South Korea Becomes First Country To Replace 10% of Its Workforce With Robots (tbsnews.net) 53
An anonymous reader shares a report: A new report suggests South Korea is the first country to have replaced 10% of its workforce with robots to tackle its shrinking population due to its low birth rate, reports Independent.
For every 10,000 employees, South Korea now has 1,102 robots, making the country number one in the world in using technology instead of human labour to do tasks, according to the annual survey by World Robotics 2024.
South Korea now has twice the number of robots working in its factories than any other country in the world. Only Singapore has been close to South Korea regarding robots, with 770 of such technology per 10,000 workers.
For every 10,000 employees, South Korea now has 1,102 robots, making the country number one in the world in using technology instead of human labour to do tasks, according to the annual survey by World Robotics 2024.
South Korea now has twice the number of robots working in its factories than any other country in the world. Only Singapore has been close to South Korea regarding robots, with 770 of such technology per 10,000 workers.
Martial law (Score:1, Troll)
If you haven't been following the news closely, the South Korean president recently (a day or two ago) declared martial law, and even more recently the MPs voted to block it.
Things are happening in South Korea right now. Given the awful state of the MSM in the US right now, I have no Earthly idea what's going on. Does the (SK) president have security information that's not public knowledge? Has he somehow become deranged? (I suppose psychotic would be the correct label, seeing things that aren't there). Was
Re:Martial law (Score:5, Informative)
The coverage tends to basically say the president wanted to do stuff and the (opposition run) parliament was like no, not that and then the president declared martial law claiming the opposition has been infiltrated by North Korea.
If that's the case the deranged theory seems to stand.
Re: Martial law (Score:2)
See...the last time martial law was imposed anywhere in the US at scale was when Lincoln declared martial law in Maryland and had all the secessionist state legislators rounded up before they could vote to have Maryland (a slave state) join the Confederacy. And there was the unpleasantness immediately after the war ended.
And you've got to admit, declaring martial law *after* the rebels seceded and were shooting at federal troops is kind of a foregone conclusion. Declaring martial law preemptively just ain't
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No US veteran would violate their oath to do this.
Sadly, I would have once believed this.
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Maryland (a slave state) join the Confederacy. And there was the unpleasantness immediately after the war ended.
Well it was less than the unpleasantness before the war ended and before the war started too.
Declaring martial law preemptively just ain't gonna fly in a place with more guns than people.
Depends on how many people cheer it on.
And they know this. So they don't even try.
And who is "they"?
In South Korea, they have universal conscription. So everyone *knows* how to handle themselves.
In America they do
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Oh I should add, even the president's own party voted unanimously, actually unanimously against him. And it looks like he's going to be impeached if he doesn't resign first including by his own party.
Somehow I don't see that happening in America.
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Even in a place like Liberal Massachusetts, if the goons start going door to door, there's about one chance in 10 they'll come out with more holes than they went in with.
This is a right wing fantasy that has been completely, totally disproven. The January 6th insurrectionists had the cops show up at their door, arrest them and, in a lot of cases, take all their guns, and all of them went meekly. When push comes to shove, they cave. The actual measurement of the most likely group to state that state the police would be "coming out with more holes than they went in with" stands at 0 out of 1,200+, which, at minimum, and assuming the next one they try to arrest is the first on
Re: Martial law (Score:2)
So you can't tell the difference between martial law and being arrested for a riot, either? Don't worry. Your pardon will come Jan 20, 1201EST.
Re: Martial law (Score:2)
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Korea is a funny place. I've been in the midst of protests in Seoul. It's not like here in the US. They have specially constructed paddy wagon buses they load the prisoners into after they've tear gassed and billy clubbed them into submission. Huge numbers. The statement that they are influenced by the North is trotted out every time.
It's really hard to get a handle on what it is like there from this side of the ocean. Making domestic analogies is leaving out some of the story. Also, there's a virtua
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Making shit up? Check. Whining about the Dems? Check. Projecting "plans" on people you don't like? Check.
Have you thought about applying for Talk Show Stooge at FOX?
