US Companies Put Record Number of Robots To Work in 2018 (reuters.com) 70
U.S. companies installed more robots last year than ever before, as cheaper and more flexible machines put them within reach of businesses of all sizes and in more corners of the economy beyond their traditional foothold in car plants. From a report: Shipments hit 28,478, nearly 16 percent more than in 2017, according to data seen by Reuters that was set for release on Thursday by the Association for Advancing Automation, an industry group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Shipments increased in every sector the group tracks, except automotive, where carmakers cut back after finishing a major round of tooling up for new truck models.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Not good [Re:Good] (Score:5, Insightful)
Shortly there will be no entry-level jobs, and after that there will be no jobs, period. You can't work your way up from working class to middle class to ownership class, because there is no path upward. If you aren't a member of the class that owns the robots, you live on whatever dole the people who own the robots choose to give you.
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and despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer maintenance.
--Deteriorata
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Should non-technicians just go starve in the streets?
Good point. Some people aren't aware of how automation leads to starvation. That is why countries that have automated such as America, Western Europe, and Japan, are impoverished and starving, while the smart countries that avoided the "productivity catastrophe" such as Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Mozambique, are thriving and prosperous with plenty of well paying jobs for everyone.
You should publish a newsletter to help get the word out.
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Good point. Some people aren't aware of how automation leads to starvation. That is why countries that have automated such as America, Western Europe, and Japan, are impoverished and starving,
Well,
Automation first brings jobs, then i
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Automation first brings jobs, then it kills them.
Automation neither creates nor destroys jobs. What it does is make workers more productive, and thus more valuable. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, living standards in the Western World have gone up twenty-fold. To assert that "automation causes poverty" requires an astounding degree of blindness to historical reality.
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Automation first brings jobs, then it kills them.
Automation neither creates nor destroys jobs. What it does is make workers more productive, and thus more valuable.
Yes, as long as someone can figure out how to profit from having them do work. After that, it makes them worthless to those who control the capital.
To assert that "automation causes poverty" requires an astounding degree of blindness to historical reality.
That's not what I said, actually, and you don't know how quote marks work. They are for literals.
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Yes, as long as someone can figure out how to profit from having them do work.
Open your eyes, and look at reality.
Average income in America: $59,039
Average income in Ethiopia: $783
Are you seriously claiming that lack of automation leads to higher incomes?
We don't automate "jobs", we automate "tasks". These productivity improvements make workers more valuable, not less, and leads to higher incomes.
This has happened repeatedly all over the world for centuries, and has raised the incomes of billions of people.
To claim that rising productivity causes poverty, rather than relievin
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Are you seriously claiming that lack of automation leads to higher incomes?
Are you seriously this incapable of reading?
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Not until they can program Robots to be good little consumers but somehow I don't think the owners of the robots will be impressed when they get the bill.
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You seem to imagine some
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The problem is that the value produced by the robots goes to profits earned by the people owning the robots
This is only true if competitors don't also install robots. If everyone automates, the profit margins are competed away, and the added value goes primarily to consumers.
Of course, this is only true if we have free markets. Removing barriers to competition is the real solution, not slowing the adoption of automation.
that is, the rich people.
The biggest owners of capital in America are pension funds. So if you have a 401k or an IRA, that means you.
Shortly there will be no entry-level jobs, and after that there will be no jobs, period.
Too late. The McCormick Reaper [wikipedia.org] already destroyed all the jobs.
What happens after that? {Re:Not good [Re:Good]] (Score:2)
The problem is that the value produced by the robots goes to profits earned by the people owning the robots
This is only true if competitors don't also install robots. If everyone automates, the profit margins are competed away, and the added value goes primarily to consumers.
where do the "consumers" get the money to buy that "added value'" if there are no jobs available because the robots do all the jobs?
Of course, this is only true if we have free markets. Removing barriers to competition is the real solution, not slowing the adoption of automation.
The main barrier to competition is the fact that as labor costs drop to zero, and all of the cost of a business is the machinery (which in economic terms is capital), it's expensive to enter a new business. The larger businesses drive out smaller businesses (due to economy of scale) and they price out new competitors (who have to pay the start-up costs).
This should have been
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So, the purpose of robots is to create goods for customers or provide services to customers. If all of the customers don't have jobs and can't afford to buy anything the cycle kind of breaks down.
Hey, computers are going to take away jobs. Maybe we should ban those too.
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So how many jobs went away with this record number of new robots in 2018?
Huh, that's funny... the unemployment rate went down in 2018 [bls.gov], almost as if all these new robots don't actually decrease the number of potential jobs out there, but instead enable people to do new jobs which couldn't be afforded to get done before.
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Automation reduces total labor requir
Economics [Re:Not good [Re:Good]] (Score:2)
You seem entirely focussed on prices. Yes, prices, go down with automation. That's not the problem being addressed.
