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America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

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Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#211

Post by regularization »

Hikikomori wrote: post #194
dluan wrote: post #174

American tech workers need to start paying attention to Chinese national policy, the National People's Congress is happening right now and it's how China sets long term goals and targets. "Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering…

At this point all China needs to do is the gaben strategy, doing nothing while America keeps shooting itself in the foot. Trump seems to have unlimited bullet supply.

[flagged]

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#212

Post by s1artibartfast »

ryandrake wrote: post #31
tartuffe78 wrote: post #2

Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.

> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant ne…

Wealth =/= spending, and definitely doesn't equal consumption.

Elon Musk might have more wealth than 1,000,000 US households, but he doesnt eat 3 million meals a day, drive a million cars, or sleep in a million houses.

I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown of consumption instead of wealth, as competition for goods and services produced is where disparity has tangible impact.

However, the productivity of workers in relation to capital is a valid concern for their ability claim the goods produced.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#213

Post by [deleted] »

toss1 wrote: post #170
rtp4me wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know - the article specifically said Honda will produce the cars "to avoid potential tariffs". I don't think the Trump tariffs were in place "years ago"...

Of course, a marketing line to fit the current situation (and curry favor with the current vindictive administration) is easily added/updated at press time. This does not mean the making of the deals and building the factory had anything to do with it at the time, but stating that those past decisions also have benefit in today's situation is not surprising. It also does not mean that this has anything to do with the…

[deleted]

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#214

Post by Hikikomori »

regularization wrote: post #211
Hikikomori wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point all China needs to do is the gaben strategy, doing nothing while America keeps shooting itself in the foot. Trump seems to have unlimited bullet supply.

[flagged]

The US has certainly wasted much of their wealth since the end of ww2 trying to keep their imperialism 2.0 going.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#215

Post by guhidalg »

from-nibly wrote: post #148
guhidalg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufactu…

Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with the us right? Specializing only works when line goes up forever. Heck sometimes line not going up as fast as yesterday is a "crisis".

> Is there not opportunity cost in both directions?

Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US.

> At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right?

We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism.

> Specializing only works when line goes up forever.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#216

Post by ChuckMcM »

fallingknife wrote: post #192
ChuckMcM wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce. In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resul…

I still haven't seen an example of technical workers being replaced by AI

Perhaps we have differing definitions of "technical workers" ? Here in the Bay Area at least there are a number of companies which are replacing "senior staff" with an LLM and a junior engineer. The argument is that this combination is "cheaper" than the salary paid to the senior engineer. For me that is exactly analogous to replacing a factor worker with a robotic work station and a technician to maintain the robot. There is a ceiling on that junior engineer's career which occurs when they are themselves replaced by another junior engineer to reset the salary cost.

We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search.

What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#217

Post by c0nducktr »

alabastervlog wrote: post #145
Loughla wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, depending on the amount, yes it could be deciding all of the things you said. You would be limited in your choices depending on how much the ubi actually is.

Right now I get zero ubi so I guess I am even more limited on all of those, and am even more a pet.

Right now you can live without it.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#218

Post by j_timberlake »

I assume that future AGI which is smart enough to control "general purpose robotics" is probably smart enough to design robotic forms that make all the current stuff obsolete anyway.

Like the article says, physical world data is too scarce to jump straight to powerful robotics first.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#219

Post by dragonwriter »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #109
dragonwriter wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI Any system with UBI requires other sources of income to exist (thr absence of such sources means that nothing of value is being produced for exchange, in which case any money printed is basically monopoly money and how you distribute it doesn't matter because it isn't doing anything), and a major premise of UBI has always been th…

Well, my question implies that being a landlord would be a remaining source of income, for starters. But if that landlord also owns the automated farms and factories producing consumer goods without labor, then the people they're renting to really might not have any other income. At any rate, where a UBI is substituting for employment income that someone used to earn, but is no longer able to, then I don't think the…

Yes, if you have a single capital owner that owns all productive assets, that's a serious problem that UBI won't solve.

The idea of adopting a downward-redistributive policy like UBI is to do it before that occurs.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#220

Post by jimbob45 »

Hikikomori wrote: post #194
dluan wrote: post #174

American tech workers need to start paying attention to Chinese national policy, the National People's Congress is happening right now and it's how China sets long term goals and targets. "Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering…

At this point all China needs to do is the gaben strategy, doing nothing while America keeps shooting itself in the foot. Trump seems to have unlimited bullet supply.

How does Valve put out one of the worst releases of all time in Artifact and not get dragged through the coals ever for it? The only working strategy Valve has succeeded in running in the last 10 years is making passive income from Steam and that won't last forever.
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