Robots Appear To Raise Productivity Without Causing Total Work Hours To Decline 391
Hallie Siegel writes: We often read about the economic impact of robots on employment, usually accompanied with the assertion that "robots steal jobs". But to date there has precious little economic analysis of the actual effects that robots are already having on employment and productivity. Georg Graetz (Professor of Economics at Uppsala University) and Guy Michaels (Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics) undertook a study (abstract) of how robots impacted productivity and employment between 1993 and 2007, and found that "industrial robots increase labor productivity, total factor productivity and wages." And while there is some evidence that they reduced the employment of low skilled workers, and, to a lesser extent, middle skilled workers, industrial robots had no significant effect on total hours worked.
This is important because it seems to contradict many of the pessimistic assertions that are presently being made about the impact of robots on jobs. What I am especially curious about is post-2007 data, however, because it's just in the past few years that we have seen a major shift in industrial robotics to incorporate collaborative robots, or co-robots. (Robots specifically designed to work alongside humans, as tools for augmenting human performance.) One might reasonably suspect that some of the negative impact of industrial robotics on low and middle skilled workers pre 2007 could be offset by the more recent and increasing use of co-bots, which are not designed to replace humans, but instead to make them more efficient.
This is important because it seems to contradict many of the pessimistic assertions that are presently being made about the impact of robots on jobs. What I am especially curious about is post-2007 data, however, because it's just in the past few years that we have seen a major shift in industrial robotics to incorporate collaborative robots, or co-robots. (Robots specifically designed to work alongside humans, as tools for augmenting human performance.) One might reasonably suspect that some of the negative impact of industrial robotics on low and middle skilled workers pre 2007 could be offset by the more recent and increasing use of co-bots, which are not designed to replace humans, but instead to make them more efficient.
I've said it before (Score:3, Insightful)
Mainly because work is not a set amount. We don't need X, and never need X+1. The amount of work that we want to be done so far exceeds the amount of work we need to do, or can do, that if we replace every single job in the entire world, in twenty years, all the new people will have created new jobs.
Give clothing to every single person in the world? We want more than one outfit. Give us 100 outfits each? We want to each have a unique, handsewn outfit. etc. etc. etc. Give us all sex bots and we will each want two sex bots for a threesome.
That's the nature of mankind.
No jobs? No talk to me when mankind has terraformed every planet in the solar system. Till then, stop being a ludite.
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Exactly. The stupid peasant Luddites in our society keep retarding our technological and industrial advancement through their asinine paranoid misunderstanding as to how ANYTHING works.
We should have impliented far more automation than we already have. People say "oh but labor costs in country X are low"... yeah but if you automate heavily it just doesn't matter because most of the production is a result of the damn infrustructure at that point.
And the US, contrary to what many think, has pretty good indust
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This is ok as long as society either
1. Stops increasing the population and/or
2. Redistributes wealth so that the new unemployed can live and find creative and entertaining ways to spend their lives.
else: Revolution
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The west is not in danger of over populating itself.
So when you refer to "society" you must be specific to which socities. There is no single human society.
The first world can sustain and expand its current population. We do not suffer famines etc.
As to your requirement that we become some sort of communistic society or else you say we have to destroy our tech. ... well, you are precisely one of the Luddite peasants I was talking about that fucks everything up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Nope (Score:2)
Oh I'm no Luddite and hardly a peasant. :) I love tech. Nowhere did I suggest limiting technology. What I said was that people have to support themselves and have some decent kind of life. If robots take the jobs and you don't redistribute wealth (which is not the same thing as socialism), there will be a revolution, regardless of the carrying capacity of the West. We don't have real famines yet because most people can still find enough paying work to buy food, or they rely on charity. But you can't
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Redistributing wealth arbitrarily is distinct from socialism/communism in what way?
As to being a luddite... you're saying that the robots should not be permitted to automate industries IF "reasons"... Standing in the way of that at all for any reason is opposition to the most efficient means of producing something in the economy.
As to the notion that there will be a "workers revolution"... that is literally right out of Karl Marx.
