Posted on 06/14/2016 11:34:30 PM PDT by nakutny
Opportunities for producing and assembling products and their components have spread worldwide, making it is easier for countries to climb the production value ladder. States at the bottom, extracting raw materials, can gradually move up, first making low-value components and then progressing to higher-value ones or basic assembly. But just as technology spurred globalization and the shifts in international trade that followed, so, too, will it revolutionize how countries again do business with one another. Compounded by the economic and demographic changes taking place today, automation, advanced robotics and software-driven technologies are ushering in a new era — one of shorter supply chains that will provide fewer opportunities for the developing world.
(Excerpt) Read more at stratfor.com ...
“just as technology spurred globalization”
Come on, man!...It’s not like politics didn’t enable it just as much.
Automation eliminates labor arbitrage. All those chinese serfs are not even going to have time to rack up a credit card debt load buying stuff before they are gone. Without labor for manufacturing the next cost to eliminate is transportation and energy cost, which is why all future automated factories will be outside the urban tax zone but camping on every major city border. Goodbye shipping industry, we barely knew you. Now if we can just get rid of those pesky truck drivers just think about how much money we can save on producing and delivering our automated stuff to the consumers?
What’s that? No one has a job to buy any of this stuff? But we are practically giving it away for free!!!
This is our future unless someone gets exploring outer space going as a new frontier for the unemployed.
Bookmark.
you can see the same in 1700 BC when technology of better shipping enabled vast commercial links between Egypt, Crete, Myceanean Greece, Anatolia, the Hittite empire, Assyria, BAbylonia, Elam, the Indus Valley
you see it also with the better ships of the europeans in the years 1400 to 1700, then steam ships etc.
The US was the foremost proponent of globalization in the 20th century as the US after WWII was the only real manufacturing power and needed places to sell to. Globalization is nothing more than an expansion of the initial trade between city states.
You (literally) can’t say that politics has had nothing to do with it and will not have anything to do with it in the future.
I think permanently exporting all leftists to outer space should be the number one item on the agenda.
I hope there are some smart conservatives who are thinking about how to make conservative ideas work within an economy where 40-50 percent of today’s jobs are automated. Because it’s coming to that, sure as the sunrise.
That’s how I understand it as well - technology has gotten cheap enough that automation is becoming cheaper than the logistics to purchase the labor at a lower cost so production is going to become co-located and sized to the market.
I believe Newton’s first law of motion applies to predicting the future - a body remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an outside force.
In other words, everything will continue as in the past, until an outside forces changes it. This unexpected outside force is often refereed to as the Black Swan Theory.
While we can use the past to predict trends, we can not truly predict the future for the simple reason there are too many variables and is by definition unpredictable.
I think it would be safe to say an event will occur that will change everything. Trying to pin down that particular event is what is impossible. It could be war (it has been close to 70 years since the last major world war, we are closer to another than many would like to think about). Or, it could be a truly world wide pandemic not seen since the early 1900s. Or it could be spontaneous revolutions in a bunch of different countries with the populations over throwing their existing governments.
Regardless, there will be a large loss of human life and a disruption of trade. And that is my point. When you have world wide trade and every nation’s economy is based on that trade when it is disrupted, there will be chaos and perhaps famine.
People have become to reliant on technology. If that technology were to disappear (if the power gets shut off) most will not know what to do.
I do not see a happy future for mankind.
We can all stay at home in our PJs videotaping our cats and dogs for the fun and amazement of our friends.
And only Zuckerberg knows how many Biebers there are waiting to explode on the music scene.
/sarc
Tourists returning back to their home countries after the Olympics in Zika-ridden Brazil?
If it happens, cheap airfare and unrestricted travel will contribute to its spread
Just be sure to retain a few telephone sanitizers for safety's sake.
The article assumes that undeveloped areas will suffer from these changes, because the old path to development will not be available to them.
But new paths to development will become available, from these same technologies.
Increasingly, undeveloped areas will find it easier, cheaper and faster to just make their own stuff locally. Robots will get better and cheaper, just like cell phones did - everyone will get them, and sooner than folks thought ahead of time.
Artificial intelligence will increasingly replace the need for an educated workforce, potentially REDUCING the comparative advantage of more developed societies. Those who invent new things could make huge fortunes quickly, but the bulk of the human population will quickly be able to get their own copy at little incremental cost (a software update).
If undeveloped countries don’t have the capital to buy their own production equipment, just leave the door open, and foreign companies will set up shop to produce locally, as it becomes more economical - prices will still drop for their consumers, and there will still be secondary business for the local economy, from having production there (energy, raw materials, etc.).
As the article mentions, the equipment itself will become less capital-intensive over time, which will make it easier to move. It will become easier to improve standards of living in undeveloped countries (barring political restrictions).
The real cost drivers would increasingly become energy, raw materials, and taxes. Large scale manufacturing should migrate to areas with a relative cost advantage for those factors, while lots of manufacturing becomes localized.
The bottom line is that the costs, and cycle times for manufactured goods will drop. Quality of life will improve, even if some improve faster than others.
“... The next cost to eliminate is transportation ...”
As one savvy entrepreneur said, “logistics is waste.”
I believe you are right on the mark, like Newtons law i think, every thing that goes up must come back down.
The Bible tells us there is nothing new under the sun, every thing that will be has aleady been.
Tariffs are as old as trade. The USA built its manufacturing base behind steep import tariffs. Up to WWII the Republican was known as the tariff party. Alas we gave away the store. Globalists are not patriots.
The history of automation is that it may displace automatable jobs, but it creates many new jobs in entirely new and novel industries created by the advances in technology and fueled by increased productivity generated by automation
The Automation Paradox is that the technological advances and research, development and production of these advanced robots and automation systems needed to Americans out of work will generate so much economic activity and consumer and capitol goods output that we will have to import workers to provide enough labor and technical support.
Think of what it has taken to get a personal computer in most every home in America starting with the Apple II in the 1970s .
Extrapolate that to every commercial, industrial and consumer product or machine in our country.
What you are talking about is another wave in the series of waves in the Industrial and technological revolution
The amount of economic activity needed to develop, commercialize, manufacture , train and deploy all this technology world wide is a staggering task and one which keep people employed for two generations
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