Ultimately all progress in human material conditions comes from "eliminating jobs". Back In The Day it took 80% of the US population just to keep everyone fed. When tractors came along most of the population went into manufacturing, and with robots people go into services. You can't have more stuff without finding ways to produce the current level of stuff with less people.
>>Ultimately all progress in human material conditions comes from "eliminating jobs".
I think it should rather be eliminating the need to work for things like food, clothing, medicine and shelter.
As automation increases by multiple folds, I see this as a inevitable fallout. Needing to have a job to even survive might not even be relevant as concept in the future.
I agree with your main observation, but don't forget that 'jobs' in the sense of selling yourself to pay for your basic survival needs (and maybe a bit more) are historically a fairly recent phenomenon. The negative connotations that come with 'eliminating jobs' all have to do with that.
I think that automation could play an important part in a post-capitalist society.
I'm not sure I understand you. "Selling yourself to pay for your basic survival needs ... [is] a fairly recent phenomenon" seems pretty clear cut, but surely you're not trying to claim that jobs are more onerous today than they were in the past? Peasants in Sumer were working far harder than the average westerner today, and their effort only bought them their basic survival needs (with none to spare).
I assume, given the robots will run 24 hours. THe comment:
According to a translated page from the Chinese site Techweb, each robot costs between $20,000 to $25,000, which is over three times the average salary of one worker. However, amid international pressure, Foxconn continues to increase worker salaries with a 25 percent bump occurring earlier this year.
This seems like a easy choice, each robot should pay for itself in a year or so.
Personally I think this will generate some social unrest in my hometown where foxconn has a factory. Those robots will drive millions of young workforces out of a basic job. I'm pretty concerned about the near future.
In the long term though, this seems to be the only way to go: automate boring jobs.
From the perspective of the owner, the social unrest is a temporary problem. As robots take over jobs, the potential for social unrest in the future reduces. Bosses don't have to worry about wage demands, housing, transport, kids, strikes etc.
They're unfortunately not focused on automating boring jobs, which would at least have some benefit for the worker. They're reducing variability and the need to negotiate with humans.
How long before the next jobs are eliminated, then middle management jobs, then everyone except those who own the robots?
In my country we've had miners striking, demanding pretty large increases. My default answer has been to automate the lot and put robots underground, but on the other hand...
>From the perspective of the owner, the social unrest is a temporary problem. As robots take over jobs, the potential for social unrest in the future reduces. Bosses don't have to worry about wage demands, housing, transport, kids, strikes etc.
That's not how it works. You're thinking it of the perspective of the factory owner, not the overall society.
In fact, the potential of social unrest in the future increases: all those people, brought over from their villages and left unemployed in the big city, with wages for unskilled labor going down (due to even less demand after the automation of most jobs), and no future, will not end well.
>In my country we've had miners striking, demanding pretty large increases. My default answer has been to automate the lot and put robots underground, but on the other hand...
But on the other hand, we have (as a society) exploited the work of those workers at the time that the job could not be automated (which is still the case today mostly), while paying them less that it's worth it.
"You'll work for a pittance, and if you argue about it, we will force you to using the police instead of negotiating better wages."
And that in an extremely harsh job, where a huge percentage of miners dies of cancer.
I'd ask you to read it again. I'm arguing for the workers, but pointing out why the managers are making their decisions.
It's not because they're trying to make boring work go away. Managers don't optimise for the health of society. They do it for their own gains.
> all those people, brought over from their villages and left unemployed in the big city
They're migrant workers. They have to go home after their term is complete. In China you can't just move to a new city or region.
I'm not saying it's right. I'm pointing out the perspective of the decision makers. With respect to the miners I was pointing out the obvious parallels, and why my default perspective on striking miners might not be correct.
Anyone else is happy about that ? When everything will be done by machines we will have to think about what it means to exist in this world without being a little hand.
'The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How can we eat?" the second by the question "Why do we eat?" and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?"' - Douglas Adams
Perhaps they shouldn't, but we've just gone and replaced their jobs without having solved scarcity - which is the magic pill that needs to be invented for a function society where you can do nothing productive yet still live.
In all practicality this means we need to retrain tens of thousands of people in some other form of repetitive task that hasn't been taken over by a robot. It doesn't mean they get to go off to a Star Trek-ian utopia where they can pursue higher pursuits without having to worry about survival.