So... you're almost certainly a marxist. Which is cute because the ideology is
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Redistribution of wealth is inevitable. The only question is if you want it done in a controlled, orderly fashion (socialism) or by violence.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like you didn't study history very well. Eventually those who amass wealth are always overthrown and the wealth redistributed. It's inevitable, because wealth accumulates and eventually the majority decide that they are better of risking a violent overthrow than continuing to live off the crumbs that are handed down to them.
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Oh, the WEST isn't in danger of over populating itself! Well well, that's awesome. Screw all those other people outside that great big giant wall we have that separates us from the rest of the world!! Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster and his noodly appendages that nothing that happens in the world would ever effect us here in the WEST!
You are about the biggest example of a horse's ass I think I've ever seen.
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The more you speak the more the stupid comes out of your mouth.
They're the ones that are outstripping their OWN ability to maintain themselves
Really? Because the West didn't already strip their countries bare after centuries of exploitation as colonies, and now via mega-corporations that prop up our unsustainable lifestyles? Our very economy depends on an uneven arrangement of low offshore wages and cheap foreign resources. We've destabilized governments to ensure that we narrow few remain on top.
Not t
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As to quality of life, by what metric?
As to food quality, by what metric?
As to soil, by what metric?
As to being able to get the vitamins out of food... I really don't know what you're referring to there. We have not only the super markets, but whole foods, and the farmer's markets. Are you saying they're all bad? Or just the super markets? And how do you show a trend over time? What are you basing this on?
As to travel time from home to work, that is largely because of congestion and it is largely an issue l
Re:I've said it before (Score:4, Funny)
I like this solution. I would quickly become one of the new unemployed.
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With a porous border, it hardly matters..
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What is your snark free plan for dealing with the people displaced from the farms? Remember, the overwhelming majority of the labor force used to work on farms.
Today... about 2 to 4 percent of the population and we have a food surplus with those numbers.
Should we get rid of the tractors because people will be displaced from farm labor and go back to hand harvesting wheat?
Your position is naive.
First see to the wealth of the society... the jobs issue will take care of itself. It always does.
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and I'll say it again - technology INCREASES jobs, never decreases it - over the long term.
What do you have to back up that assertion (especially that bold "never" part)? Is it just that you know this is true and the whole world is supposed to trust you? Even though all the models we have to predict future behavior are entirely based on what has happened in the past and by definition can't account for events in the future that defy current models? What about your apparently trenchant knowledge of "the nature of mankind"? How could you possibly be able to support any kind of summation of what huma
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What do you have to back up that assertion (especially that bold "never" part)?
The past five centuries of human history. I'm not the previous poster and I wouldn't go as far as to say that technology always increases jobs - there might be a counterexample somewhere, but it's been a long time job creator for several human lifespans which is about as certain as you're going to get in this area.
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The past five centuries of human history.
You skipped over, or didn't respond to, the part of my post that already responded to that:
all the models we have to predict future behavior are entirely based on what has happened in the past and by definition can't account for events in the future that defy current models
History doesn't repeat itself, even if certain parts have an awful lot of (usually superficial) similarities. And I should add that the Roman Empire lasted, in one form or another, a hell of a lot longer than 500 years. Agriculture was the primary form of wealth generation for the most powerful nations of the world even longer than any one empire. And yet both of these are long since consigned to the history books.
Or
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all the models we have to predict future behavior are entirely based on what has happened in the past and by definition can't account for events in the future that defy current models
There is no reason to believe that this time will be different. Most likely it will be just like all the other times.
Here's a cool thing: if it turns out to be not follow the same pattern of the past seven millennia (or however long we've been improving technology), we can notice that and do something then. We don't have to catch it preemptively.
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Why don't you say what this new situation is that will destroy society before we can do anything.
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all the models we have to predict future behavior are entirely based on what has happened in the past and by definition can't account for events in the future that defy current models
Unless the future events that defy current models never happen. I don't really see the point of defending a solid historical trend against imaginary defying events.
And I should add that the Roman Empire lasted, in one form or another, a hell of a lot longer than 500 years.
Some forms didn't last 500 years. For example, the Western empire almost lasted 500 years with failure of the empire evidence for about a century before it collapsed. And the Eastern Empire (the Byzantium Empire) was slowly falling apart for a thousand years.
