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Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

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Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#211
post #165
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They teach you economic history and show that predictions of pervasive unemployment and lack of spending power caused by technical innovation have been made every decade and never been borne out as new ways of delivering societal value are constantly being invented. In Econ 301 they teach you to never say never. Whether this time is different than the previous rounds of automation or will have larger dislocative effe…

I think we're definitely looking at, at the minimum, another day off the working week - similar to the shift from the early 20th century from 6 to 5 days, as combine harvesters triggered a movement of something like 90% of agricultural workers into cities. Beyond that, it's hard to say. There is lots of work that needs to be done - picking up plastics anybody? - but the money is in the wrong places to pay for it, and…

>...such interesting, interesting times.

I think the "Chinese" (or Austen Chamberlain [1]) had it right when "May you live in interesting times" was meant as a curse.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/12/18/live/

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#212
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly playing devil's advocate, but is the lifelong employment of their staff uniqlo's problem? If you found a cheaper supplier of milk, would you feel obligated to reimburse your milk man? (may be a misplaced cultural reference, but in the UK 20+ years ago a chap delivering you milk to your door every morning on a rolling contract basis was the norm - generally they do other stuff now)

Companies as a group should be aware that they are just a polite fiction that exists only because actual people allow them to exist. If they continue down the path of externalizing all costs while internalizing all revenues, people may one day decide that they're tired of humouring the fiction. If we somehow got to a point where 90% of workers were laid off due to automation, with no adjustments to the social safety…

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Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what is Econ 201's solution to pervasive unemployment, or lack of spending power due to underemployment? Is that also classified as "societal value"?

Perhaps you should go ask a blacksmith. btw, unemployment is extremely low currently.

Just wait a couple hundred years and your skills will be back in demand. Artisanal blacksmiths make a killing today.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#214
post #144
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a non-starter for most voters. Only to the degree that they've been trained to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and identify more with the interests of the owners than their own personal interests.

How do you think a law would work, which would only allow floor workers to own/operate robots, but not the workers (the CEO/warehouse foreman) that oversee other workers?

> How do you think a law would work, which would only allow floor workers to own/operate robots, but not the workers (the CEO/warehouse foreman) that oversee other workers?

I don't think "most voters" who don't see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires would shed a tear if CEOs, business owners, members of the management and ownership class, etc. had their ability to own robots limited. At least after some consideration of what where most labor was replaced by automation would look like. So I object to the idea that such a law would be "a non-starter for most voters."

I'm not a legislator who's spent a lot of time thinking how such a law would be implemented, but you could probably accomplish with some kind of per-capita ownership limit. A CEO could still own robots, but not any more than a pleb to make a difference. They'd have to employ the pleb's robots instead of buying all they need themselves. That gets around the problem of classifying people. There's still the problem of determining the overall number to be rationed, and that probably requires a bit more thought than I have time to give right now. Though part of it could probably be modeled after the present-day labor market.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#215
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering seems safe, if that is what you are primarily thinking of in your question. Developing software at the same level of a skilled engineer is a problem we'd only be able to solve with general AI. Even if program synthesizers (things that take declarative high level requirements and produce code) worked (and they don't at the level required for an non-technical user to use), most engineers today must…

It's not at all clear that software engineering is safe. Sure there will probably always be a few programmers, but as tools (and soon I expect AI) gets better those programmers can do more and more of the work. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find the number of software engineers decreasing in the not too distant future. The only reason it hasn't already is that we've managed to grow the number of things software d…

If current trends are any indication, the only way I can foresee the number of software engineers decreasing is if we make the job so complicated that the IQ floor on being able to perform at an acceptable level rises too high. We are currently piling the abstractions higher and higher, and we're patching them up with duct tape fast enough to keep most of the leaks at bay, but when things go south into Here-Be-Dragons territory, there are just a helluva lot more dragons lurking around these days, and they can be some nasty Lovecraftian dragons.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#216
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

high skill jobs are at risk too. It's reasonable to assume, given recent tech developments(AI, low code for software, generative design for graphic design/engineering and architecture, blockchain for professions working on trust in transaction like accounting, some automation in the legal field, automation in insurance) that many high-skill professions will suffer unemployment too. And can someone with high-skill job…

The jobs you listed have largely been augmented rather than replaced. You’re also not accounting for new jobs we can’t even imagine yet. Ten years ago no one would think YouTuber or Instragram model would be viable jobs for some people. Social media directors at companies large and small have to find unique ways to engage with other humans. The guy that fixes cracked screens on smartphones couldn’t have done that in…

Great comment.

Actually, people did think that the internet would greatly increase niche markets pretty early. And that requires marketers to support.

And people did think people will own something like a smartphone, so it makes sense some people will be responsible for maintenance.

So maybe with all those new technologies coming(which some do new jobs), someone will need to build and support them, and who knows how many people that will take.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#217
This article needs a lot more detail before it can even begin to be used as an indicator of impending rapid mass technological unemployment.

The huge, mostly mechanical system pictured in the Japan News article doesn't visually differ much from AS/RS systems that have been developing for fifty years. And according to the linked Reuters article, Uniqlo doesn't appear to be benefiting from AI or breakthrough tech, but is merely attempting to deploy automated warehouses, a relatively old technology, globally.

