market adherents. Apparently if we just have free markets there will be infinite employment. The wages for all those jobs will be free market too

why would a business place robots on an assembly line if their intent were not to reduce their labor costs. It will be a comparison between cost of robot v cost of human.

Throwaway robots is the call.

All repetitive actions can probably be automated with simple software subroutines. Even routine decision making can be coded.

I think you have taken the position of many folks with whom i have worked who believed their presence was indispensable to the operation of the company. When they left, the company didn't miss a beat.

It's about making money. Labor costs are high. Reduce those costs. Send jobs overseas. Get robots. Automate. Retain small cadre of technicians to maintain robots/automations.

Make oodles of money.

i think you can extend

this may be the fundamental flaw in free market capitalism i.e. there is an infinite supply of [fill in the blank].

there have always been shifts in the labor markets.

these shifts come for a variety of reasons.

there was a time when half or more of the populations was working in the fields
my own family came as immigrants to the mid west. they had large families and worked what is now a small piece of land. it all made sense at that time because you needed a lot of hands to work the land.

but over time, the small farms have been consolidated and are now worked by increasingly large and capable machines. And so a relatively tiny part of our population work all of this farm land. People have much smaller families, and many people move to the city. Others work in support like equipment repair, welding etc.

100 and more years ago, we were the boom town country. We were the china of the time. And in fact, lots of immigrants moved from elsewhere to get these new jobs and opportunities that were not available to them in Ireland, italy, germany, scandinavia, etc. that means there were more jobs here, and unemployment elsewhere. But this was a temporary phenomenon.



TOdays unemployed do not have the option to leave europe and come to the USA
We do not have the option to leave here and relocate to booming markets in CHina
Somehow we all have to learn how to adapt to the new situation.

That situation has become even more difficult for workers because it is easy for corporations to quickly shift jobs to new locations where there is an abundance of low cost labor.

The garment industry is the most obvious example. Production capacity constantly shifts from existing locations that are becoming more expensive, and relocates to some other place with a surfeit of free and cheep labor. At each shift, the former workers are left high and dry.

There are no guarantees that there will always be lots of good jobs available for everyone. There never has been such a guarantee. And there never can be such a guarantee,

As is clear, I do not worship at the alter of free markets. Never the less, market dynamics are unavoidable. The number of jobs, the type of jobs, the location of the jobs, etc.... these will all shift. And at some level people have to see what is going on and to adapt.

In times past, you could have a big family, the incremental cost of raising a child was not high. And there would always be something for another person to do.

now, if you want a good job, you need a lot of investment in your child. Advanced degrees and training. You can still have a big family of kids who get a high school education.... but those children will largely be consigned to scrabble for minimum wage and part time jobs, or prison, or welfare. kids who want to "make it" these days start building their resume/ career planning in elementary and middle school.

And even so, new workers will have to be prepared to make career shifts. Who knows if any given company will continue to exist or be successful in 20 years. Life and the world changes... and the changes are accelerating.

Never that less I also think there are policies that could be put in place to somewhat stabilize the job markets. For example I think it is appropriate to have some amount of tariffs on outsourcing. There should be structural incentives in place to keep employment local in every country to the degree possible. Workers should not lose their jobs just for a trivial cost savings.

velociraptor capitalism and your optimistic hope... who wins

almost everyone has assumed with fairly good reason that increases in automation have commensurate job losses which have commensurate job increases ... thus we have net job losses ... I believe that is the past

I suspect that there will be, if it hasn;t already occurred, critical points at which time there will no longer be commensurate increases in jobs with increases in automation. As the technologies continue increasing levels of sophistication, I predict at some time there will be less need for supporting staff. Not only that but at some time, service for automation will be automated. By induction we will eventually reach a critical point at which is the minimum labor force necessary to maintain Automation.

I predict that future employment will range between 10-25% of available workforce. (I am of course pulling what I think may be reasonable numbers from the air.)

What I think we should be considering is what if that is the case. As we approach that critical value I believe all the historical paradigms will melt away and we should consider what the alternatives are.

I think we will be faced with the unpalatable position of most folks not working and the only real alternative will be for those working to support those not working. Also at some point money will become meaningless as there will be no point in keeping score when there is no demand to drive production. Business will be dedicated to supporting the global population.

No matter how distasteful this may seem, perhaps this is the ultimate freedom people actually seek ... do what they want without any concern for the basics of life

It may be generalized that the lower wage jobs are more vulnerable to replacement by robots. It also appears that the jobs created to service the robot industry are not likely to be filled by the folks who lose their jobs to robots. Da poor gits poorer.

It would also seem to trend that there will be increasing competition for the jobs that are more resistant to Bot relacement, thus driving down wages for those jobs.

All in all, I don't see much of an upside to increased use of non-human labor. It seems to parallel the corporate personhood vector, where the increase of vitality on the side of the non-human personages is not advantageous to old-fashioned human units.

There isn't an upside. I wonder what "they" will do with all the displaced workers? Hey, I know: start another war. That's always good for the economy.

Ok
Let's assume that some of us saw this issue long ago. 3o years ago.
Let's assume that we had the power to write laws back then. What laws would we have passed 30 years ago and how would the current situation be different?