In comparison, we've had astounding economic growth for half a millennium with no evid
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This idea that we (Who's this "we", anyway? The West? The industrialized world?) have been doing things more or less the same way for 500 years is absurd. I mean, just to pick one example, one-sixth of the entire wealth of the United States 155 years ago was legally owned human beings! We've had to keep changing things, thank God.
We, as in the entire world. Humanity.
And in the above paragraph you illustrate the considerable difference between technological progress of the past half a millennium and the idea of the Roman Empire. We are moving through a long, fluid time and yet, certain core characteristics hold no matter how much things change.
Why the Roman Empire was fundamentally a stagnant ideal which eventually grew unable to deal with the world around it.
after trying it millions of times, we know. Elasti (Score:3)
Jobs have been automated millions of times. Every time, it's the same cycle, with on variation that happens often, but not always. The demand for goods and services is not perfectly elastic, so increased productivity for a specific task very often results in fewer people being employed at that precise task. As an example, milking machines mean that fewer people are needed to milk cows.
However, prices ARE somewhat elastic, so as the increased productivity reduces the price of milk relative to substitute
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between 100 and 70 percent of the human population used to be concerned entirely with procuring enough food to survive.
As of about 150 years ago, about 70 percent of the US population was involved in agriculture. Today it between 2 and 4 percent.
Unless you're willing to go back into fields and harvest wheat by hand... I don't want to hear this luddite shit. Its ignorant bs largely spread by elites that are just pissed that the increasing upward mobility of what were peasants is threatening their class domin
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... i advocate no such thing. One already exists and you can't upset it by your means without destroying everything which will harm everyone... especially the poor.
What you need to do is maintain as much upward mobility as possible so that people can challenge the elites.
Having elites is fine and good. Some people are actually better than other people. I know... that isn't politically correct. However, some people are smarter, wiser, more motivated, have better fashion sense, are more artistic, are more cre
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I saw your comment in the context of others and thus generalized to the extent that there are big gaps in your position that have to be assumed since you haven't specified a position to any great extent.
As to soapboxes... the issue is a soap box issue. We've only put off automation this long because people stood up on their soap boxes and shut it down. And that resulted more in outsourcing and offshoring than it did in saved jobs.
As to chilling out...
I don't do gradations. I do logically determined modes th
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Second of all, most of what I wrote is not simplistic logic it is instead obvious facts. The basic problem is that you think there are X jobs available. NO. There is no set limit of X jobs. If you think that RIDICULOUS idea is true, it is up to you to prove it.
I k
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It is a trick, a scam of misinformation. Pause and think about it, they are studying currently existing companies and the impact that adopting automated devices had upon them. Still miss it, how about I call those current companies, only those companies that survived the adoption of automated devices, the other companies, the ones that failed and do not now exist, well, as they don't exist they can not be evaluated.
So the companies that adapted to automation and produced more dominated the market and hir
Re:I've said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
While I generally agree, what happens when the only jobs left are those that require creativity or critical thinking. There's a lot of people out there who can't do anything more complicated than repeating a few simple tasks over and over again. These jobs are going to be replace by robots. When the only jobs left are jobs that require high levels of thought, there's going to be a lot of people who simply can't hold down a job. I don't think that changing the way we educate people or making education free or anything else is going to be able to change the fact that some people don't have the cognitive ability to do the high level jobs that robots won't be able to do.
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Second of all, I think a lot of humans will surprise you about how creative they can become - especially if they have to in order to get a job.
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Shit, finger-spasmed Submit instead of Continue Editing, apologies. I'll continue:
Re:I've said it before (Score:5, Insightful)
If robots don't cause total human working hours to decline, then what the fuck good are they? Are we really automating the work force so people can work more? If so, then please stop with the robots.
Or, maybe we can just dispense with the "robots will make human lives easier" BS and just go straight to "robots will increase profits for people who already have all the fucking money".
Rule of thumb: If there's a human endeavor that doesn't make human lives better, then it is not worth doing.
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Re:I've said it before (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's hope so. Because there's no question that automation has lowered the incomes of working people. Robots devalue labor, so if the goal is to make people poorer, it's working.
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Ah, but we're not talking about "across the board", are we?
