Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More Robots 187
jfruh writes: Foxconn, which supplies much of Apple's manufacturing muscle and has been criticized for various labor sins, is now moving to hire employees who won't complain because they're robots. The company expects 70 percent of its assembly line work to be robot-driven within three years.
New customers.. (Score:1)
I take it the poor starving humans would die off and the customer base woudl be robots as well.. right?
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I take it the poor starving humans would die off and the customer base woudl be robots as well.. right?
Do you really think Foxconn workers are Foxconn's customer base? I doubt Foxconn workers buy many iPads.
Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More Robo (Score:4, Interesting)
Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More Robots
Manufacturing Future: Fewer Humans, More Robots
this, is pretty much what we have all known for quite a long time. as tech gets better, menial jobs become useless to humans because robots do it better.
Also water is wet. news at 11
Re:Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More R (Score:5, Interesting)
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Soylent Robot Oil
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what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore. Sure, we can say that the economy will catch up, but that might take 50, 60 years.
The same thing we've been doing as this process has gone on for hundreds of years.
New generations train in other areas, make more money, and support the older generation. This isnt even unusual in China, whereas it would be in the US.
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Right, but the conversation that's being had around this is what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore.
Employ them. That's what China will do. The two or three "lost generations" is a developed world problem coming from an uncompetitive labor force.
The phrase you're looking for (Score:2)
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they're living in poverty while working for foxconn too so whats the difference?
at least now they'll be hiring more decent engineers. the only reason they were using human labor in the first place in such amounts and in such boring easily automated tasks was that they lacked decent manufacturing engineers. in other words it was cheaper(or easier in their work culture) to hire 40 guys to put in screws instead of hiring 1 decent guy to first make a jig for the work and 1 guy pressing the button to do the work
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You mean all those people we don't need to do the work yet we need them to buy the product, else we don't have any need to make the product and thus have no need of robots.
So we need to restructure out of wasteful mass consumption and shift to more sustainable with a focus on quality, durability and fit for life (products that last your lifetime, rather than fad or disposable products). So with robotics the model needs to change, from greed based to need based. With robotics who do we get rid of the empl
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With robotics who do we get rid of the employers or the employees. It makes far more logical sense to eliminate the employers, rather than the employees. The employees employ the robots thus eliminating the need for employers.
That also eliminates the need for cheap disposable shit that will disintegrate in short order and generate another visit to the crap shack. So it actually eliminates the need for many of the robots as well.
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That only works for things like furniture and other simple solid objects. For everything else, the technology advances too fast to make this practical. Why make a car that works for 100 years when in 10-15 years the cars will be much more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, and we'll
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Increase manufacturing of course.
The wonderful thing about freeing up human resources is they can go on to do other things. Yes it's not perfect but the reality is people have been saying x technology will destroy the workforce since manufacturing at scale began, and the reality has been that as people have been replaced, manufacturing has become cheaper and as a result we tend to manufacture more.
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In prior times, there was always a go-to industry that replaced the old. In current times, no such area exists long enough to be viable.
I wasn't saying go to another industry, I was saying increase industry output. Computers can't think. People think. Sometimes the best people to run automated production lines are those who used to do it manually. I've seen this first hand at several food plants (a cannery and two baked goods manufacturer) which were automated to reduce costs. Turned out costs stayed the same, the number of people employed stayed the same, and output doubled.
There's more manufacturing, but the quality has declined.
Nonesense. Quality depends on what you pay for it. I want to see a
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That same conversation has been around since since the first saboteurs threw their shoes into the gears of factory equipment.
The answer has never changed: society will evolve to a communist one because it has no choice if it's to avoid mass revolts and warfare.
You have only to look to the inner cities of North America to see the unrest and riots that have already started over trigger-issues such as a citizen being shot by police. Those riots aren't just over the deaths; they're an expression of people
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Although the way it's written is brutal and arrogant, I think it is the closest to what will happen. The more I look at it, the more it seems the future will look like "the Dancers at the End of Time" by M. Moorcock. It is either that, which means a brutal decrease of the unneeded population, or the end of technological advancement or the end of humanity.
Re: Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More (Score:4, Insightful)
Oddly, we seem to have managed to get past the introduction of the assembly line without the sort of problems you're predicting - humanity is still here, its population is still growing, and technology is still advancing.