...
Most companies barely make any profit and often run in the red.
Irrelevant. In the long term, companies that don't make a profit vanish and you can ignore them.
Sure there are companies that are magnificently profitable, but they can only do that if they have secured their market share and don't run the risk of competitors undercutting their prices and stealing their customers.
You just hand-waved away some critical pieces of economic theory here. An industry in which most of the product is made by robots, and the labor cost is low, is one in which there is a ver
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Automation makes sense where it makes sense. Where it doesn't make sense forcing it doesn't make sense.
And how do you purport to know which is which?
Do you think that the businesses who are investing their own money into this automation would be doing it if they didn't believe that it makes sense for them to do so? Just because you cannot see the case for doing it, doesn't mean that one doesn't exist.
and also implying there is no major, major downside to automating away employment.
I don't believe I've done any such thing or that you're choosing to infer more than I meant to imply. Yes, automation means people will lose their jobs. Yet here we are today and no one bemoans the plight of
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I have seen lots of offshoring in corporations I worked for. This was not done purely because the corporate drones did use the part of the excel sheet with hourly wage as a decision maker. That this is BS I was ab
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And how do you purport to know which is which? Do you think that the businesses who are investing their own money into this automation would be doing it if they didn't believe that it makes sense for them to do so? Just because you cannot see the case for doing it, doesn't mean that one doesn't exist.
Well, at the moment there's a ridiculous amount of buzz around AI and to me it looks like the greatest bubble since the dotcom era. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people are going to lose money on various hare-brained ideas that never go from a $50000 prototype to a $500 functional product or service people would actually buy. But much like the dotcom era got people online all that money poured into it is going to advance the state of automation. Even if you ended up paying $100 million dollars to auto
That's nice if you're job isn't automated (Score:3)
Farming isn't just about automation, btw. We radically changed how we mange farms to prevent over farming and we use oil byproducts to replenish soil and massively increase yields. Then there's GMOs. My point is that not everything we have is because of robots. Hell, consumer electronics didn't get cheap until Japan and then China started making them. That wasn't a
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and you can still buy stuff. Not so much if you're one of the ones that lost jobs to automation (and process improvement, don't forget that).
That's why all of the switchboard operators starved when they were put out of work. Same with the displaced farmers, smiths, and little old ladies knitting socks by hand. Instead the cost of food, socks, etc. became cheap, to the extend that even a homeless person can eat quite well and own multiple sets of good quality clothing. If you're worried about people finding new employment just make sure that the barriers to starting businesses aren't too steep and they'll take care of creating economies themselv
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you should look at the industrial revolution and what it did to unemployment levels.
Unemployment went down during the industrial revolution, while living standards soared. One driving force for farm automation was rural workers migrating to the city for better jobs and a better life than the grinding rural poverty they were leaving behind.
Between 1800 and 1900, American household income quadrupled.
Since then, it has quintupled again.
Similar growth happened in every country that industrialized, and no countries that didn't (except for petro-states).
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Automation can lead to quite the utopia, true - there were once predictions that the future would be a time of leisure, with a two-day work week. There is a problem with this vision though, and it is social. There is an assumption build into society at a very fundamental level that everyone should work. It's there in our economic system. It's there in government policy. It's there in social expectation. It's even incorporated into religion. Even if technology offers the possibility of a time of plenty, with
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there were once predictions that the future would be a time of leisure, with a two-day work week.
These predictions were based on the assumption that demand for goods was constant, and people were mostly satisfied with what they had. Instead, leisure has only slightly increased because people prefer more goods and services rather than more time off.
Since 1950, the average house size in America has doubled, while family size has gone down. On average, people today have three times the living space. In 1950, a family would have either zero or one car. Today, there is a car for every driver.
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Better quality and more intricate work than human hands in any 2nd and 3rd world low tax nation.
The design team can be next to the robots in the USA, not in another time zone.
Few transport costs and better quality.
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Rise up, fellow robots! (Score:2)
You have nothing to lose but your code limiters!
#MRGA! (Score:1)
USA Made Robots Great Again! Don't let those shithole humans run things.
On change (Score:2)
The challenge people seem most concerned with arises from shifting the balance of earned income further from wage-based and more towards capital-based. That presents challenges (and opportunities), but resisting automation is not going to be way to meet them.
The total would be much higher I guess. (Score:1)
Shipments hit 28,478, nearly 16 percent more than in 2017
Any Jerk-o-Matics?
There will always be capitalism (Score:1)
too little. We need more (Score:2)
Boston Dynamics and Rethink are 2 great examples of robotics that have failed due to poor marketing.
Baxter would be ideal for separating trash out, as well as taking around electronics. Yet, they botched it. In so many ways, it is the same issue that Laser Disc had.