We're talking about what robots have done to existing workers in specific industries.
And even if we were talking about "across the board", the real CPI is much closer to 10-12% than what is reported when you count the actual cost of education, health care, food, etc which more than triples any "across the board" increases in incomes for working people, wiping out any gains and lea
Begone, luddites (Score:2)
You really don't get it.
The invention of the automobile simultaneously made life much cushier for humans (try getting around in a horse-drawn stagecoach for a while), and created millions of jobs that previously didn't exist (from repairing brakes, to paving roads, transporting fuels, and doing R&D of improved airbag designs).
Every new tool or technology has done the same thing: increased the average standard of living, and also resulted in a net increase in the number of jobs. You don't even have to b
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I'm not talking about automobiles, I'm talking about robots.
You know all those millions of jobs you were talking about? Nearly a million of them were good paying jobs making those cars and parts for thos
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I'm not talking about automobiles, I'm talking about robots.
The difference is only a matter of degree of automation.
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Yes, of course. And the degree of automation is exactly what we're talking about here. The question is, "What degree of automation in the work place will make the most people's lives better?"
http://www.merriam-webster.com... [merriam-webster.com]
robot
robot \r-bät
: a real or imaginary machine that is controlled by a computer and is often made to look like a human or animal
: a machine that can do the work of a person and that works automatically or is controlle
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If robots don't cause total human working hours to decline, then what the fuck good are they? Are we really automating the work force so people can work more? If so, then please stop with the robots.
People choose to use their increased productivity hours to earn more, so as to buy more stuff.
Take it up with the individuals, not the technology.
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We're not talking about increased productivity. We're talking about longer working hours. Not the same thing.
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We're not talking about increased productivity. We're talking about longer working hours. Not the same thing.
Reading is hard.
Slashdot article title: "Robots Appear To Raise Productivity Without Causing Total Work Hours To Decline"
Also, "work hours not declining" is not the same thing as "longer working hours".
From the article, they didn't find a significant relationship between automation and hours worked.
When we use our instrument to capture differences in the increased use of robots, we again find that robots increased productivity, and detect no significant effect on hours worked.
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And the benefit of the increased productivity to the workers is...?
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And the benefit of the increased productivity to the workers is...?
What does the freaking article summary say?
industrial robots increase labor productivity, total factor productivity and wages
Does higher wages sound like a benefit to you?
How you get Insightful for failing to RTFA is a mystery. I blame the increased productivity your computer is giving you. You can count that as a benefit of technology.
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zero independent problem solving ability
Oh, look! Another one of the "privileged" writes-off the unwashed masses. . .
If your ego allows it, you might ask yourself the following:
-Did these people look exhausted due to working 3 jobs?
-Did they look demoralized because their under-privileged status had resulted in endless mind-numbing tasks?
-Were they self-medicating because life at their socio-economic level really sucks?
-Perhaps you mistook poor second language skills as poor first language skills?
-Or, perhaps they just knew how to act aro
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American worker productivity went up every year from 1945 to 1995. Do you think prices went down for the goods they made during that period, or did they go up?
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It's a bit like computer chips. With Moore's law we could have had incredibly inexpensive CPUs because with modern lithography, the chips would be beyond tiny (the 8086 only had about ~30,000 transistors in
Yes and no (Score:2)
Basically the Manufacturing jobs from the 70s were replaced by McJobs in the 90s. You traded $70k/yr + benefits for $20k/yr without (unless you're lucky enough to live in a state with so
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and I'll say it again - technology INCREASES jobs, never decreases it - over the long term. Over the short term it can make certain skills worthless, putting some people out of work, but that's it.
If your position is correct, the number of jobs in Agriculture has increased over the long term.
So, for instance, the number of people working on farms has increased over the last century or so.
Yes?
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Turns out that hand-made outfits are only being bought by some hipster niche subset of the wealthy, while the real world is buying robomade shirts. Turns out luxury items are an exception to the rule, an outlier, a fluke. The path of the bottom-line, of efficiency, is still king. Is the only reality pertinent enough to discuss, unless you need to be misleading.
Turns out they only bu
Re:I've said it before (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean in the past technology has increased jobs. There is no universal law that it be so in the future.
