Posted on 08/03/2014 5:04:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Is the increasing automation of our economy a threat to American wages and jobs? Should the American worker fear the rise of the robots? No, not really.
Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes warned that society faced “a new disease” of “technological unemployment” in which the “means of economizing the use of labor [were] outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” Much more recently, Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute wrote about how “robot workers could tear America’s social fabric.” Strain worries that machines could eliminate the livelihoods of millions of less-skilled workers.
These fears are misplaced. In reality, technological advances will improve living standards and working conditions for the vast majority of Americans. Computers have certainly automated many tasks. From travel to banking to manufacturing to retail, machines now perform formerly human tasks quickly and reliably.
Technology has eliminated countless jobs in the U.S. and around the world. Even Foxconn, famous for its vast iPhone-assembly lines in Taiwan, plans to install a million robots.
But almost as quickly as technology has eliminated some jobs, it has created new ones. Like developing smartphone apps. Or shuttling Uber passengers. Or moving inventory in Amazon warehouses. Contrary to Keynes’s prediction of 15-hour workweeks, the economy has always found new uses for displaced workers.
(Excerpt) Read more at heritage.org ...
OMG, you swallowed the Marxist interpretation of the Industrial Revolution whole! No one was “forced off the farms”, people flocked to factories because the wages and working conditions were so vastly preferable. As Lenin said, “It was Ford, not Marx, who made the Revolution possible by freeing the proletariat from the idiocy of rural life.”
I’m surprised Amazon isn’t already using robots to move stuff around in their warehouses.
The Lego factory in Denmark is a marvel of robotic technology, with transporters running around all the time that are smart enough to stop when there are obstacles in the path.
or need expensive Obamacare insurance, although I could see democrats deciding robots have rights, and requiring them to join unions, which would skim 10% of their “wages”, defined as whatever the democrats decide a robot job is worth.
Automation doesn’t worry me. We’re a long way from crews of robots being able to climb on steel and build scaffolding, or run layout on a wall. The vast majority of things still require human oversight.
I hate to break it to the author, but most of the inventory in amazon warehouses is moved around by robots.
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Please see my #26.
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A couple of days ago, my daughter ordered something from Amazon at noon, and it showed up at our door at 6pm. Probably hard to do that with people doing all the work.
The only question regarding this picture is, “would Lazz hit both of then?”
And that ladies and germs is how you destroy a thread on Sunday morning.
What people forget is that someone will have to build the robots that build the robots that build the robots that build the robots that build the robots................................
IIRC from the documentary I saw, the only thing workers do is double check the order from an invoice printed by the computer, throw it in a package, affix a label (also printed by the computer) and send it on its merry way. BTW, posting this from a kindle.
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You are mostly right. But a couple of points:
1. The coming Robot Age is not going to be a step function. It will come for sure but it wii come gradually and that in itself will ease the transition.
2. The premium placed on technical skills will continue to rise. Those who cannot or will not put in the effort to develop the skills that the labor market seeks are going to be at a major disadvantage. So - TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL.
You didn’t ping Laz. How are we to get his opinion if you don’t ping him?
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Robots probably won’t be cost-effective to clean houses or weed your garden, so there’s always the low-end labor market.
We are doing it to ourselves. We are so technologically ahead of everyone that if we focused on educating our children to operate in these environments, there would be plenty of jobs.
Instead Johnny can’t read, write or add 2 plus 2, so Achmed is brought in to do the job. And frankly, Achmed with his masters in engineering from Chenai school of engineering and technology isn’t much better.
The other thing that is killing us is a product called Taleo. HR departments are so inept these days to a point they might as well be the DMV. The biggest problem in America today as I see it is one little line on a job application. COLLEGE DEGREE REQUIRED.
Many of these kids are intelligent and with a little OJT can figure out these systems. Instead they bring in people from off shore who take twice as long to learn things and in the end we wind up redoing it at twice the cost.
My best engineer has a high school equivalent. I fought HR and management to get him on board. And that was from over 200 resumes I received.
The difference between then and now is that the agrarian workforce was capable and willing to work. the displaced ‘workers’ today are neither.
These misanthropic fools are only fodder for the anti-christ-capitalism-america-family-culture evangelists who populate and pollute our social and political power structure. Revolutions rarely end as their proponents envision.
Society faces “a new disease” Obama&Co.
Displaced workers, agrarian, riparian, or otherwise, are only unwilling to work these days because of hefty transfer payments extracted from those remaining in the workforce. The incremental tax on the first hour of labor is well in excess of 100%, close to 400%.
Sorry, don’t know how to ping. Could you do the honors, please?
Through family connections, I knew the vice president for public relations for Kodak. We tended to get along well and at his insistence, he arranged a private tour of one of their film factories in Rochester, around 1990, when people still used film. The degree of automation was impressive. Probably fewer than 20 people on the floor in a 20,000 square foot factory.
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