In the long run this will probably pan out to be a net positive - these robots can do a job better, more precisely, and less expensively than a human, which will advance the state of the art further.
In the short run this will create unrest, poverty, starvation, and possibly arrest the hard-earned development of a country trying desperately to claw its way out of poverty.
It's funny, software automates far, far more than robots do, and yet you would be hard pressed to find people on this site who hold the opinion that software destroys jobs. Software adds value, it may create efficiencies but it is not a job destroyer. And the same is true of physical automation as well.
We've come a long way since the days where everyone worked on the farm, or everyone worked in a factory. Automation has never created poverty or starvation. Look at Japan, which went through exactly the same process as China is today. In the mid 20th century it was a country heavily dependent on exports fueled by cheap labor (in 1950 Japan's per capita GDP was less than 1/5th of the US's). But it didn't take long for them to automated like crazy. Is Japan a poor, unruly, starving country today? No, it's one of the richest countries in the world with one of the highest standards of living.
> "and yet you would be hard pressed to find people on this site who hold the opinion that software destroys jobs"
You've found one right here. Not all software destroys jobs, but much of it certainly does. More often than not this destruction is a net positive for society - but it tends to create localized minima that are hard to resolve.
In less abstract speech: by using software to destroy jobs we create more jobs that ostensibly have a greater positive impact to society, but that's really very little comfort to the auto plant worker in Michigan, or the call center agent in Minnesota, or the travel agent in California, most of whom are severely underqualified for these new jobs, and have no reasonable way of becoming qualified.
Humans are not discrete units of productivity - specializations, experience, education, intelligence, all of which exist as substantial barriers in making humans easily interchangeable.
One cannot reasonably take the position of "relax! we won't even remember this in 100 years", even though it is true. While society will recover from these periods of change, you still have millions of unemployed, hungry, desperate people at your door step right now, and you will have to face that problem regardless.
> "Automation has never created poverty or starvation."
Are you serious?
"Automation has never created a net decrease in productivity in the long term (measured in decades)" is probably more accurate.
If you want to see automation creating poverty and starvation just go to the rust belt in this country. Go to Detroit and see the boarded up houses, the burned out husks of neighborhoods, and then try to say with a straight face "automation has never created poverty or starvation".
Whenever this topic comes up on HN (and elsewhere) the response is invariably highly binary. Either automation is a noble advancement with no negative effects, or automation is a complete evil that destroys people. Both views are equally ridiculous. Automation is an inevitable fact that is, in the long term, a positive for society - but it creates very significant localized destruction for substantial amounts of time (measured in terms of human life).
The ignorance of that last part is dangerous. Automation has already put millions out of work just in this country alone, and will continue to put more people out of work. There are substantial gaps between the unemployed and the new classes of jobs that are being created, and bridging this gap is neither inevitable, nor trivial, nor will the magic of unbridled capitalism solve it automatically. It is a tremendous social issue that faces every society on this planet, and it should not be trivialized.
This is why a capitalist economy must be balanced with a robust welfare state. We luckily have an economic system that creates enough wealth to easily take care of the losers it also creates and still leave everyone better off.
I think it will depend on the culture its dropped into. Norway seems to have benefited greatly from its oil but its been a curse for some African countries. Total automation could be the same.
> but we've just gone and replaced their jobs without having solved scarcity
But surely automation, by robots or otherwise, is part of the solution to scarcity? By your definition, you couldn't have a post-scarcity society without them, for who would do the farming and the like in such a society?
It is, but it's the transition process that's difficult - you need to sustain people gradually automated out of their jobs while the post-scarcity economy is not yet working.
> where you can do nothing productive yet still live.
It's actually not possible to do that. Humans simply can't. As soon as a person has no reason to live, they start deteriorating.
If the person is healthy enough they turn to vices and intoxicants (legal or otherwise) to try to feel something. Other people simply wither. But in all cases a persons life is cut much shorter.
In lieu of a job, having children works too, since meeting their children's needs gives people a reason to exist (unless they have too much money, and hire a nanny).
The thing is, the same value is created, no matter if the work is done by humans or robots. The extreme would be a world where all work is done by robots, and the same value is created without the involvment of any human.
There shouldn't really be any reason for anyone to starve in such a world. It might sound like communism, but think of it.