My sister tried to use this argument about why a particular tree limb didn't need to be cut down. It had never fallen in the past so it would never fall in the future.
Bullshit (Score:2)
What is this, some grade school hack? If you produce more stuff with the same number of people, you've just told me that you've used robots to replace workers. Because if you can make and sell more stuff, then you can hire more people to make that stuff. Hiring robots instead of people costs humans jobs, plain and simple. I'd also be interested in seeing if "robots" included self-service terminals or whether they just count robots that move and build things.
It would be one thing if we were losing population
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You have things waaaay too oversimplified. Raising productivity makes goods cost less, which makes people buy more goods, which makes more jobs. And the new jobs are higher skilled and better paying. The losers are the ones who don't have any skills. So rah-rah public education, but we shouldn't hold up automation and subsidize the guys who - if they came to class at all - sat in the back and farted.
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Raising productivity makes goods cost less, which makes people buy more goods, which makes more jobs.
This might work for a while but certain segments of society are already getting to the "no more stuff" stage.
You are starting to see alot of talk of tiny homes, downsizing, and even nomadic lifestyles. If people started
consuming significantly less or just stopped consuming more and more and more then these more jobs would
never appear. Luckily, the rest of the world has a lot of catchup to do and we'll probably all be dead one way
or another before everyone on the planet owns 2 cars.
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Mark my words - the "tiny home" thing is a trend that will die like bell bottoms and pet rocks. You can already get a 700 sq. ft. condo for the same price - this is not a new thing. You are absolutely right that most of the growth will come from people currently living without glass windows or indoor plumbing, but if we can figure out the right free trade / labor balance there is plenty of room for growth right here in the developed world. It just won't seem like it because it will be in the low single-digi
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Which is the point in the conversation where I need you to RTFA.
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If your factory's productivity doubles do you just pocket the savings or produce twice as much stuff to sell?
If you chose the latter then congratulations, you now understand how robots didn't take jobs.
And the question is... (Score:2)
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If robot's are making such strides in productivity, what are the flesh-n-blood drones doing to deserve the pay ?
Producing and installing extra apostrophes. No robot would put one where you did - it takes a human operator to make that special leap.
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Ah, the old "Broken Apostrophe" fallacy.
No, no fallacy. Just a mysterious urge to stick one in plural words. It's a curious thing that some people just do, for no reason. And a good example of the sort of randomness that humans bring to working.
Robots do eliminate jobs (Score:2)
Robots eliminate crappy, boring, mind-numbingly repetitive tasks that a human shouldn't have been forced nor encouraged to do. Sometimes those jobs are replaced with a dual job of babysitting the robots while doing some other boring task that hasn't been roboticized yet. Also, there's always the design and repair of robots.
Overall, increasing efficiency (often called "eliminating jobs") is a good thing, but can both displace workers and further concentrate profits.
Re:Robots do eliminate jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
"crappy, boring, mind-numbingly repetitive tasks"
You might be surprised that this is the extent of the ability for a great number of workers out there. It's easy to forget when you're in an all-white collar environment that there is a large portion of the population which has close to zero independent problem solving ability, and an overlapping portion which has almost zero reliability. As someone who deals with these people on a regular basis, I can tell you that they are some of the nicest people I know, and yet sometime during their lifetime there will be a robot which can do their job better and more reliably at a fraction of what it costs to feed, clothe and house them.
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And you forgot to mention that starving people are very dangerous. They do things like whack the heads of the untouchable elites because they have nothing to lose whether they succeed or not.
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I believe Marie Antoinette is known for having said a very similar thing...
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The summary said entry level and some mid level jobs are being replaced, and mid and upper have more work. So how do I bypass a low or entry level job and get to the expanding workload?
The stats show we are replacing workers with robot managers. That's obvious just in the summary.
Where do these people find a job?
I'm all for the robotic economy, but this horseshit is self serving, myopic tripe. I would argue that your dregs don't have a place in the robotic economy, but these stats argue it for me.
