African Manufacturing Jobs Could be Threatened by US Based Robots, Report Says (bbc.com) 90
Within less than two decades it will be cheaper to operate robots in US factories than hire workers in Africa, a new report warns. From the report: Falling automation costs are predicted to cause job losses as manufacturers return to richer economies. Some analysts say poorer countries could be less impacted by this trend, however the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) suggests otherwise. But its report adds African nations have time to prepare for the change. "African countries must not shy away from manufacturing, but instead prepare by increasing access to internet, investing in technical skills and promoting technological innovation," said Karishma Banga a senior research officer at ODI. "If done well, automation can present important opportunities for African countries by improving labour productivity in manufacturing," she said. It has been suggested that poorer countries will not as be affected by automation because they have less money to invest in it.
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Slave labor has built many societies. /cough Pyramids?
Slave labor indeed built the infrastructure of many societies. Strangely enough, though, not the pyramids (despite the persistent myth).
The pyramids were, basically, a work project to keep people employed during the non-planting months.
https://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html [harvardmagazine.com]
https://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/01/12/egypt-new-find-shows-slaves-didnt-build-pyramids [usnews.com]
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Slave labor has built many societies. /cough Pyramids?
except evidence shows that the pyramids were not built by slaves the worker's villages in their shadow the worker's tombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This is actually good news (Score:4, Insightful)
Africa needs to get its shit straight and cook up an economy to support themselves. They do not need to be the world's latest source of cheapest available labour to be exploited for trinkets. No, "the internet" and other gimmicks are not even key here: The key is to get organised. This needs infrastructure, of which information tech is but one part. Africa doesn't need the rest of the world exploiting it, supporting its upper crust in the name of "development aid", patronising it, or anything else. Africa needs to get its own shit straight.
Re: This is actually good news (Score:2)
You know the Nazi, Brits, French, Spanish, Dutch, & Japanese weren't black right?
Also, remember that one of those needed a giant dangerious island (Australia) on the other size of the world to hold their most dangerious.
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> Also, remember that one of those needed a giant dangerious island (Australia) on the other size of the world to hold their most dangerious.
But that's completely incorrect. Britain began transporting convicts due to lack of land space for citizens, much less for the growing criminal underclass. Once they realised that sitting them in rotting boats in the harbour was a less than tenable solution, they started shipping them to the Scottish, Irish and American colonies in the early 1600's. The only reason
Re:This is actually good news (Score:4, Interesting)
We've tried for decades. As the charities say, they want someone else to pay their lunch for them.
To solve the food crisis, we send them aid in the form of corn and grain seeds so they plant crops and have a self-sustaining agriculture. They either eat the grain or sell it for fast cash, then wait for the next airplane to deliver more aid.
We can build self-maintaining water treatment works. These systems work on long-wave radio and satellite communications. Everything is designed to be animal proof. Satellite and radio antennae are high up, grounded to protect against lightning and lined with a box mesh to stop primates getting anywhere near. Any faults are broadcast upstream and a repair team is sent out. Systems have fault-tolerant redundancy built in. There isn't any way these systems could fail. Except that the operator in the control room would change the satellite channel to watch local soap operas and take the system off-line to do so.
If we try and build roads, anyone with any equipment will suddenly have breakdowns and needs money to buy spare parts. If you provide your spare parts from warehouse, there will be break in and suddenly those spare parts turn up on the market.
The only thing that can be done and that's what the Chinese do, is pay them to rent their land.
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Unfortunately, it looks that way. Incidentally, when you want somebody to say really, really bad things about Africans, ask an African refugee that has been in Europe for a while and is trying hard to make a new living (not all do, but many work really hard). The families back there expect them to send enough money to keep the whole (large) family afloat, pay for education, bicycles, etc, since they are now rich and, of course, nobody else in the family has to work anymore or even take good care of their th
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Put in optical? That gets dug up to see if it is copper and can be sold.
Put in wireless system? Just lots of parts in one location to be recovered and sold.
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Even the sub-station transformers aren't safe. Thieves will cut them down in order to extract the PCB based oils to sell for cooking.
https://www.aljazeera.com/inde... [aljazeera.com]
More or less, anything that happens in Detroit, happens in Africa.
Re: This is actually good news (Score:2)
Wireless antennas and cheap routers aren't very appealing to small-time thieves. But the big car batteries that provide power when the grid is down are highly saleable. They must be locked in sturdy metal boxes, bolted to the floor.