Re: Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More (Score:4, Insightful)
Oddly, we seem to have managed to get past the introduction of the assembly line without the sort of problems you're predicting
Have we?
humanity is still here, its population is still growing, and technology is still advancing.
Whee! But, with a tip of the cap to Greg Graffin, progress is not intelligently planned. If you're playing a strategy and you use up the resources in early play then you're going to have a bad time.
Granted, life is more complex than a game with a fixed tech tree. Who knows what technology we'll invent tomorrow, right?
Check your history (Score:2)
The industrial revolution caused massive unemployment, and it took the economy 60 years to catch up and start creating new jobs. If you lived after that period things got better
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Weren't people saying the same sort of things when the "assembly line" was first invented? After all, the main purpose of the "assembly line" was to make the same amount of stuff with fa fewer workers than had been needed previously.
I'm not saying this will be next year or so, and I'm not sure the parent post was meant to be exact with respect to the timeline. But, yeah, it's the kind of global direction we're heading towards. The ultimate goal is to replace of work done by humans by work done by machines, simply because we're lazy. that and the fact that capitalism is about gaining the benefits of someone else's work because you own the business. If owning robot overlords can assure you all you ever need without working, it's obvious
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Not quite.
In the developed world, population growth is negative absent immigration. Currently, this applies to China, the EU, and the USA. Last I bothered to check, the projections were for continued global population growth up to the 10-15 billion range, followed be a decline to a stable population in the 5-9 billion range.
Note that that "stable population" presupposes that the entire world is "developed" by that time.
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Weren't people saying the same sort of things when the "assembly line" was first invented? After all, the main purpose of the "assembly line" was to make the same amount of stuff with fa fewer workers than had been needed previously.
Well first off you're not looking back far enough, during the first industrial revolution there was massive unemployment as machines replace skilled artisans and craftsmen with cheap, expendable factory workers that could receive minimal training in their one task on the line. The assembly line actually comes very late in a mostly industrialized society already and an old fashioned manual assembly line still employs a considerable number of people. And Ford famously doubled wages to get retention up, becaus
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Weren't people saying the same sort of things when the "assembly line" was first invented?
Yes, up until Henry Ford doubled his workers wages, introduced a 40hr week, and proved the Scrooges wrong.
Um... that's not the problem I predicted (Score:2)
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Or to put it another way, "past performance is not indicative of future results."
There's a big reason this doesn't apply. In the financial world, having a really good year means a higher likelihood of having a poor year next. There's no well above average investment that can stay that way. And that's really the only reason for the caution. After all, nobody will dump money into a losing investment on the hopes that it will continue to lose money.
When we get to technology development, past performance is indicative of future results. The strategies for developing new technology remain
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Or we could figure out a better way to distribute resources. Capitalism works great when there's plenty of work to do. Not so well when there isnt.
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Or we could figure out a better way to distribute resources. Capitalism works great when there's plenty of work to do. Not so well when there isnt.
Or we could find a way to make plenty of work. A huge part of the problem is the many obstacles thrown in the way of creating new businesses and employing people. I'll take complaints about unemployment seriously, when someone treats it like a serious issue.
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To be pedantic, it's jobs, not work.
No, I agree with the earlier poster, skam240. Your observation about "There's always plenty of work" just means that capitalism can always be applied, contrary to skam240's assertion that somehow we can run out of work. A job is just some amount of work done by a human.
Reality doesn't conform to your theory. Foxconn is in relatively obstacle free China, with relatively low labor costs, and this story is telling us they too are looking to reduce human jobs.
That's not in the story. What is actually in the story is that they are automating some jobs which are particularly amenable to automation. I imagine the degree of automation is probably being exaggerated as well. But in a fluid society like
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That's fine, but who do the factories sell to ?
I think that'll cause problems first.
They will sell to the upper middle class of course. Taking a look at how well budget PC vendors are doing compared to Apple is a pretty good indication that companies are already doing a good job shifting their focus to the upper middle class.
While the middle class is shrinking, the upper middle class (think the top 10%, not just top 1%) is growing rapidly. They have enormous purchasing power and make for a great consumer base. They are also unlikely to go away until general AI, or something very close, is
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People must accept the idea that the age of the working class and the middle class is over.
Sorry, but we don't have to accept things that aren't true. There's vast creation of these "classes" throughout the developing world, you just choose not to recognize it.