The differ
The pessimists totally ignore history. (Score:4, Interesting)
Every new tool or technology has ultimately enlarged the economy, and increased the number of jobs -- after causing temporary disruptions, like putting buggywhip makers out of work. For every buggywhip maker who lost his job, thousands of jobs have been created in the auto industry and other supporting industries (paving roads, transporting fuels, R&D of improved airbags, etc.).
There are more people employed today that at any earlier time in history, and most of the people who are employed today can thank some recent technology without which their job wouldn't exist.
The more disruptive the technology, the more jobs it ultimately creates. It's pure ludditism to think that robots would be the first exception to this rule.
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Comparing a pre robotic world to a post robotic one?
I understand your point generally, and agree. But, even if we take every hour spent doing work, and replace it with an hour, or more, programming or repairing robots, some people will be out of work due to lack of trainability. There will be no job they can do. Because they are on the wrong side of the bell curve.
And they will do what, exactly, at that point?
Here's the problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Robots do increase productivity. Often it opens up jobs in higher skilled areas, like QA people that check the jobs that the robots do to ensure quality. We see this a lot in the Auto industry.
The problem is what happens to the lower skilled people that get displaced by the robots? They may not have the skills, or the aptitude to learn those new skills, to do the new jobs that the robots make available. Now you have a bunch of people that used to be productive that are now unemployable.
What do we do with them? Sure, some of them might be old enough to retire. What about the person that went to work for GM right out of high school? Now they are 40 or 45 with no real skills other than what they learned on the assembly line. They probably earned a pretty good living on the assembly line. Now they are unemployed with no college degree.
Whose responsibility does it now become to support these people? The company? Not bloody likely. They put the robots in to save money. Robots don't get sick or go on maternity leave or get pensions or 401K matching. The government? Society at large? Who knows.
Re:Here's the problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
He indicated that this job was mind numbing to the extreme but that it paid very very well for someone not yet finished highschool. If he worked there long enough his hourly pay would be actually pretty good for the rural area he was in. He told me that many people who worked at the mill never bothered to finish high school and few went to University because even with a degree it would be hard to beat a job at the mill.
I am pretty sure that I could build a bark detecting optical system in under a week to replace him if the mill were still open. But it isn't through a combination of far lower demand for paper product because of the electronic age, combined with far higher efficiencies at the existing mills.
But all one has to do is go to the early seasons of the show "How it's made" and see that even fairly automated assembly lines usually had people doing things such as quality control, packaging, and the occasional odd procedure in the middle. Now, if you watch the recent seasons, about the only thing people do is to load crap into the machines at the beginning, and forklift large boxes of the final product in the end.
One of the final job killers are the pick and place machines.
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Pretty much. There's probably more job openings than ever. The problem is that it's all for high skill labor. And only a small portion of the population is high skill. The rest...well, that's a problem.
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Even if you post a job offer at 500k/year, you won't get a significant uptick in how many qualified people will apply for it (you will see an uptick, but it won't double or anything). What you will see however, is a HUGE amount of idiots applying for it, and your hiring managers will struggle to find signals in all the noise. In the end it may take longer to find qualified people.
How do I know?
Simple: we tried.
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How about the people themselves? If we actually taught people how to handle money responsibly in school, then they wouldn't be living paycheck to paycheck and could afford to spend a few months learning a new trade when their current job gets automated or outsourced. Also if we taught critical thinking skills, they might be able to see that their job is at risk and start to take some precautions ahead of time.
There is plenty of work left to be done. We just need to make sure that everyone has access to t
Two factories (Score:5, Insightful)
Two factories make toilet paper, one introduces robots and doubles its production and also profit margins, the number of employees stays the same. There is no impact to those employees, but the other factory goes out of business. That is where the jobs get lost and that is what the study does not measure. Same amount of toilet paper is produced at twice efficiency and half of the jobs get lost in the overall economy.
Re:Two factories (Score:4, Informative)
There is no impact to those employees, but the other factory goes out of business. That is where the jobs get lost and that is what the study does not measure.
Read the article.
Although we do not find evidence of a negative impact of robots on aggregate employment, we see a more nuanced picture when we break jobs and the wage cost down by skill groups. Robots appear to reduce the hours and the wage costs of low-skilled workers, and to a lesser extent middle skilled workers. They have no significant effect on the employment of high-skilled workers. This pattern differs from the effect that recent work has found for ICT, which seems to benefit high-skilled workers at the expense of middle-skilled workers (Autor 2014, Michaels et al. 2014).