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Better solution, leave them the fuck alone and of course the flip side, make fucking sure they leave us alone. When they are ready to advance they will, until then let them kill and eat other as they wish, just don't supply advanced weapons to make the situation worse. Nothing in and nothing out, refugess held in secured camps in country, boring as fuck but safe, until they are ready for leave. Sure select immigrants if they are good enough, smart enough, not psychopathic or sociopathic, fit and healthy. Fr
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Obvious troll is obvious.
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If they actually were facts. They are not. Africa has severe problems, but this is not one of them. Your closet (or open) racism does not actually change the facts.
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People like to rip on big agriculture, but billions of people would starve without it. If the whole world switched to organic or "sustainable" farming, everything would look like Africa.
US robots are cheaper than African workers, but (Score:2, Funny)
. . . African robots are cheaper than US robots.
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Not if you take into account shipping to the US. If you want to sell in Africa, you'll produce in Africa, but if you want to sell in the US, you'll produce in the US. (And yes, you frequently need to ship the raw materials from somewhere, but producing at either the material source or the selling destination is cheaper than involving a third intermediary location for production.)
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haha, shipping is so cheap that this wouldn't matter. The only way it would matter if the US government got serious about climate change... But now that we have Captain Cancer brought to you by "clean coal" as president, that's doubtful.
Not so simple (Score:5, Informative)
Not if you take into account shipping to the US. If you want to sell in Africa, you'll produce in Africa, but if you want to sell in the US, you'll produce in the US.
Sorry but it's not remotely that simple. US labor is among the most expensive in the world so labor intensive [wikipedia.org] goods tend to be produced elsewhere, even for items consumed by the US. But even that doesn't capture it all. Supply chain location matters too. East Asia dominates electronics manufacturing in large part because that is where the supply chain is located. It's FAR cheaper to make the products there and then ship them to the US in most cases and that isn't really a function of labor rates for the most part. Japanese labor isn't much cheaper than US labor but Japan exports a huge amount of stuff to the US. Conversely the US has a HUGE export sector too even though the US is a net consumer.
you frequently need to ship the raw materials from somewhere, but producing at either the material source or the selling destination is cheaper than involving a third intermediary location for production.
The calculation isn't that simple. It depends on relative labor rates, tariffs, exchange rates, local supply chains, infrastructure, lead times, communication costs, administrative costs, and a host of other considerations. All other things being equal you would be right but things are rarely equal like that.
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https://www.theonion.com/ameri... [theonion.com]
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The government was replaced with a Communist government and the only policy is now forced land redistribution.
Complete nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Within less than two decades it will be cheaper to operate robots in US factories than hire workers in Africa
Speaking as someone who runs a manufacturing plant and who has bought robots, this is complete bullshit. Anyone who actually believes this has no idea of the costs involved or the capabilities of robots or manufacturing automation. There is PLENTY of headroom in labor intensive [dictionary.com] industries for people to be employed in manufacturing including in Africa. Robots simply are not that cheap or capable and are in no danger of becoming so any time soon for most tasks.
Robots are economically viable for high volume and/or dangerous work. They are not nearly as flexible or capable as many people imagine them to be and they certainly aren't cheap. There are some industries and products where they make a lot of sense and many more (especially low volume production) where they are not economically viable. Most automation actually doesn't come in robot form either for that matter.
The problem Africa has in getting into manufacturing comes in several parts. 1) A lot of corruption, 2) extremely bad infrastructure, 3) An inexperienced talent pool for workers. All these are solvable problems but aren't easy ones either. Automation is far down the list of obstacles to manufacturing in Africa.
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Africa is now the low cost labor pool for China.
One of the big complaints about Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa is that the Chinese companies bring in Chinese workers, and employ very few locals.
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They need to get things done. Chinese workers have low work ethics, but they beat the average African worker by a large margin. And no, this is not racist. This is what African refugees have told me as their analysis of the problem.
You wanna tell that to Foxconn? (Score:2)
Yeah, good infrastructure, skilled employees and a lack of (the wrong kind of) corruption is good. But those things are also expensive. You need schools and roads. And with schools and roads comes taxes and (worse) an educated and mobile workforce. If you're gonna pay that much you might as well build in American (or whatever country your selling in) and not pay the tariffs.
The point
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They seem to be doing pretty well with robots despite wages and working conditions we here in America find deplorable.
Foxconn can make use of robots because of the product volume they produce. Labor is a lot cheaper in China than in the US but even so once you are making a product in the tens of millions (like an iPhone) it becomes pretty easy to justify automation. The equation is still the same but with lower labor rates it takes higher volumes to justify the automation. Foxconn seems to have achieved these.