Barring new details, this article doesn't describe the beginning of an avalanche of robot workers, but an established $XXm custom build process entered into by the latest company with sufficient scale, margins, capital, etc to make it worth the investment.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely two outcomes. Either everyone will be given a basic income for meeting their needs or the robot revolution will make goods so cheap that very little money/effort will be needed purchase things. Most of the jobs may move to the entertainment and healthcare industry.

What if we're not satisfied with mincome and soma, and we want something more? With no framework to provide for useful productivity, what will young people end up doing? A lazy population with no way to differentiate and striate financially will find other ways of anteing up over each other, including criminal acts...

Meh, if anything think vr, internet, video games will keep most people occuppaid. Lazy population will be too lazy to bother each other.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lower class gets bigger and bigger, and is either kept just happy enough to not revolt or... At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force.

An alternative, which I advocate for, is that the lower class form productive collectives, stop contributing to the ultra wealthy, and generate their own real wealth. Much of the worlds wealth exists in wealth-generating infrastructure and information that is accessible to all of us. If we simply divest from the ultra wealthy and build a new economy based on cooperation, we can construct a system that inherently lift…

Seriously, do it. However, I'll warn you that it's not as easy as you might imagine. Cooperatives require cooperation and if you've worked on a software team before, you will see that true cooperation is quite difficult to achieve. Usually it devolves into power plays where a certain few decide that they should be making the decisions to save us from the stupid people. And having taken the power and made all the decisions, they feel that they deserve more than other people because without them, there would just be chaos. So you just end up constructing a new wealthy layer.

It's not like this hasn't happened before. If we go back 200 years ago, the money was all tied up in the super wealthy families and royalty. The system was set up so that the wealthy would inherit their god-given gains (slight sarcasm, but I don't think that if you asked them they would disagree with that statement). Our financial system has changed and there is the "new rich" now (who have vulgarly worked to become rich). Of course the financial system is mostly controlled by this new rich class and they spend a considerable amount of effort to ensure that they continue to control it (obviously). Donald Trump is president and got there by campaigning against the legacy of rich people. You can't make this stuff up.

Having said that, I once belonged to a home brew beer club. That club was amazing. We got fed up with the stores completely ignoring our requests (because they were concentrating only on casual customers who only made beer to save money, rather than because they wanted to make beer). We just decided to approach producers directly and ask them what kind of minimum order they required. Then we organised bulk purchases every year. Somebody would organise the purchase and put everything on their credit card. We'd collect all the money and then get together at someone's house to split everything up and deliver it. Eventually our bulk purchases got so popular that we started doing them at much higher frequencies (like every couple of months). We no longer needed minimum orders and in fact we were making purchases that were larger than most of the micro breweries in our area. We could actually command rare hops, etc that nobody else could get, because we were the best customer that the suppliers had. Our purchase sizes were tens of thousands of dollars and we had people lining up to organise buys because the air miles (or whatever deal the credit card companies were giving) would mean free vacations anywhere in the world for the person doing the work.

Eventually the homebrew stores started complaining because our business was orders of magnitude larger than theirs. But it was too late. They tried to sour the suppliers against us (and it worked in a few cases), but for the most part the supplier preferred us. I moved away and so haven't talked with those guys for a long time, but I've always thought this is basically the ideal cooperative. But it only really worked because the guys organising the deals had high paying full time jobs doing something else. The organisation was just a hobby for them. You can easily see that if someone decided, "Hey I'm going to start a home brew store and since I'm the one with the contacts for the malt/hops, I can force everybody to go through me". And suddenly they are the ones in charge and you get what they decided to order, etc, etc. They start making decisions based on what makes them money, not based on what makes you happy -- it's only common sense, after all. And they try to make sure that nobody can steal their business out from under them (like we did one time to the incumbent home brew stores). Now instead of a collective, we just have the same thing we had before -- only difference is a different person in charge.

Re: Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

#220

Modern societies are going to have a very real problem to grapple with as this replacement goes from newsworthy to the norm. This could result in significant worker displacement with massive bottom-line ROI for companies in the next decade or two, particularly as minimum wages rise. I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Even if they do, it is unlike…

Truly. Minimum [to say nothing of market!] wages are climbing fast in my state, and I have heard real chatter from business owners about implementing [robot] automation on the production line / warehouse sooner rather than later.

Another industry I have knowledge of, orcharding, is moving toward harvest automation at an astonishing rate, driven mainly by the rapidly-escalating cost of labor [having to pay for H2B visa costs, the disappearance of harvest-following migrant worker bands in favor of more professionalized workers who demand pay greater than the prevailing minimum wage, regulations that require orchardists provide quality housing [at a cost upwards of $10k/worker/year] and pay for rest periods, rising liability / workers' comp insurance costs, etc. Adoption of automation in the orcharding sector is increasing as cost of equipment falls -- for example, two years ago, a typical apple harvest machine [which replaces a crew of, say, ~20 humans] cost in the neighborhood of $500k, whereas today viable models are available at half that.

My understanding is that the vineyard industry is even further along in implementing automation, owing to the relative simplicity of their harvest process.

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