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what nonsense, automation has been great for most people, for over four centuries. You'd prefer being a serf/peasant having most of the fruit of your labors taken by royals?
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It used to be that new technologies created new jobs as it destroyed old ones. But that's merely a historical pattern, not necessarily a law of nature, and it may end.
It's kind of like Moore's Law: it's held so far, but nobody knows if it will keep.
Many conservatives feel that if the gov't doesn't meddle, new jobs will come from somewhere. However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.
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However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.
That's because it's nearly impossible to predict specific future technologies with any accuracy. A century ago, no one could have even dreamed of the job I currently have. A decade ago, "mobile app developers" didn't even exist, at least not in any real quantity.
Regarding the demise of Moore's Law. I'd like to share with you a quote from a year 2000 paper entitled "The End of Moore's Law?" [technologyreview.com]
The industry’s newest chips have “pitches” as small as 180 nanometers (billionths of a meter). To accommodate Moore’s Law, according to the biennial “road map” prepared last year for the Semiconductor Industry Association, the pitches need to shrink to 150 nanometers by 2001 and to 100 nanometers by 2005. Alas, the road map admitted, to get there the industry will have to beat fundamental problems to which there are “no known solutions.” If solutions are not discovered quickly, Paul A. Packan, a respected researcher at Intel, argued last September in the journal Science, Moore’s Law will “be in serious danger.”
Most new chips are at 22-28 nanometers now, 14nm chips are gearing up, and 10nm is in the pipeline. It's always amu
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At 7nm, you start to near the point of 'the atoms are just too big.' Hard to engineer your way out of that one.
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Naturally there's going to be a limit with the current silicon-based technology. At that point, we'll probably see attempts to work in other directions, such as moving into the realm of 3D, using new materials like graphene, silicon-germanian, or even pure germaniam (which could allow for lower voltages, and thus less consumption, tunneling, and leakage), or other techniques that no one has even contemplated yet.
It should be interesting to see whether they'll succeed or not, and what that will mean for the
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There's still a lot of space in the vertical direction.
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not really, putting one extra processing layer on a processor doubles the heat generated and worse interferes with ability to radiate heat away.
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Actually, reviewing U6 and discouraged workers, we are at record levels of unemployment. Close to 25% of the working age population isn't working. They are going on disability early, retiring early- but many 16 to 54 year olds who worked in the past are not finding employment. I know several people in this category.
It is much rougher for 30 year olds than it was when I was 30. Some retrain and then the job they were training for is swamped by so many applicants that wages are supressed.
I was hoping reti
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Advances in AI will make it possible to replace large swaths of 'smart' and 'creative' jobs by 2050.
Solving a problem is the easiest part. The hardest part is identifying and describing the problem. Once AIs can both identify and solve problems, then there will be absolutely nothing left for humans for "jobs".
80% of statistics are made up (Score:2)
As of January 2015, the U6 rate is at 11.3% [stlouisfed.org], from a high of 17.1% in 2009-10. U6 includes discouraged workers (U4 and up) and even "underemployed" workers (part-timers that would prefer to be full time), and so is probably a bit high if you're talking about actual unemployment. No, we're absolutely not at record levels of unemployment.
Moreover, no one uses "percentage of working age people not working" as an unemployment metric (unless you want to inflate the figure), because that includes people who choo
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Nothing made up, U6 even includes "underemployed" beside the "short term discouraged". Not the mocking "percentage of working age not working" phrase you coined.
There used to be a broader rank used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics before the 90s, and by THAT measure we have near 25% unemployment. That's the old method that shadowstats.com uses, for example.
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First - you need to watch out for averages. The average includes billionaires who skew the hell out of your result. You should use the median over the average in any situation like this. The median net worth is $140k for boomers near retirement age.
Second- you need to watch out for "net worth" vs "savings".
"Savings" is CASH, EQUITIES, etc. Cash. MONEY. You can buy food with it.
"Net Worth" is Cash, Equities, etc. PLUS your car, your property, and oh.. you know.. your HOUSE.
The median Home value is $189,
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Underemployed doesn't mean just part-time workers who want to go full-time. It also means people who have had to get a job considerably below their abilities.
