Posted on 08/19/2012 7:23:16 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way.
At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.
One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year.
All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.
This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.
Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Interesting to see the NY Slimes take on this subject.... and pretty revealing as well. I work in manufacturing and see millions of dollars in robots working every day. I also see the men and women who work with them and are needed to make them work correctly.
Robots provide reliability and consistency in terms of manufacturing processes, but they also come with skilled people who program, maintain, install, and support them on a daily basis. These workers are educated and generally well compensated.
However, from a very pro-Union media outlet like the Slimes, these robots represent a threat to unions and their overwhelmingly liberal voting base. The elimination of low skilled, repetitive process intensive workers means the unions will lose this essential core element to their membership.
The worst thing possible to unions and their existence are educated workers who don’t need to rely on unions and their thugs to extort management. This shows their true colors, in my opinion. Unions would rather companies depend on low-skilled uneducated workers, who they need to fill their union coffers, rather than see people become educated and succeed on their own. Another, typical example of how liberals want people to become dependent on society, rather than prosper.
Even here in Michigan the union percentage was up to 18.3% in 2011 which is only 1% higher than 2010. Still too high but the trend is downward over all. in 1989 is was 27.8%
http://www.bls.gov/ro5/unionmi.htm
When I was in the union we had a no strike clause which was a good thing for everyone. We were relatively low paid but had good benefits but our no strike clause kept us working while others around us were on strike.
Thank you for making my case for me better than I can.
We cannot even discuss the facts, as best we know them, of this situation, because they infringe on our most sensitive societal taboos.
The problem is that you have not disproven my assertion that this is a looming problem, you have just refused to discuss it. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make the problem go away. It merely ensures that we won’t take action to deal with it.
Not that I have any idea of what action would work.
Duh, 50% are always going to be less than average no matter what and there will always be a bottom 10% even when they are all millionaires. lol.
I think automation is a very good thing for us.
For example:
In 1950 the US steel industry employed 600,000 people and produced 87.9 million metric tons of steel.
In 2011 the US steel industry employed 85,000 people and produced 86.2 million metric tons of steel.
So we are able to produce the same output but with 7 times less workers.
While that is true, it is still a ways off.
What these robots can do now and in the near future is replace workers who were outsourced to other countries in the last 20 years. So the jobs will come back, but they will be give to robots. People in low wage countries have the most to lose, because robots can work cheaper than they can, and with machinery the competative advantage is the local energy cost. (Which is why on nearly every energy thread I am always advocating lowering the cost of energy to compete in the global marketplace)
We also have to consider that we are in the bursting of a demographic bubble, and these robots will actually be necessary because of the enormous amount of boomers retiring.
Not only can they print tools, they can print their own parts!
The right to be self sufficient without government intervention or oppression. The right to own property and live off it freely. (The Amish got it right. They're untouchable. When all else fails, they'll just see it as another day.)
Those who can't, or choose not to, work for someone else can work to provide for themselves. THIS is real freedom. This is how America is suppose to be. This is what it was like before we allowed our own government to enslave us.
The founding fathers warned us. We didn't listen. If we don't offer up our tythes to Uncle Sam, we lose everything. We don't even have our own land to fall back on to grow our food. They take everything away from us.
I once visited a Vermont American plant and watched a robot make paddle bits. Amazing.
In another part of the plant was another robot building the robot that made the paddle bits. Really amazing.
The 'market' handled the above changes - and the changes worked. The correct change doesn't happen when control freaks like Obama or communists committees start making the call. We don't need '5 year plans'.
As long as we protect people's rights to make market choices, they'll make the right ones for themselves - and as a by product, the right choices for society.
If elites and 'know it alls' are out of the loop the solution will just happen.
Public schools and media are a huge part of the problem with people not reaching their full potential.
However, in general, IQ is a measurement of potential. As with most things, its distribution is represented by a standard distribution or bell curve.
You can, and people do, argue that our present IQ tests do not fully measure human potential. Personally, I would greatly prefer it if these naysayers were right, and I believe in one sense they are. IQ measures only one aspect of human potential. Unfortunately, we have many decades of evidence that indicates that, while not perfect, IQ measures “something” that is absolutely critical to performance in the modern economy. And that criticality is increasing, not decreasing, with technological advancement.
Claims otherwise are the equivalent of insisting, per Lake Woebegone, that “all the children are above average.”
To specifically address your point, modern education ensures that a great many people don’t reach their full potential. However, even an ideal educational system is not capable of bringing people to a point where they achieve above their potential.
Those things are great. The problem is taxation and regulation. Capitalism, the freedom to buy and sell, has always been a pillar of mankind. When oppressive taxation, regulation and control are added to it, it suffers.
The market is no longer free, so the slaves will continue to find ways to escape.
When people are not needed for labor anymore, where will the demand for all these robot-made goods be?
But what if technological changes mean the market no longer works?
There is no law of nature, AFAIK, that means free markets will always result in economic improvement for most people. That has indeed been the case for the last 200 years, but is there any real reason to be “positive” that it will always be the case?
“It is radioactive, at least in this country, because certain minority groups are disproportionately concentrated in the lower IQ range, and therefore any discussion becomes about race. Which in a very real sense has little to do with it.”
For the lucky few, there is always basketball.
Our modern system tries it’s best to dumb down those who would be above average because it is set up for the lowest common denominator.
I think that is true, but I make the following observations:
1) We are not a market-driven economy. Big Government allies with Big Business in an economy of fascism and control. This works against workable solutions.
2) We could achieve workable solutions for the future (as we have done in the past) if we could break the stranglehold of Big Government and its crony capitalism tendency.
3) Big Government always seems like a good idea when people want to avoid suffering. How many government programs have been imposed on us "for the children"? If we really want market solutions, then we really have to hold Government Charity at arms length, and we really have to accept a certain amount of real suffering, so that society can move toward real solutions.
Based on our current social and political state, I have no reason to believe that either politicians or voters will tolerate market-driven solutions.
We should have a free market. We sometimes tell ourselves that we do have a free market. But we don't. And without a free market, real solutions do not "just happen". What we get, instead, is just more Control.
Well, no.
True capitalism can only really exist when a specific, and historically rather uncommon, group of factors coincide.
Property rights, rule of law, freedom of contract, etc.
The market is unkillable and is always with us. But the market is only one requirement for true capitalism, which is actually quite rare historically.
In capitalism, wealth flows to those who are most efficient economically, with political power accruing to them as a side effect.
Historically, wealth has been largely distributed not as a function of economic efficiency, but rather as a function of political power, which is of course rooted in military efficiency.
The last 300 years or so of western history are the anomaly, not the norm.
Then what happens? Well, if everything is made by robots, I suppose we’ll all get jobs maintaining and building the robots. There’s a clue about career choices in the article.
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