The last I looked food isn't free, and I don't see Apple or Foxconn planning on using their increased profits to provide food for those that are now going to be without work.
>There shouldn't really be any reason for anyone to starve in such a world.
There is, because having food when your neighbor starves gives you power over them. Even in a world where all the work is done by robots, unless all the decisions about what work is done, how much and for whom, are also being made by robots, someone will find a way to oppress someone else with the system.
Which is exactly what will happen when the higher paychecks deploy automation everywhere, thus solving the "we need all those people to make stuff" problem.
The thing you're envisioning as a happy outcome, that is automation used everywhere and a society living happily above work is too "socialist" and "communal" to come to pass.
The huge masses of people would be useless, and left to rot, as are the huge masses of African, Asian, Indian, etc people today.
These workers have no other way to earn money. I am not saying Foxconn is an angel, but it is the only option these workers have. The other options are to work in agriculture, or educate/train themselves in some other trade/profession. We know how difficult agriculture is. Re-training takes time, effort and money, and I am not sure if the workers can afford any of the three.
It would be wonderful if all the shitty/boring/junk/monotonous work is left to robots. But that has to happen gradually. While we improve robots technology, we should also solve the problem of finding enough work for the workforce that the robots will replace. These two needs to go hand in hand. Otherwise we'll have some serious trouble in our hands. We are at 7 billion people today, and we are on track for 9 billion in the next few decades. How are we going to keep this many people busy?
I notice that lack of ways to earn money affects already some western countries for a decade or two.
Some people (especially young ones not yet placed inside hierarchies that are excuses to give money to the older ones) have trouble with earning basic levels of income.
There are few solutions to that discovered so far.
US for example builds prisons. Hires some young people as guards and puts lots of others inside. It's easily done by penalizing almost harmless activity popular among poor youth. Then uses this as excuse to provide for both groups.
Northern European countries give their young lots of education. It's nice because some of those young people might eventually learn to do something actually economically useful like building robots, electronics or software. All this education also gives government great excuse for providing for those students and their families (having a child while young is encouraged there).
I'm not sure what kind of excuse will china make up to provide for their youth but I hope it won't be something horrible.
You have stumbled into an old fallacy, the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs. More robots increases productivity for society and creates the excess resources for new and better jobs in other sectors, normally the service sector. This is a huge win.
You have stumbled onto an old fallacy either - that the creation of new jobs as a result of technological development floats all boats equally.
Replacing people with robots certainly increases productivity, and frees up resources for other pursuits - it is also unlikely that the people whose jobs have been removed will find employment in many of these new jobs.
So sure, the entirety of the closed system (i.e. the Earth) has experienced a net productivity boost - but for the areas impacted (i.e. that part of China) this is very much a net negative.
This is probably the greatest social issue we face today. We are very rapidly replacing the jobs of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people. We are creating jobs elsewhere as a result - but the intersection of these new jobs with the skills of the unemployed is very low, and the nature of these new jobs also means retraining is becoming harder, not easier.
Someday they will be forced to. Its just cost of production will fall down so rapidly and to such low amounts.
Getting rich that way will be like trying to fill a terabyte scale hard drive by adding 10 byte text files. It will be a exercise in futility. Think of it more like free phone calls, unlimited internet band width and free apps.
But think about it - if the cost of labor plummets, and material costs plummet because the labor required to gather and refine materials plummets, the cost of pretty much every need and most wants are ridiculously low to non-existant. It's quite similar to the discussions about the economic impact of a molecular assembler.
Indeed, I read that book last year and it felt really relevant, Vonnegut sort of nailed it with the second/third industrial revolution and the kind of social problems it would cause.
So if the Chinese are just replacing people with robots why can't America, or really any nation, do that now? Or why didn't they do that sooner? If we want to bring back manufacturing why not start with robots? It might not bring back the mass amount of jobs, but it will bring back more exports and stabilize the trade deficit. The robot repairmen will stay busy that's for sure.
There's no need to "bring back manufacturing". China didn't pass the USA as the world's largest producer of manufactured goods until last year. And contrary to popular belief, the reason why the USA shed so many manufacturing jobs over the previous few decades has little to do with Chinese competition, and a whole lot to do with the USA's rapid adoption of robotics in factories.