The number of stay-at-home spouses, students, and early retirees depends on the ability to get good jobs. Some early retirees saved a whole lot and were able to take a comfortable early retirement, and some lost their jobs, couldn't get anything comparable, and gave up. Some stay-at-home spouses planned to be that way, and some lost their jobs, o
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Technology creates new fields, but it's the trickle down effect (mediated through the market or through government) allowing increased consumption which creates the jobs.
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Just last week I had a strong disagreement with someone who said robots were not ready to effectively replace humans. He's spoken to industry people personally and they told him robots were not ready yet.
And he ignored the numerous examples I linked him where robots are already replacing humans-- and damn fast too.
This could be about half a million skilled employees who were making $5000 or less- yet robots are replacing them because the robots are less expensive. How can a 1st world employee hope to comp
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What about the average to below average 3.5 billion people? They supposed to just roll over and die?
well.... it sounds heartless, but the world is way over populated as it is. I dont know the answer but we do need to cull the heard so to speak
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What is interesting though is - robots cost the same price here as they do there. The only advantage Foxconn had was cheap humans...
An advantage which they still have. But they also have relaxed regulations and being in the largest industrial power of today with all the supply chain and infrastructure support that implies. I think a large part of the current economic problems with the developed world is that there is a profound ignorance of economics and what's actually going on in the world.
So not only are places like China great for job creation, they're also great places for the next wave of automation innovation.
Foxconn is so much more than Apple (Score:1)
so why is Foxconn always seen as some evil company doing Apple's bidding?
Re:Foxconn is so much more than Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
so why is Foxconn always seen as some evil company doing Apple's bidding?
Mr. Tycho Brahe observes: [penny-arcade.com] We must, as conscious beings, observe when we are told things that are strategically lathed not to inform us but to make us fight with one another.
About time (Score:2)
I was surprised in 2005 that so much was being done by human hands.
There's no stopping them (Score:4, Funny)
I bet these robots won't stop at replacing humans. Pretty soon, even the pick-and-place and wave-soldering machines will be out of a job.
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I see what you did there...
Yeah, ain't I a stinker? Anybody who gets worked up about robots replacing people needs to realize that it's been happening since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. After all, isn't a cotton gin just a mechanical robot that does what people did previously? And don't get me started on the famed Jacquard loom [wikipedia.org].
I have an old vacuum-tube tape recorder from the '60s that has a hand-wired circuit board because it was built before printed circuit boards had been invented. Although PC boards ar
Good (Score:2, Insightful)
It's about time that the average Chinese laborer had a high enough standard of living that robots are cheaper.
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After you replace the laborer, what's going to happen to his standard of living ?
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You're assuming an oversimplified, ideal world, where if there were no robots manufacturing in China, everything would continue as it has been.
That's not what's going to happen. As China has developed, wages have increased. They now have a burgeoning middle class. But the higher wages means their factories powered by manual labor are no longer cost-competitive with other third world countries. Already, a good chunk of m
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I imagine the nets are to keep the employees from landing, not from jumping.
Why pretend this is an Apple story? (Score:2)
Why make the same complaint every time? (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone makes this complaint every time one of these stories happens. The answer is always the same: Apple posts the big profits, and everyone knows who Apple is. When you say that it seems to come from a desire to attack the company which is recently most successful, you're half right. That's a means to an end. Apple is most visible, so by attacking Apple, you're getting the most visibility. You could simply attack Foxconn directly — these days they actually sell stuff with their name on it — b
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Automation is Dependent on Design for Manufacture (Score:4, Informative)
I've been to Foxconn factories in Shenzen, and there are clearly opportunities for deeper automation. However, this will only be possible when the underlying hardware design has been designed for automation.
At the PCB level, pick and place achieves amazing automation and performance with smaller than rice-grain size components used in modern electronics. That is a given.
At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs. There are flex cables, adhesive, torque sensitive screws that all rely on a human to be able to manipulate and then quickly respond to misalignment. To automate this, the design constraints placed on the Industrial Designs need to change. For low and mid-range products where form is not at the level of Apple integration, this will probably increase the automation. For the high end where every mm counts it's unlikely that there will be a high level of assembly automation.
Re:Automation is Dependent on Design for Manufactu (Score:5, Informative)
At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs. There are flex cables, adhesive, torque sensitive screws that all rely on a human to be able to manipulate and then quickly respond to misalignment. To automate this, the design constraints placed on the Industrial Designs need to change.