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Before you even begin to address the current situation in ROK, you need to understand their main way of life. It is fundamentally different from anything we know or understand in the West, and is closest to what "Cyberpunk corpo" life is.
In ROK as a child, you are expected to spend your entire youth doing nothing but study for a specific exam that will determine what Chaebol you'll serve for the rest of your life. This is likely why most families only have one child if they have any. They are forced to spen
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This is a good marker of a far left ideologue who is utterly disconnected from realities of humanity and has been fully subsumed into "everything is political" narrative of modest Western Far Left ideology.
You, in real world overwhelming majority of people understand that on individual level, they cannot impact how state acts. They can only impact how their child will be prepared for conditions that persisted for their lifetime. And they choose to act on things they can change, not those they can't. Only a
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Pretty much. The most hilarious article I ran into researching this is "how South Korean political leaders end their lives".
It's basically a massive repeat of "prison, assassination, prison, suicide".
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Quite misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we know each robot replaced one human? Could it be that it takes five robots to replace one human job? Or vice versa?
Or more optimistically, could it be that each robot enhances one or more humans? Or that the improved productivity having all those robots allows for even more humans to be hired than without the bots?
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Or it creates an entire industry of design, manufacture, support and operating the robots, creating more jobs that the robots displace.
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If there wasn't a net savings, the robot wouldn't be worth building. The whole point is to replace people with them, so any robot that requires more than a fraction of a human's time is impractical from the very start.
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You say that like there aren't big corporate interests running the show.
The robots probably replace low/un skilled labour, and will never join a union, or care about workplace health and safety.
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Your post makes no sense as a rebuttal to mine, since it is reinforcing my point.
People are expensive, robots less so every day. If your robot ends up magically 'creating' even one job that fully employs a human, it just cost more money than a human.
The idea that robots will create multiple jobs per human-replacing robot is just magical thinking.
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The active economic population in South Korea is still growing. That means more people are in employment. Somehow more robots has translated in to more jobs.
Employment participation rate is also steady
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If there wasn't a net savings, the robot wouldn't be worth building. The whole point is to replace people with them,...
To pick a nit, the point of robots is to improve productivity, that is, value produced per hour of human labor (where "value" includes changes in quality). And somehow productivity needs to factor in capital costs because robots ain't cheap.
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I'm thinking that instead of "replaced" they meant "supplemented". You don't tackle a shrinking workforce by replacing workers, but you would if you started supplementing your workforce with robots.
There are nowhere is near the 1st (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's just raw automation it doesn't include things like process improvements. I started years ago supporting a desktop software application. High speed internet got us the ability to remote into a customer's computer and took calls that used to take two to three hours and turned them into 30 minute calls, 15 minutes of which were spent getting access to the computer.
Later we switch to a web-based application and moved away from complex mainframe applications drastically reducing the skill needed to support the products. Before long I had to move on to other things because that work was just going away. It was compartmentalized and simplified until what little was left of it could be shipped overseas and done by teenagers.
We have a massive amount of automation going on and we just don't think about it or talk about it. And the first thing you're going to automate are high-paying jobs. The GDP goes up but the jobs go away. And the only one getting a piece of that action are billionaires.
If you doubt me and I'm sure you do go to YouTube and look up how literally anything you buy is made. And take note of how few people are involved in the production of it. I have a video card where the ad copy on the box proudly proclaims no human being was involved in the production of the card. Or go look up how the old steam controllers were built where they just poured parts into a machine and out came the controllers.
We are running out of work. As a mental exercise try to imagine explicitly and specifically what jobs are going to replace the ones we keep automating or replacing with process improvements. Don't give in to the temptation to come up with a vague answer. If you do that your blood pressure is going to go up several points along with your heart rate as you panic.
We are not ready for a Star Trek post-work Utopia. We still get really angry if somebody who isn't upper class doesn't have to work to survive.
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"We are not ready for a Star Trek post-work Utopia"
And in the meantime
"Here ye be violence!"
It's going to get extremely ugly before it has a chance of getting any better.