The real causes for the USA's trade deficit have less to do with its ability to manufacture goods and more to do with macroeconomic conditions such as its strong currency, relatively low domestic savings rate, and relatively high rate of foreign investment.
Theoretically, it should eventually sort itself out due to normal market forces. For example, domestic savings should increase and foreign investment should decrease as Americans begin to quit living on credit and start refilling their bank accounts. Incidentally, this sort of thing happened a few years ago, and was accompanied by a huge drop in the size of the trade deficit.
I was hoping to see someone mention this, because there's a great conversation that we're not having because of the lack of awareness of the extent of automation and even lights-out machining.
There was a wonderful article on lights-out machining in the States that I found thanks to HN - sorry I don't have the link - but which mentioned that manufacturing in the States grew by a third since 2000, while jobs were slashed.
That really complicates the conversation.
Lots of people seem to implicitly assume that by giving companies incentives to manufacture here, we can solve the employment problem. Um ... nowadays, there are manufacturing jobs that require knowledge of CNC machines and maybe even programming and/or metallurgy. Skilled stuff.
I want to know: now that we don't have the easy fix that 'wet robot' jobs gave us, are jobs on the whole being created or destroyed in high-tech societies? Even assuming people can be given technical skills in the numbers that they'd need, the openings for skilled technical work hardly seems sufficient for the masses of people being made redundant.
You are being a Luddite. People will shift into cushy service sector jobs. Craft beer, massage parlors, landscape architects, mobile game programming, whatever wealthier societies might want more of.
That sounds fantastic, because service sector jobs tend to be local.
Massage parlors and landscaping -- pretty geographically limited, ie limited competition, and scale poorly, ie no large competitors with economies of scale.
Is that the overall trend? The things that wealthy societies want -- in the future, will they increasingly or decreasingly come from geographically limited services that scale poorly and are thus good candidates for employing large numbers of humans? Even if increasing wealth grows the pie, will enough of the things we want in the future be the kinds of things that lots of our individual neighbors can give us?
I wouldn't bet on it.
I mean, I think it'll all work out -- it always has -- but I could also see lot of things we take for granted, like high employment and industrialized education as sufficient to prepare people for work, revert back to the historical mean a bit.
I don't think one needs to be so pessimistic about it.
The historical trend is that as technology improvements have reduced the need for human labor in industries that used to be big employers, humans think up new and exciting ways to put the excess labor force to use.
When we look back on the era of cottage industry, we don't remember it as a golden age of high employment. We remember it as an era where the standard of living was lower because the huge amount of human labor that went into textiles meant that they were comparatively expensive. So expensive that after people were done paying to clothe themselves they had little money left for other consumer goods such as clocks, books, or glassware.
Similarly, we don't look back on the era of peasant agriculture as a time when every able-bodied person was virtually guaranteed a job in the thriving agricultural industry. We remember it as an era where most everyone was tied to the land and eked out their lives doing backbreaking labor.
As for whether the service economy can replace the manufacturing economy, I don't think that's a question we need to speculate on. Looking back on the past few decades of American economic development, it's clear that it already has. And that employment rates in the USA have remained relatively high throughout that process.
The argument for full-automation is and cannot be that simple. By just pretending that we just need more of something else you are over-going a lot of real world problems. Most of the people that are being put out of jobs now are not being given a reasonable transition route into those (promised) jobs. And they are also not equipped to take it by themselves, in a lot of circumstances.
If we truly want full-automation of boring and dangerous jobs to become a viable alternative we need a society that is ready for it. You need appropriate living and working conditions, even geographic-spread of those jobs across, education facilities, re-education facilities and so on.
The same as you don't just jump from Capitalist to post-scarcity in the blink of an eye.
Service sector jobs are not immune to automation. Eventually, inevitably, societies will put those who failed competition for highly creative jobs (something like 95% of population) on some form of welfare.
I don't think it's the most likely possibility, necessarily, but I'm totally open to the idea that near-full employment was a brief historical blip, caused by the momentary usefulness of humans as wet robots during the early days of automation, creating demand for them as 'employees.'
I sometimes suspect that both education and employment, at least as we know them now, are just blips caused by temporary conditions, and that may well revert to a less rosy historical mean. (I don't think that's a good thing, either -- history, uh, sucked).