As for working conditions, I've been to China. I've been in factories in China that make Foxconn look like a pa
Automation calculations (Score:2)
Maybe not all manufacturing is the same? I'd imagine the clothing industry is going to be very prone to robot manufacturing
Clothing manufacturing is among the hardest industries to automate. Clothing manufacturing is among the most labor intensive industries in the world. This is why you almost invariably find clothing manufacturers to be clustered in places with extremely low labor rates. This includes making the cloth for the clothing too. Even the most automated looms require quite a lot of labor to operate.
I don't think your experience translates to the entire manufacturing industry.
The calculations for labor vs automation don't depend on what you are making. To oversimplify, you have material c
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The problem Africa has in getting into manufacturing comes in several parts. 1) A lot of corruption, 2) extremely bad infrastructure, 3) An inexperienced talent pool for workers. All these are solvable problems but aren't easy ones either. Automation is far down the list of obstacles to manufacturing in Africa.
And - in some places at least - political instability. The list above are all day-to-day problems but when a powder keg goes off business can be seriously disrupted for a long time. You need it with natural disasters, there's flooding in Thailand and HDD supply is crippled. There's an earthquake in Japan and camera supply is crippled. What happens if there's a new Arab Spring or another war in CAR or Somalia or rioting in South Africa or a Boko Haram attack or the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda start killing ea
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then someone throws a monkey wrench in your plan.
It's Africa; they just throw in a monkey.
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Indeed. And a lot of places in Africa are also politically unstable, at war or run by cleptocrats, racists and religious crusaders. While some people there see that this cannot go on, most are simply far too selfish and want to just get rich quick. And, of course, the smartest ones leave and only very few come back.
oxen and draft horses out of work [Re:not a prob (Score:2)
In other news 99% of the population unemployed because of tractors.
99% of the oxen and draft horse population: yes.
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In other news 99% of the population unemployed because of tractors.
99% of the oxen and draft horse population: yes.
A single modern combine, operated by one driver, can do as much work as 100 horse pulled reapers driven by 100 men.
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I don't know about that figure. There are a lot of Amish or Mennonite farmers using draft horses, and there are as many horses, today in the USA, as there were in 1900. A lot of non-Anabaptist farmers with draft horses for sport, as well, at least in PA.
Oxen are SOL, though. The only oxen used, other than in historical parks, are steers being fattened for the table. Tasty for us, at least.
Of course, 5% or more of the US populace is still employed in agriculture, so tractors didn't end 99% of the jobs.
Robots "threaten" (Score:2)
Permanent Institutional Poverty (Score:2)
Some regions could be stuck in a cycle of permanent poverty. That is, if you give them only fish, and no fishing nets, then they're dependent on you for fish. Now, replace a simple net with modern robots connected to modern computers, and it's obvious they can never build such a thing from scratch, starting with zero relevant knowledge or infrastructure. Worse, if somehow you happen upon a textbook that explains how to engineer or program computers or robots, chances are you won't try to make a robot manufa
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modern robots connected to modern computers, and it's obvious they can never build such a thing from scratch
Can you?
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Containerization replaced dockworkers. Digital printing replaced print shop workers. Automated telephone exchanges replaced telephone operators. It's getting to the point where they can eliminate editors and allow anyone to automatically create a local newspaper anywhere simply by filtering for keywords, events and categories. Automated weaving looms replaced the need for four artisans to make one garment in several months to making hundreds of uniform garments in a week.
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Indeed. And add to that, that every job has a minimal level of talent it needs directly and indirectly (via the talents needed to benefit from education), and hence the better job quality gets, the fewer can do them. We seem to be now at a point where the part of the population that can newly created jobs is beginning to be a minority. That is a unique point in human history, because before most people could do most jobs and that is one reason why before there always were replacement jobs.
No shit. (Score:2)
Robots will lead to on-shoring. This isn't really news. Both Afrika and Asia will be selling way less finished goods to the first world.
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Tey will be selling robots instead, at least Asia.
Except... (Score:2)
Only in a state that doesn't charge a business property tax.
I don't think we're in Kansas any more, Toto (Score:3)
A robot is gonna take your job away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
And now the jobs are lost in Africa
Gonna take a miracle to keep the things we had
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Nonsense. Actually competent measurements show this effect does not exist. Of course, if you have an African person fill out an IQ test in English, targeted at somebody with a western background and average western education, you get such results, but they are bogus.
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The tests keep returning the same low results decade after decade.
Take some effort to educate a population and the results for some get better.
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And your last line very clearly indicates these test are bogus. IQ is not influenced by education. But the result if inadequate IQ tests are.
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Thats the US mil emergency draft IQ number when the entire useful population has to be called up for war.
The US mil set that IQ number so very low as to ensure they got the entire productive US population in for a war dr
I Don't Follow (Score:2)