Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs 559
kkleiner writes "For the last 30 years, automation has enabled U.S. manufacturing output to increase and lift profits without having to add any traditional jobs. Now, in the last decade, nearly a third of manufacturing jobs are gone. As manufacturing goes the way of agriculture, the job market must shift into new types of work lest mass technological unemployment and civil unrest overtake these beneficial gains."
Increased leisure time (Score:5, Interesting)
Not Stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Blue Collar workers are not stupid.
They are not bolting doors onto cars or running forklifts because they can't do anything else. When they joined the work force, these jobs were available and were jobs a person could raise a family with. A smart option for most, but the side effect is that you get stuck in a rut. The same way a guy who only known COBOL gets stuck.
But things change and Blue Collar manufacturing is less and less a job market that someone want's to join. New workers, who in the past would have gone into this job market, are capable of more. They can be the guys designing the robots, programming them, maintaining them, manufacturing them.
The knowledge of manufacturing is just as essential now as it was in the past and a robot has to put the nuts and bolts in pretty much the same order, as a human did. There is a lot of Tribal Knowledge about manufacturing that you don't learn at college and can pretty much only be found on the factory floor.
The Trades are not going away, just changing.
Re:The cheapest robots are slaves... (Score:4, Interesting)
What a load of crap.
You neglect to mention that those Foxconn employees are not only volunteers, but compete intensely for those positions. Why? Because the alternative of subsistence farming is significantly, brutally worse.
Why would it be morally superior to double the wages of the Asian factory workers, as opposed to keeping the wages the same and doubling the number of workers? The net benefit to those WITHOUT the factory jobs who get them would be much greater than those WITH them, but who get a raise.
The reality is that even on the meager pay from Foxconn (as an example), those workers manage to save and send money home. Those jobs give hope that the next generation can afford to get an education and break the millennium-old cycle of poverty. Without those factories, those born into poverty will always be there, generation after generation.
No, this is reality. (Score:5, Interesting)
Was the last century a fluke where a large middle class had power, which will soon revert to the more common system in human history where a tiny few live in splendor and the rest live under their heel?
Probably. When capitalism functions as designed, the price of labor drops to just above survival level. This is the "iron law of wages", and held for most of history. For much of the 20th century, in the developed world, it was different. When productivity went up, so did wages. That was driven by two factors - unions, and fear of communism.
Nobody has taken communism seriously in decades, even the remaining communists. But from the 1930s to the 1970s, it was seen as a serious threat to capitalism. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, capitalism failed, while communism in the USSR was on the way up. There was real fear that communism might win economically. Fear of nationalization forced companies to increase wages and treat their workers better.
When the USSR started building atomic bombs, space satellites, and ICBMs, there was fear in the US that the USSR might pull ahead in technology. This fear drove the "space race", and is why the US set up NASA and funded the space program so heavily.
This all ended in the 1970s. The best year ever for blue collar workers in the US was 1973. The USSR no longer seemed to be an economic threat. So things gradually went back to normal, and real wages in the US went down for several decades thereafter.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." - Orwell.
Re:What year is this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not? If you think that "this time is different", can you explain why? We are already a mostly service economy, so improvements in manufacturing should have less of an impact than in the past.
Well, one difference I see is automation of service jobs. You already see those robotic carousel soft drink machines in fast food joints. It's not hard at all to imagine a machine that takes your order via terminal, cooks your "meat" patty, places it on the bun with the various toppings you've selected and wraps it up in paper before ejecting it out of some chute. I would be extremely surprised if I didn't see this scenario in my lifetime. In fact, I'm kinda surprised it's not happening already. When the low-level service jobs start drying up, I'm not sure what will be the new foundation of that pyramid.
Granted, that's only an example concerning the fast food labor market, but I can see other places going the same way. Janitors, stocking crews, etc.
Re:What year is this? (Score:4, Interesting)
look.
the IDEAL end result is that the work output of just few guys will feed the entire nation and the rest can just fuck off with their social security doing arts & etc to get the social security extra bucks from the other guys on social security if they want extra hookers&blow. of course the ten individuals who manage to do the actual work would be pretty rich.
we're already way further that road than people would imagine, but really, think about how few jobs are actually connected to the basic human needs of medical care, food supply, shelter and clothing.
it used to be that the vast majority had to toil on farms just to keep the nations from starving.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Lump of labor (Score:5, Interesting)
Based on the changes over the past 250 years new jobs will replace the lost jobs. Short term unemployment occurs due to new technology, in the long term enough new jobs are created to meed demand. What this argument really amounts to is "Because things have happened that way for a long them they will always happen that way." Sure, that is a good assumption to make when you don't have more information, but it does not create an unassailable argument.
The entire point of automation is to eliminate the need for human labor. We can't do it yet; our automation is just not that good. But some day it might be. I don't think that day is anywhere near, and I think panicking about it is silly. But dismissing concerns about the possibility is also unreasonable. Maybe automation really will eliminate the need for human labor . Or, more likely, so many of the low-education jobs will be automated that a substantial portion of the population is not capable of learning what it takes to get one of the remaining jobs.