Take education - what the heck chance does the current educational model stand of preparing people to be, say, a programmer?
It's not hard to learn programming. Not at all. And yet after 12 years of public school, 40-60% of the people who want to be programmers are weeded out of their very first year. That's a fairly damning indictment, given that programming is about the 'softest' engineering discipline out there.
But the truth is that most designers didn't start from zero in college, and most programmers the same. We came in knowing something, maybe knowing a whole bunch, maybe having done it since we were kids.
Industrial-age schools worked when it only needed to produce wet robots. What if that was a blip, and systems of apprenticeship, which are a natural fit for skills that may take several years of on-the-job experience to be really useful in, turn out to be the right model?
Well automated intensive agriculture can feed a country by using 1-2% of the workforce.
If we can get well-automated intensive consumer goods industry to provide basic necessities by using 3-4% of the workforce, and can finally make some progress in automating construction and other infrastructure, then I see no reason why all the "standard needs" can't be provided by ~10% of people, leaving the other 90% for these 'luxury' occupations. This can (and most likely will) happen after a few decades, still during my lifetime.
The trade deficit is a good thing for the U.S., we get sent real resources and products and everyone else gets points at the Fed.
The problem is that we feel that when government spending minus taxes is greater than zero, it represents some kind of moral failing rather than what it actually is. Americans can't net save dollars unless more dollars get put into circulation than get taken out.
Supply chain. We can't just have a phone factory, we need the factories that make all the parts that go in it.
Incidentally, this was why the auto bailout was such a big deal -- it was not about protecting the car companies, but protecting the industry around it.
It's happened already in the US, and in other countries.
When do you think the peak of US manufacturing output was? It was actually 2007, it has only dropped since then due to the economic downturn. However, while US manufacturing output has doubled since 1975, the number of jobs available has more like halved, due to increasing per-worker productivity (from computers, containerized shipping, factory automation, etc.)
Sooner or later, we'll have to in order to compete with other nations. The problem is that it will eliminate jobs, which is unpopular. We seem stuck on preserving jobs in certain industries, regardless of whether the economy is better off with those jobs or not.
The question is: How do we create jobs for people with manufacturing skills in other industries that are more needed in our economy? We need to figure out a way to transition workers to jobs that are better for the economy, not keep on subsidizing industries in the name of creating jobs.
I submitted a story last week I was a little disappointed got no comments or upvotes, but if this (http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/11/06/evil-high-speed-...) is what robots in labs can do no, then things will continue to be exciting and interesting as these technologies get commercialized, become hackable and find new uses.... what COULDN'T robotics like this be used for? (that link was the one I submitted if that wasn't clear)
Ahh, I remember seeing this video back when it first surfaced. One of my favorite comments I saw somewhere (maybe slashdot?) was that robotic capability is usually insufficient for something like dribbling a ping pong ball ... until it isn't, at which point it can do it hundreds of times a second flawlessly.
I'm sure I've paraphrased quite liberally with the comment, but hopefully the intent stands. With sufficient engineering we should be capable of many many things quite soon.
If the rate is anything like that of computers or other complex technical gear, they will need plenty of engineers. Nowhere near the number of people they are replacing on the production lines, but still not an insignificant number.
I doubt that. You need humans to construct and program robots. There is no reason why you'd need humans to maintain and repair robots.
For a (slightly contrived) analogy you could look at modern farming or datacenters. It's not uncommon for a modern farm with thousands of cattle to be run by a work force smaller than 30 people. The same is true for datacenters that house ten thousands units of rather complex machinery.
In purely manual labor (assembly lines) a 1000:1 workforce-reduction doesn't seem unlikely.
I imagine said company would then have to contend with getting the raw materials into the US (or buying them in the US at US market rates), US environmental laws, US electricity prices and US rates for "robot service jobs".
Of course, they would save on shipping the finished products..
Actually the US has a pretty fantastic supply of rare earths. the US used to mine a TON, then imports from China got cheaper, so they stopped mining domestically. In this process, lots of "knowledge capital" was lost, but we still have vast reserves of rare earths. The big problem now is the lack of infrastructure to get at them again.
According to the article that is 83.3% of their workforce that will no longer need to be paid. It will take about three years to recoup costs, which means more profit for Foxconn and Apple and more subsistence farming for previously Foxconn employed Chinese peasants.