Re:There are nowhere is near the 1st (Score:4)
How fucking awful must a study be for rsilvertroll to refuse to link to it? That's a rhetorical question: the troll is too lazy to link to anything.
But if one does the search that he suggests, one finds a paywalled article. If one finds a way around the paywall, one finds it cites this NBER working paper [nber.org], which says ... nothing remotely like "70% of middle class jobs lost to automation".
Which is not surprising, given that everybody would know if we lost 70% of middle class jobs (since 1980) for any reason or for all reasons combined. rsilvertroll simply fell for a blatantly wrong article and didn't check the facts or even ask whether his assertion was totally fucking insane. He never does, he just spams his agitprop bullshit in thread after thread.
Let me summarize your argument (Score:2)
So the study absolutely says exactly what I and the article said it did. Full disclosure though it does give a range and that range goes as low as 46% and as high as 70%. Naturally the news article went with the bigger number because it's a headline but let's just pretend for an instant that it's the lowest number the study indicates it can be. We have still lost almost half of our middle class jobs to automation and they're not coming back.
And again it doesn't take much to confirm this. A
Let me correct your argument (Score:2)
rsilvergun = wrong wrong wrong.
From the study you cite:
Our estimates indicate that task displacement explains 50%-70% of the observed changes in wage structure between 1980 and 2016, while these traditional SBTC proxies account for less than 10%.
(SBTC = Skill Based Technological Change)
From footnote 5 on page 3:
Note, however, that task displacement does not need to be associated with "job loss", and can take the form of a worker being reallocated within the same firm or a decline in hiring of new workers into certain tasks.
The study WARNED you not to mistake the thing they are talking about with job loss, and you did it anyway. That's even before we get to the question of whether their massive regressions are meaningful rather than the result of lengthy r-value hacking. Or that they are talking about changes in wage structure rather than the thing you mistook for job loss.
Go away, do not come back, and t
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You could argue that's "automation" but not "robots," but even that is increasingly not true. Even the ones with a guy still in them are actually steering themselves most of the time.
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What a coinkydink (Score:3)
Calls grow for South Koreaâ(TM)s president to resign after martial law chaos
https://www.cnn.com/world/live... [cnn.com]
Maybe not related but, yikes!
Unemployment must be sky high, with all those bots (Score:2)
Oh wait, it's https://www.macrotrends.net/gl....
Maybe there is a future for human employment, even in a world where robots (or AI bots) do all the grunge work.
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Let's try that again.
The rate is less than 2%. https://www.macrotrends.net/gl... [macrotrends.net].
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OK I give up, I need a bot. Less than 3%!
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Replace the political parties (Score:2)
I say we replace 100% of political parties with robots, both in SK and the US. Can't do any worse than they already have. Because God damn things have been a shit show this year!
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Do the Luddites have a political party? If so, your proposal becomes much funnier.
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Can't do any worse ...
When Trump bragged about his own greatness at the UN, the delegates laughed at him. Now, Trump will demand more than applause. What Trump is planning to do, is horrifying. Will he succeed, is the important question.
The one thing protecting sanity is Trump's own incompetence. For instance, Trump sees tariffs as a way to blackmail other countries. In short, he thinks threats will create a planet directly subservient to his interests. Trump is willfully lying to his voters, that other countries will pa
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You are thinking that el Bunko is capable of learning. He never admits mistakes he makes either to others, or, more importantly, to himself. This makes him unable to learn from his mistakes. Studying economics does not mean one has learned economics. One can study to pass tests and once the tests are over, the residue leaks out quite quickly.
I will admit one thing protecting us, sorta...kinda....unless he achieves a mythic screwup, is his incompetence. He does treat anything he has control over like a mob c
bottom of the dumbness pit. (Score:2)
Political parties in the USA have already been replaced by cults with a quest to race to the bottom of the dumbness pit.
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Yes, but if you think both parties in the USA are the same you are not intelligent enough to contribute to a mature conversation.
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I for one welcome our new RoboMusk Overlord! Intergalactic trolling is best trolling!