I think you underestimate how far sensor technology has come and will go, here for example is an example of automated salmon processing [youtube.com]. Obviously there's a lot of natural variation, do we need to bioengineer a more robot-friendly salmon? No. They're measured out by a laser and intelligently cut. Head/tail/other cuts are dropped out to go on another processing line. Each cut is grabbed by a robot with robot vision and placed in pouches to be sealed. Skip to 3:12 if you just want to see that last part. Fillet-making machines are still in the research phase but there are examples [youtube.com] of that too using X-rays to scan and find the pin bones. If they can deal with all that, I'm sure they can apply the right torque to a screw.
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Fish gutters are more impressive than simply doing portioning with straight cuts ... but these machines have years to earn their costs.
For mobile phones you'd be designing new manipulators all the time, we don't have something as generic as the human hand which can work magic with relatively simple tools. We'll get there, but not in 3 years.
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At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs.
The designs will simply change to make manufacturing easier, and the designs of the robots will change to meet them partway. It's not like this problem can't be "solved", it just hasn't been solved yet.
Sooner or later, the whole phone will just be laminated into one brick which can only be taken apart with exotic chemicals so toxic that you need to keep them sealed away from all that is holy. And then, the terrorists^Wcorporations will have won... but regardless, there will be no need for human assembly, or
Robot vs Machine (Score:2)
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By calling them robots instead of machines, the article writers are playing on emotional strings of people, trying to provoke a larger response than otherwise.
Robots are like other machines which have automated away jobs in obvious ways. They are also unlike them in other ways, which will enable them to seize more jobs. And there was significant social upheaval when we moved to manufacturing. It wasn't all for the better, although obviously it provided opportunities for more people. It's also come at a significant cost in sustainability.
This is very Interesting (Score:2)
Now this announcement is an indication that this may not happen. China has built up such a massive web of suppliers, often in close proximity, that it now has a compelling logistic advantage. Even if you wanted to build a completely aut
Technological utopia and capitalist reality (Score:2)
Under the current system, we ARE seeing b
No ! No! No! (Score:2)
I wonder if... (Score:2)
They'll have to install tamper proofing on electrical outlets everywhere to prevent the robots from committing robot suicide?
It's all fun and games (Score:2)
OK, how is this going to work? (Score:2)
If the robot population is increasing, how are they going to use (and pay for) all the gadgets they are producing?
Here I am ... (Score:2)
... brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to assemble iPhones. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.
I think that wave soldering machine just sighed.
We need to make full time 32 hours a week or less (Score:2)
We need to make full time 32 hours a week or less and make OT pay cost so much that very few people are pulling 60+ hour weeks.
Also make the min level to be on no OT salary pay to be something like 80K-100K+ COL.
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We need to make full time 32 hours a week or less and make OT pay cost so much that very few people are pulling 60+ hour weeks.
Also make the min level to be on no OT salary pay to be something like 80K-100K+ COL.
Rather than an immedate large jump, perhaps better would be to gently increase the number of statutory holidays and/or decrease number of hours that qualify for "full time" at some predictable rate over the long term. Every few years add another holiday, or decrease the work week by twenty minutes. If we had done this type of thing a few decades ago, things might not be getting so bad right now.
The world's productivity per worker has increased many times since the 1920s when labor first got organized and th
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Yes, and now that the rentiers will make even more money for no labor, the displaced workers are doubly fucked.
As a general rule, it's a good idea to have some compassion for your fellow members of the species.
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And how, pray tell, will the rentiers make even more money if noone can afford to buy what they make because they're unemployed?
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And how, pray tell, will the rentiers ...
Contract manufacturers are not "rentiers".
make even more money if noone can afford to buy what they make because they're unemployed?
You should read up on Comparative Advantage [wikipedia.org]. Here is a simple example: Annie makes apple pies. Bill makes baskets. Each day Annie makes two pies, and Bill makes two baskets. Then they trade one pie for one basket, so they each have one of each. Then Mike, a manufacturer comes along. He can make ten pies as cheaply as Annie makes one. So Bill trades a basket to Mike for ten pies. So is Annie unemployed? Of course not. She switches to making baskets. The r
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Now Bill and Annie will both be unemployed, right? Wrong. A pie is still worth one basket. So Annie can go back to making two pies a day, and trade one for a pie, and Bill can make two baskets a day and trade one for a pie. They are no worse off then at the beginning.
