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 ...
I completely oppose socialism, big government, or government charity. I don't want a welfare state. However, if the machines do most of the work, then how are YOU going to get a pay check? If you don't need to work, then how are you going to put food on the table?
Once upon a time (early 1800s) the world found that it had too many farm workers -- so people moved off the farms and into cities, and they worked in factories.
Once upon a time (mid 20th century) the US found that it had too many manufacturing workers -- so people moved out to the suburbs and commuted to their jobs in cubicle-land.
At some point, there won't be anywhere to go. We will be producing "stuff" -- but there won't be an obvious justification to give you a pay check so that you can buy the "stuff".
Then what happens?
Robots don't have unions who'll strike, shut down production, and demand more. They don't need Obomacare. They don't need vacation days. They don't need disability payments. They don't need unemployment insurance.
For industry, robotics are a business saving miracle. They don't have to deal with the wanting anymore. People have wanted themselves right out of a job.
Somebody has to build the robots, at least for now, and because the robots are so lucrative, that will be a well paying trade. Now when robots can build other robots, then the world may be on the brink of being taken over by the robots.
This is the biggest and most important issue of our time, and absolutely nobody is talking about it.
Automation results in greatly increased productivity, and historically this has allowed people to move out of drudge or manual labor jobs and up into those requiring greater skill and that receive higher pay.
Those who, IMO, live in the past assume that modern automation and future will always have the same effect.
Unfortunately, many of those displaced by this latest wave of automation are not mentally capable of performing the higher-order skills that remain in demand.
What this means is that more and more people are literally falling out the bottom in our society. There is no economic demand for their services, in any meaningful sense. As such, they are and can only be a net drag on the economy. In other words, if they all disappeared tomorrow, the economy would only be improved in the long run.
As automation continues and accelerates, a larger number of people each year will fall out the bottom. Eventually the only real economic demand will be for very high skill levels, which only a small percentage of the population is capable of performing.
In such a condition, it seems clear to me, that at some point free market principles, which have had a fantastic 400+ year run, start losing their applicability. At least if your goal is the good of society as a whole, and not just the top few percent.
This whole issue is discussed at length in The Bell Curve, which is looking more and more prescient every year.
Interesting... perhaps the manufacturing sector will return to USA. But not the assembly jobs. But new jobs will be created to service the robots and move the raw materials/products as well of think of new ones.
In a few years, we'll be the number one producer of manufactured items and energy providing the politicians don't screw things up.
Until the business attempts to find someone to sell to. It’ll sell to the robotics engineers because they are still indispensable. The others? Not as much so.
” Robots don’t have unions who’ll strike, shut down production, and demand more. They don’t need Obomacare. They don’t need vacation days. They don’t need disability payments. They don’t need unemployment insurance. “
One other thing that robots don’t do - they don’t go out and spend their paychecks on manufactured goods...
YOU are going to become more educated and will learn to design the robots. YOU will also plan the assembly floor plan layout. YOU will program the robots. YOU will also maintain the robots. YOU will perform time studies to see how you can optimize he manufacturing process on order to increase throughput. YOU will earn more than you would have otherwise if you were putting these products together by hand.
YOU are no longer a bank teller. YOU design ATM machines and maintain them.
There are no longer people employed by cities to shovel horse manure from the streets each night due to he invention of the automobile. Oh, pity that.
Great minds and all that.
It is quite possible that capitalism and technology, like other human ideologies and practices, contains the seeds of its own destruction.
I certainly hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.
What is most interesting to me is that absolutely nobody in politics is discussing this biggest issue of our time, the loss of economic demand for less-intelligent workers.
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.
Try looking at the view point of abundance rather than scarcity.
Humans have shown remarkable resilience whenever industries become outmoded to invent whole new industries to improve our standard of living.
The robots will by and large also be running Linux. Not Windows.
There was a time when people were truly free and could live happily off their own land. They could buy land and actually own it. The political extortionists came along and ruined it all by taxing what wasn't theirs to tax, regulating what wasn't theirs to regulate, and confiscating what wasn't theirs to confiscate.
The problem isn't the freedom to survive. The problem is the lack of freedom to survive.
.
Somebody has to build the robots, somebody has to repair them, somebody has to supervise production, etc.
There will always be jobs for human beings, but a lot of the bottom line jobs (picking up a piece of wire and threading it through a hole thousands of times a day, for example) will be done by robots. The same was true when things like mechanical looms took over the cottage weaving industry.
We don’t need to be Luddites about this. It’s a fact of life and technology, like it or not, is unstoppable.
Human beings will move to other jobs where being a human being interacting with human beings is important, and technology actually frees us to do that.
I don’t think any of the Chinese semi-slave labor in the factories wants to be there and if they could find some other way to make a living, they would.
Heck, our immigrant chicken pluckers here at the Tyson plants don’t want to spend their days doing this disgusting job, so they save their pennies and go open some tiny business of their own somewhere. But the Chinese don’t have that option.
Humans have shown remarkable resilience whenever industries become outmoded to invent whole new industries to improve our standard of living.
I agree and am really excited about the future now. It feels like the period before personal computers saved the 1980s.
All we need is the busybodies in politics to back off and let the personal sector do what it does best... create new opportunities.
Perhaps ossified attitudes are more to blame than technology shifts for extended inability of people in outmoded crafts to adapt. The boom of the horseless carriage gave the buggy whip maker a new market — in crafting upholstery. But old buggy whip makers and new upholstery manufacturing management both had difficulty in thinking outside of the box.
The point is time and technology moves on,we need to move with it or get left behind. I`m not going to pay thru the nose for either of the lazy idiots to sit at home mooching or needlessly assemble widgets on some assembly loser line.
I don`t know`em and I don`t owe`em!
And somebody has to carry around the stuff that feeds these robots and that the robots make. Ergo, truck driving isn’t going to go away anytime soon.
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