Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by lexs » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 9:32 AM UTC

why_only_15 wrote: post #138

acd wrote: post #87

The Question is if Robots should pay income tax? Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income. Tax wise do you replace the replaced workers with zero tax robots or do you tax robot workers? When a company do not pay tax or pay lower tax they do not pay for schools and roads. That is not cool. We still need roads and schools to build a future society. Ie the bigger question is that of income di…

The money saved gets taxed twice: as corporate income and then when distributed to shareholders again as individual income. It likely gets taxed at a higher rate, actually, because the income tax rate of the workers this replaces is probably very low but the rate of the company + the individual could easily be 60%.

Could you break down how you get to "easily" 60%?

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

#272

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 9:36 AM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #124

cgag wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly believe this isn't going to be a problem?

People have predicted that it would be a problem every year for the last hundred years. And those people were all proven false. How many times do the same predictions have to be proven false before we don't take them seriously anymore? People won't do that though. We will continue to hear the same predictions for another hundred years, and every time the people making will say "but this time it's different!"

The reason why we continue to hear the same predictions is because the predictions from the other side (that everything will be alright this time) are never concrete. It's always something like, "oh, there will be new industries you couldn't possibly imagine before, and jobs will be there". Excuse me if I don't find that argument convincing.

Saying that it happened before is not really convincing either, unless we understand the underlying mechanism and can predict that it will continue to operate the same - and I haven't even seen any convincing theories yet. Relying on past observations alone without understanding what's behind them is not always such a good idea; you might be crossing the river by walking on ice because it never cracked before - and then one day it does, because it's springtime. If the risks are high, I'd rather be more sure than "it never happened before". And we're talking about a potential economic disruption so massive that it'd likely erupt into violence, so the risks are high.

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

#273

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

apazzolini wrote: post #27

ed_balls wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

state-backed jobs with negative income tax/UBI/wealthfare. This is what gonna happen in Japan. USA? no idea, some kind of revolution. The biggest problem will be in countries like Bangladesh.

The second (third?) most recent Sam Harris podcast episode with Yuval Noah Harari discusses this. We normally talk about UBI in the context of one country, but like you said, third world countries will suffer the most. Automation killing basic factory jobs will have a much larger effect outside of first world countries, and unfortunately there's no real way to address that disparity from the context of policy in any…

Realistically, we know how the First World countries are going to solve it, because many of them are already in the process of implementing that solution. They'll dump some token amount of humanitarian aid to relieve their conscience, and meanwhile set up electrified razor wire fences with automated turrets and drones at their borders. They're not going to share as much as would be necessary to implement something like UBI worldwide, even at local levels of "subsistence wage".

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

#274

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

justfor1comment wrote: post #41

liquidise wrote: post #3

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…

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.

> or the robot revolution will make goods so cheap that very little money/effort will be needed

Any such robot revolution would drive the cost of labor down faster than it'd drive the cost of goods. It might just not be immediately visible from every vantage point in society, because economic sectors will be taken out one by one - so today you live like a king because of all that cheap stuff, and tomorrow you can't afford it because you have no job, and hence no paycheck. So some form of basic income would still be needed for many.

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

#275

Post by lexs » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 9:47 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #136

mschuster91 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a socialist and yet I believe that neither Stalin's Gulags nor Mao's mass hunger deaths are something that should be repeated. Authoritarian socialism has been proven to not work, what the world desperately needs is liberal/libertarian socialism. We can learn from history - ok, those who openly fly the Nazi flag not, but majority of society can see the problems like homelessness, drug epidemics and exploding rent…

Libertarian socialism? So a minimal govt that owns all the means of production? My head just exploded.

You have a very narrow understanding of socialism then, there are many different forms of social ownership. State owned is only one of them.

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

#276

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

merpnderp wrote: post #225

ardy42 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 so…

Telling a person they can't own something because they might create too much value, sure seems antithetical to western values of personal freedom. And why not take your idea further. Only one person per truck? Per acre of farmland? Per airplane? Per computer? Per pencil? Per lathe? Why shed a tear over lost crappy factory jobs when those people might be better employed fixing the robots, at a higher wage and skill se…

The modern Western ideas of personal freedom with respect to property arose in conjunction with a particular economic system that made sense at the time. But, as any economic system, it has its constraints. Right now, it works because ownership of capital is pointless without a labor force to make it produce things - so you can have capital concentrated a lot, but the workers still get a slice of the pie for working it, even if it's not a big one.