Ask former bulk food packagers (Score:4, Insightful)
Missing ingredient: consumers (Score:5, Interesting)
It essentially allows the same worker to do more per hour. However, unless somebody actually purchases the output, the factory is limited to the amount of extra widgets it can actually sell.
The bottleneck in the cyber-age economy is consumers, so far. The same or fewer workers can produce more, meaning the proportion of jobs that increase to absorb the extra products are not there to match the output increase.
Nobody has figured out how to get more and bigger spending-consumers. Most of the revenue and profits are log-jammed at the 1%, who don't need 500 iPhones each.
Taxing the rich seems the only known way to free the revenue and profits to flow back into the middle- and lower-class consumer. If you have a another way to balance that part of the system of economic flow, I'm all ears.
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Exactly, he has no money with which to turn his demand (desires) into economic activity. A part is missing or broken from the usual cycle.
Same with somebody who would have had a job if a robot didn't take it: they have no money in which to buy the products the robots help produce.
Surveys of businesses consistency say lack of purchases is the main thing keeping them from ex
Automation Tax Proposal (Score:2)
Ultimately what will be (I believe) the best solution is some form of tax on commercial automation, that will be used to fund a Basic Income. As automation increases and replaces more jobs, the fund will increase and can support more people. The stock answer to automation is "but that creates jobs for robot engineers/repairmen", but eventually, machines will be able to repair one another, and engineer new designs. Unfortunately, the transition to a fully-automated economy will be slow enough that we can't s
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It seems to me that the real problem with this is immigration. Our immigration system now--specifically lack of enforcement--encourages bringing in lots of low skill labor. The next is all IMHO, so take it cum grano salis! Big agra and big business (aka republicans) likes this because it keeps labor costs down. Democrats like this because it's importing new democrat voters, and the idea of America as welfare state to raise up the poor from around the world. Economists like immigration because all they care
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Re:And where the hell's my leisure time? (Score:4, Insightful)
The owner of the robots got a very nice pay raise. The robots are the ones who actually increased the productivity, so it's only natural that the owner of the robots would get to reap the rewards. Why should the human workers get a pay raise, they aren't the ones who are actually increasing productivity.
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And where's the pay raise for increased productivity?
Everybody in the entire economy gets that raise.
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Only if there's wealth redistribution.
No decrease does not mean an increase (Score:4, Interesting)
The study concluded that productivity increased while hours worked stayed the same. As the human population grows and automation increases, it's not enough that jobs are not lost. New jobs must be created.
In the absence of robots, the higher level of production would have meant new jobs, but that is not longer the case. In effect, a job not created is a job lost.
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This only holds true if the stand of living and the level of consumption per individual remains constant. It is easy to look around your house and see that that isn't the case. Today we have far more stuff then our parents ever did. Our houses have been getting bigger and there is a much more disposable attitude.
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Today we have far more stuff then our parents ever did.
Er, today there are far more people still living with their parents than ever. If you want to measure "standard of living" in terms of gadgets go ahead. In the 1950's one man could support his wife and several kids with a house fully paid for, health costs were not a problem, etc. Today? You are a slave to the bank. Don't you or your wife dream of getting sick. Can you afford that baby, and more importantly will mom and dad mind you adding yet another family member into the already crowded house?
Re:No decrease does not mean an increase (Score:4, Interesting)
The 50's are gone and the world has changed so much that it's probably impossible to get back to that point without massive amounts of wealth redistribution or a significant investment in changing education to be capable of producing the kind of work force that can lead that lifestyle.
Re:No decrease does not mean an increase (Score:5, Interesting)
"If so much of Europe wouldn't have been so ravaged by the war and focusing on rebuilding, the prosperity Americans experienced at that time wouldn't have existed."
Nope, the American economy at that time was very insular. In fact, the U.S. went into a recession after the war because it had too much excess capacity now producing things that neither the American or any economy needed. It took until 1950 before gdp hit the same level as 1945 (figures adjusted for inflation).
