11–20 of 247 posts
Another big thing that drives automation is the stock market. The stock market provides a bunch of money to companies that can show earnings growth. Used to be you could just expand globally. Well, all the big brands have done that now. So the next step is to cut costs. How?
Automate.
Without the stock market this might also happen but at a slower pace.
We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required. The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval, to be harnessed by willing politicians of short-sighted vision.
What will it mean to work and contribute to society in the future of machines?
One upside to automation is that comparative advantage with regard to labour costs becomes much less important. This means that manufacturers can more easily afford to keep production in high wage economies. There are other considerations of course, such as proximity to resources, transport hubs, and markets. Ultimately though, this doesn't change the fact that automation is mostly beneficial to capital owners and no…
> This means that manufacturers can more easily afford to keep production in high wage economies. But this doesn't really bring jobs back, since they'll just be automated. That's not to say there aren't other benefits aside from job creation, though.
Yeah, that's right. There would certainly be other benefits (and a limited number of jobs created) that are more indirect.
The real issue around automation in my opinion is how we as a society manage it. If we stay the course, it is clear that capital owners stand to benefit most (almost entirely I would say). We are already seeing problems with rising inequality due to diverging returns from capital and labour. This is going to exacerbate that hugely.
I'm generally in favour of capitalism but I think we are going to need to revisit 'the social contract' that allows capitalism to exist in exchange for a share of the rewards being used to ensure that society's basic needs are met. Just as when it was first negotiated by Bismark, this is going to have to be an initiative of the capital owners if serious unrest is to be avoided.
I'm hopeful and think that it is possible. Rich people are not inherently sociopathic. A good example of this sort of compromise in more modern times was the reaction of Kennedy snr when the US faced economic and social unrest. Partly through correspondence with Keynes he was convinced that if himself and his peers didn't take a hit for the good of wider society then they stood a good chance of losing a great deal more.
Every so often the social contract needs a reset (e.g. Bismark, the labour movement, the new deal, etc). Automation is going to make this more urgent. The one thing I am sure of is that it will be a political solution and not simply an economic one (e.g. less regulation, more free markets, etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone has to service the machines. Also, big machines are expensive to transport, so it makes sense to make them closer to where they will be used, leading to more service jobs. There are also a lot of engineering jobs designing the hardware and software of these automated factories.
Doesn't the question then become how many and at what salary do these engineering jobs exist? Seems like there typically are fewer jobs and the total compensation for labor is reduced when manufacturing is automated (why else would the company pursue such a course of action?)
Automation will continue, but labor will probably never be completely replaced within our lifetimes. I think it makes sense to have factories and make physical goods in the US. It is easier to bring hardware to market when the production is in the same timezone. I think it leads to a more robust economy even if there is heavy automation. There are still ancillary jobs associated with factories.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but this isn't very many jobs. The amount of labor per unit of productivity is drastically reduced in any case. If we can attract new factories then it could be a net win, but someone will lose out (not china, but Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and other countries that are trying to break into middle income).
Some jobs is better than no jobs, right?
I think we are destined for a future of political and social instability in the world if we continue to define labor and its compensation as we do now. We currently don't have a social understanding for navigating a world where little human labor is required. The resentment of the winners (capital owners) by the losers (jobless masses) may lead to great upheaval, to be harnessed by willing politicians of short-sighte…
Allow me to explain. Here's a youtube movie of some robots in a Mercedes factory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VreG1iC65Lc
There are thousands of movies like that. Lots of robots doing a lot of work, and apparently displacing lots of jobs. But there are some jobs in the background. Someone has programmed those robots. But aren't those programmers (super-)highly skilled?
I don't know for sure, but it feels to me a robot is programed like an Excel macro: you record the moves, and then edit what you recorded. For an Excel macro, both parts are done (generally) by the same person, but for industrial robots, they are probably done by different people. The person who is being recorded needs only know how to manipulate a mechanical arm with a controller, that is probably not very different from a PS4 controller. The person who edits the macros, creates procedures, then combines them, optimizes them, creates tests, etc, etc, that person is a highly skilled individual. The other one not so much. The difference here is the capacity for abstraction.
Now, one could say that both these jobs happen only once, and then the robot performs the jobs thousands of times, so you have 2 new jobs (one high skill, one low skill) displacing thousands others. Alas, the programming, maintenance, re-programming, upgrading, not to mention construction of the robots still needs a small army of people. But overall, I agree that it's possible that introducing these robots resulted in a net job destruction for Mercedes and its suppliers (but not entirely sure; Mercedes was most likely more concerned with the quality of their cars rather than their cost of production).
However, not every manufacturer is similar to Mercedes. A lot of manufacturers produce things in smaller batches for example. And now you start to look at the trade-off of putting the automation in place:
If a batch is small enough, the initial investment in automation is not recouped. If the batch is huge, the automation is a no-brainer. But there's a huge middle ground where only some partial automation makes sense. And part of that automation that makes sense is to do things using some mechanical arms moved by some PS4-type controller.
I think in the near future, a lot of the "mechanical" type of work (welding, cutting, soldering, hammering) will become remote-controlled. It might look like high-skilled now, but the job of a machinist was considered high-skilled 50 years ago, and essentially they are the same.
Now, the farther you are from the moving or hot or electricity-conducting parts, the farther you are from danger, and the more people can try something as a hobby. More importantly, the barrier of entry for a given (low-skilled) trade goes down, so people will be able to retrain themselves more quickly. And these people will be able to create more quickly.
Just like blogging has created millions of (unofficial, but money making) jobs, the advent of remote-controlled machines will create millions of new (low-skilled) jobs. And these remote-controlled machine will show up exactly because of the need for automation.
In the meantime, let's bring the manufacturing chain back here so we can build up the automation expertise ourselves, and, while we wait for the End of Work, stop making the middle of our IQ bell curve compete with countries that don't give a shit about their environment, the concept of intellectual property or the safety of their workers.
We can figure the automation problem out later.
It's interesting that many politicians, including Trump and Sanders, want policies to prevent jobs from leaving the US, but have no policy proposals around automation. If you want manufacturing jobs to stay in the US, regulating automation would be far more effective than trying to prevent companies from outsourcing jobs. (Incidentally, a lot of jobs that have been outsourced probably would have been automated if out…
It's interesting that many politicians, including Trump and Sanders, want policies to prevent jobs from leaving the US, but have no policy proposals around automation. If you want manufacturing jobs to stay in the US, regulating automation would be far more effective than trying to prevent companies from outsourcing jobs. (Incidentally, a lot of jobs that have been outsourced probably would have been automated if out…
You know what else is interesting? The same part of the political spectrum that cites automation as the real cause of working class decline does not hesitate to rationalize mass immigration as necessary to fill the demand for labor. If automation is the problem then what are all the unskilled immigrants for?