Full automation essentially means that labor is no longer necessary - the owner of the capital can have it produce wealth directly (and robots can fix robots, after all - although the system breaks down long before that, since even when you have humans fixing robots, one human can fix a lot of robots - so you're still employing only a minuscule part of the labor pool). From a perspective that is concerned solely with economic efficiency, all those humans are now simply redundant - they can go and starve to death for all anybody cares. And from a perspective that is concerned purely with property rights, theirs is the freedom to do so, since any other course of action - say, expropriating some robots that would then feed them - would be in violation of those rights.

Somehow, I don't think they will care for it, though. If you make enough people desperate, you get torches and pitchforks. And judging by how revolutions went historically, those torches and pitchforks won't be directed against the capitalist class first and foremost - they'll be directed against those immediately accessible that still have cushy jobs and the associated lifestyle, i.e. whatever remains of the high middle class by then. And if we don't want that to happen to us, we've got to start working out practical solutions, and using our political power to force them through.

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

#277

Post by int_19h » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 10:01 AM UTC

ry_ry wrote: post #89

taneq wrote: post #4

It's OK, the staff will just find new jobs as electronics engineers and machine learning researchers. /s

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)

It's one of those things where it doesn't make much sense when you look at it case-by-case, but the aggregate of them becomes a real problem, and somebody has to pay for it. Ideally, since it's a common problem, everybody does - i.e. we tax productivity more, and use that money to support people whose wages are driven down or whose jobs are lost.

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

#278

Post by romwell » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 12:23 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #256

romwell wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What? More people across the entire world have more access to those things I won't argue for the entire world, but I have some numbers for the US - all adjusted for inflation : - Housing: real-estate prices have increased 4x since the 40-s. The median age of purchasers jumped up by more than a decade.[1] - Healthcare: per-person spending has increased 9x since the 60's[2] - Education: the higher education cost has i…

If you just discount the rest of the world then you're talking about Plenty of people are still buying homes (unless you think those prices just rose without any buyers) and higher education is not necessary to fill the 6M blue collar jobs that remain open in the US today. You can't just look at some isolated negatives and yet ignore all the positives of change with the immense amount of opportunity available today.

>If you just discount the rest of the world then you're talking about Talking about a country with population of ~325M which we both happen to live in far from being merely "random examples" in my opinion.

>higher education is not necessary to fill the 6M blue collar jobs

6M jobs in a country of 325M. That's 2 years worth of high school graduates for you. Not exactly inspiring, don't you think?

>The people at the bottom [...] are much better off than the people at the bottom even 50 years ago.

I made my case above why I can't agree with that statement, with sources. If you have a different metric, please provide it, with sources. Then we can discuss that.

>You can't [...] ignore [..] opportunity available today.

Sure, there' plenty of opportunity for some people - including you and me, given that we're on HN. Arguably there's less opportunities for vast amounts of others. Less opportunities than there was in the 70's, in particular.

You can ignore that, but that's a part how we got Trump. Saying that the lives of poor people are improving doesn't seem to bode well with the said poor people.

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

#279

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 12:37 PM UTC

setr wrote: post #60

endtime wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gun owners are typically on the other side of the aisle from those who support redistribution of wealth. Not saying that couldn't change or that desperation can't trump principle, of course.

I don’t know if thats true: I think everyone wants a “fair” distribution of wealth. The question is in the definition of fair, and means to achieve it. Conservatives believe that distribution achieved by tax and regulation will hurt the total economic production of the US, and lead to everyone being worse off, though more equal (in the extreme: everyone is equally poor), and they also consider it fair that the distri…

One aspect of UBI (when/if we can afford to implement it) is that it presents some solution the problem you describe if it's unconditional. If everyone has an set-in-stone income provided by the society because the robots are doing all the low-level jobs and the society doesn't need their labor, then they still have sufficient free time and ability to do something extra to increase their position.

There are many useful things that aren't (or won't be) viable as jobs because they pay too little or too sporadically to sustain yourself, however, they do provide enough to increase your revenue and status, and give a feeling of opportunity - if you'd have the basics provided in some other way.

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

#280

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 12:41 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #229

EpicEng wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Will prices go down as a result of this automation? Can you name a single instance where prices did _not_ go down due to automation? You're saying process won't go down tomorrow, but of course that's not how any of this works.

Prices don't go down unless there is competition. If a company figures our a way to make massive cost savings while their competition does not, they pocket that margin and use it to either invest in more productive capacity or give back to shareholders. They don't feel some ethical need to lower prices just because they can Automation is correlated with cost savings for consumers because usually the competition can f…

Well, sure, "if a company figures our a way to make massive cost savings while their competition does not" - but Uniqlo isn't that unique; nothing that they have done here is something that's fundamentally impossible for their competition to implement as well, it's just a question of appropriate investment. Yes, there's no reason for them to lower the prices right now, but that will result in mid-term (3-5 years) price decreases in the industry.