Exports didn't start making up a big part of the U.S. economy until the free trade agreements after 1970. One of the things that caused the inflation during the 70's was the 60's. Johnson thought he could have guns and butter. It turns out you can, for awhile, until the extra cash in the economy caused it to overheat. Reagan, but mostly Paul Volker as head of the Fed, wrung it out of the economy....errr...but not the deficit spending, that increased under Reagan. The dot com bubble during the 90s soaked a lot of that up, and caused the budget to balance. Clinton had little to do it with. The bubble burst about 8 months before his presidency ended and thus ended Al Gore's chances to be president. The U.S. then went into a recession from the burst dot com and then 9/11 happened which depressed economic activity further.
Re:No decrease does not mean an increase (Score:5, Informative)
American houses are larger - 1725sqft in 1983 to 2598 in 2014
Life expectancy is longer - 69.7 in 1960 to 78.78 in 2012 (US)
Disposable income per month - 1959 $351 US Billion to 13429.30 US Billion 2014
Housing ownership rate - 1959 62.9% 2014 63.7%
So basically in all of those measures the US is better off today than it was in 1960. Even your comment about people living with their parents is not true as home ownership rates have remained pretty constant. You live longer, you have more disposable income and you live in bigger houses.
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Better is relative, maybe you have a more comfortable life today, but at the same time there's a lot less freedom too today, especially since 9/11.
Larger house also mean that you will have more room for stuff you don't use.
Re:No decrease does not mean an increase (Score:4, Insightful)
In the 1950s black people were second class citizens. Homophobia was pretty rampant (it was actually illegal in many countries, not sure about the US). Access to information was much more limited before the internet. While in legal terms you may have lost some freedom recently, overall things are much better now than they were in the 1950s.
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Er, today there are far more people still living with their parents than ever. If you want to measure "standard of living" in terms of gadgets go ahead. In the 1950's one man could support his wife and several kids with a house fully paid for, health costs were not a problem, etc. Today? You are a slave to the bank. Don't you or your wife dream of getting sick. Can you afford that baby, and more importantly will mom and dad mind you adding yet another family member into the already crowded house?
When the last recession started in 2008 or what not and people were taking about the great depression, I started looking into the Great Depression, the 1950's and standards of living. In the course, I found some studies that dealt with increasing standard of living in the 1950's. You can still living like they did in the 1950's. Just cut your salary in half and get rid of all but three of your electric appliances. Then, every year give yourself a 5% raise and buy a new electric appliance and you'll pretty m
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This only holds true if the stand of living and the level of consumption per individual remains constant. It is easy to look around your house and see that that isn't the case. Today we have far more stuff then our parents ever did. Our houses have been getting bigger and there is a much more disposable attitude.
I'm also starting to see a lot more people going the other way with tiny homes, downsizing, the "sharing economy" and even nomadic living.
If people in mass start deciding that they need less stuff then it might be problematic for all these factories churning out excess stuff.
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It would require a massive shift for that to happen. As a general rule we have consumed more each year than we did the year before with minor exceptions around major economic traumas.
http://www.tradingeconomics.co... [tradingeconomics.com]
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Would you mind programming this robot to do your job before we lay you off?
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This will change as use of robots becomes widespread.
The first industrial robot in use was installed in 1959. 56 years later, industrial robot has not yet become widespread. When should we expect it to become widespread?
Give it at least 13 more years (Score:3)
The first electric programmable computer was installed in 1943, and now there pretty ubiquitous. Give robots another decade and they'll catch up.
Or you could say they're already here. I have a robot which washes and drys my dishes, another that washes my clothes, two that make me ice. Several which play video content. One which opens and closes my garage door. Heck, they're everywhere.
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The problem is not robots, its illegal immigrants. They steal jobs. They take jobs for less than the prevailing legal wages, get paid under the books so they avoid the taxman, and cause social strife. I'd rather robots take jobs over these illegal aliens.
Until.
The robots are the illegal immigrants!
Donald?
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There's nothing new about that trick. For at least forty years that I know of, the unemployment rate hasn't counted how many people are out of work, it's been counting how many people are collecting Unemployment Benefits. Once those run out, they stop counting you. And it