I'm missing something: now that Mike's factory has changed the game, where is the market for one pie that's ten times as expensive to make as the ones Mike manufactures? An honest question, no snark intended.
(This is based on the assumption that you meant 'Bill trades one of his baskets for ten pies', please correct me if I'm wrong)
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I'm missing something: now that Mike's factory has changed the game, where is the market for one pie that's ten times as expensive to make as the ones Mike manufactures?
Because the game has not changed. Think of it this way:
Before: one pie is worth one basket
After: ten pies are worth ten baskets
A pie is still worth as much as a basket either way.
So Annie can trade her pie for one of Bill's baskets, or one of Mike's baskets.
Many countries have automated, at different times and at different paces. It has always resulted in disruption, because automation has comparative advantages, and people take time to shift to where they are relatively more productive. But it has also
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Thank you for taking the time to explain, I understand your argument a little better now.
I think I need to educate myself a little further on this topic. I appreciate this is a simplified example but I'm still not getting why the pies and baskets haven't lost their value when the market was suddenly able to supply 10x the normal amount. Or am I reaching outside the metaphor?
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In economics, the Jevons paradox [...] is the proposition that as technology progresses, the increase in efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
One side effect of increasing automation is that human labor becomes more productive. The above model would then predict that "consumption" of human labor should increase. That actually happens on a global scale despite the relative tribulations of the developed world.
I think the combination of comparative advantage and Jevons paradox explains why the current myths of automation-induced unemployment are so consistently wrong.
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Just because a pie and a basket are interchangeable before and after it doesn't address the fact that it still takes Annie ten times the resources to make a pie than it does Mike. Her efficiency doesn't magically improve because Mike is now making baskets too. Or are Annie and Bill part of the crowd that only want hand made products? What would happen when Mike starts making pies and baskets is that Annie and Bill get together and open up a fair trade, organic coffee house that also sells pies and basket
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Just because a pie and a basket are interchangeable before and after it doesn't address the fact that it still takes Annie ten times the resources to make a pie than it does Mike. Her efficiency doesn't magically improve because Mike is now making baskets too.
Yes, but the point isn't that she is "better off", just that she is no worse off. Mike, on the other hand, is getting filthy rich.
What would happen when Mike starts making pies and baskets is that Annie and Bill get together and open up a fair trade, organic coffee house that also sells pies and baskets that they get from Mike.
Yes, of course. In real life, automation has a much bigger comparative advantage in manufacturing than in services. So the natural path of developed economies is for most people to move from manufacturing to services.
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You seem to be assuming that Annie can immediately find another job, as a basket maker. This is nowhere near certain, and so there's a lot of short-term pain.
In your second example, you also seem to be assuming that Annie and Bill need nothing but pies and baskets. Since the price of baskets and pies drops by a factor of ten, everything else Annie and Bill want to buy is relatively ten times as expensive.
What probably happens is that Annie and Bob are forced to close their businesses and get jobs for
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Using that logic, the entire global economy should have fallen over immediately when the industrial revolution started
Yeah, that's what they said when Henry Ford used it.
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Yes, and now that the rentiers will make even more money for no labor, the displaced workers are doubly fucked.
As a general rule, it's a good idea to have some compassion for your fellow members of the species.
Rand Paul called - and is he pissed at you
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Why not? If companies can build robots to replace workers, can't the common man build robots to obviate his requirement to work. The robot would do all the chores, build houses, buy/grow your food and cook it, etc. You could also 3D print appliances and tools yourself. Who needs companies?
In 100-200 years time, there will be wars over natural resources such as land for food or raw materials for 3D printing. All you need
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It's already happened in America. Most manufacturing jobs have either become automated or outsourced. Most people work in the service industry. Same thing will happen in China.
I work at a facility with a large number of CNC machines making high tech stainless parts. Usually someone has to reverse engineer the old part. Someone has to draw parts in solidworks. Someone has to figure out what size the raw material has to be cut to, before it goes into the CNC. Someone has to load material into the CNC and know how to position it and run the machine. Someone has to order raw material. Someone has to be out trying to find customers. Someone has to make the raw materials at a v
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Is that why I have to idle in a chat room for days while I wait for some customer service? The service industry is a joke.
You get what you pay for.
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I'm pretty sure that's the management.