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 agree. I'm bothered by the thought because it seems to contain more than a hint of a central organization controlling a labor pool where everyone does a 4 year stint of service. Much of that bothers me. And yet I see that as somewhat inevitable if society gets to the point where 40 hrs a week, 48 weeks of the year, for 45 years is no longer what is required for "work". If you don't need to work very much at all, then how does that sort itself out? I can't think of anything better than something like 4 years of national service.
To expand a little: I believe Jay Kinney wrote an article years ago entitled "Where did you get the axe?" he took some back-to-the-earth hippies to task because they were too smug about being "completely off the grid". They had absolutely no dependency on the industrialized world. They grew their own food, chopped their own wood and had no need for the Imperial Western Way of Oppression. Kinney, of course, asked "Where did you get your axe?"
The point was that people may live off their own property, and have a very high degree of self-sufficiency -- but someone, somewhere needs to spend time in the axe factory. Or the tractor factory, or the well pump factory. Maybe not 40 years laboring at the machine that churns out axe heads, but maybe 4 years of that -- then go back to the farm and be "off the grid" and if anyone says "Where did you get your axe?" you can say "I spent 4 years making axes. I did my time."
I remember a quote, I don’t remember if it was Slate magazine, about how the work in an Asian factor was the second worse thing the writer had seen. Asian agriculture was the worst.
Factory workers were in air conditioning and protected from the rain, didn’t have bugs in their faces, weren’t working in mud, got paid money for their work that helped their families. In all, people WANTED to work in the factory because the farm was so bad.
Purchasing power parity
A guy managed to get an easy purchasing power parity measure by the amount of time required to earn a Big Mac.
We need protection from the eastern hordes, tradewise. I know that’s still blasphemy, but it’s true. We need relief from the environazi and liability lilliputians here, and we need to realize that free trade with cultures that have no freedom is not free, it’s unfair to us. Then, we would find that there are still some jobs Americans will dew. Also, gotta give the construction industry back to American nationals.
Liberal unionist response: Whine about the loss of jobs.
Conservative worker’s response: Learn to program, maintain and repair robots.
I quite agree. However, while brains are still required, it appears that sweat is increasingly not needed.
This can be seen by the employee counts of "old" versus "new" companies.
GM about 250,000. Revenue $150B. "Profit" $7.5B.
Google about 50,000 people. Revenue $40B, profit about $10B.
Now if you work at Google, you've got a great job and are probably getting rich. The company's profit per employee is high.
GM continues in existence only because "we" bailed it out. Profit per employee is arguably negative.
IOW, "new economy" companies on average employee far fewer workers per unit of production, revenue or profit than "old economy" companies. So we have the potential to have a lot of production (in revenue and profits) but with few workers.
What do we do with the rest of the people?
Computers compute. They do it far better than humans. We are not computers. Computers is a bad term for what happens in our brains. Computers compute. Humans interpret, intuit, reason. These are tasks we have no idea how to make a computer do. Not that we haven’t been trying and know a lot. It’s just that what we DO know only shows us more clearly what a (seemingly) impossible task it is.
RE: Somebody has to build the robots, somebody has to repair them, somebody has to supervise production, etc.
What about robots building and repairing other robots?
The half-wits that can’t cut it are called peasants. It won’t be like we are intentionally enslaving them. We run the only system that works and if that’s the way it ends up for some people, that’s the way it is. I just don’t plan on being one of them.
I have read that the Japanese are developing robots specifically for this type of work. Upthread, someone also mentioned dog walking and infant care. Both could be done by advanced robots designed to deal with fragile humans. The dog walkers might actually be way more efficient at simultaneously walking multiple dogs than are people. For example, the robot could easily communicate at the higher frequencies to which dogs respond.
As an elder, I would welcome the chance to lease a household robot that could also do property maintenance chores.
I do wonder about what will happen to the consumer model economy. Perhaps the centralized government will be the first line consumer of personal goods and then dole them out to the remaining humans. The same with GDP: every human would be granted a subsidy based on the productivity to the State created by the robotic workers. It would be hell for those of us who grew up under the human-centric model, but subsequent generations would accept it as normal. With lives full of leisure time, humans could become fully immersed in various sports and hobbies, much like the super wealthy elites of today.
Exactly right. China is having a heck of a hard time keeping people in the fields...they keep moving to the cities and there isn’t enough work for them. As you point out, who wants a life of miserable toil at a barely subsistence level with primitive working conditions when you can earn a wage in the factories in the city.
We need to face it: the answer will be socialism, hopefully more like social security checks to spend as we please rather than total nanny government. Our role is to keep socialism from growing faster than we invent the technology to fund it, and to keep leftist envy from destroying the place.
Don't be so sure about that. Google already has self driving cars. Robots can work faster than humans, but also don't mind working much slower either. The advantage of slower is energy use and strength requirements drop like a rock. We may soon see plastic robot trucks on the highway shoulders driving about 20 mph. Shipping costs will drop in half.
I think we tend to miss the point here.
You are quite correct that one can envision a sorta socialist society where production and economic activity has been more or less completely outsourced to computers and machines. While there is no more need for human input, there is plenty of production and no reason at all why humans should live in material poverty. In fact, such a society could be immensely more productive of wealth than our present system.
The real issue, IMO, is one of “purpose” in life. Indian reservations and ghettoes are two classic examples of what happens to societies when their basic material needs are met without any need for input from the members.
Take the Sioux reservations. Prior to their defeat, the warriors provided for and protected their families, the women took care of the camp and raised the kids. Each member of the tribe had a purpose in life.
After “reservationment” these purposes had disappeared. What was the replacement? Too often nothing. The result was moral deterioration. This is despite the very obvious fact that the pre-reservation Sioux were far more “poverty-stricken” from a purely material standpoint than they were on the res. By definition, nomadic peoples have almost no “stuff,” since they have to carry it all with them.
Simiarly with the inner-city ghettoes. They did not really start to deteriorate morally until welfare reached a level where basic needs were taken care of without working. Before the 60s these people were more poor than they were later, in material things, but the scramble to survive gave them a purpose they didn’t later have.
In many third world countries the people are much more poverty-stricken than in any American reservation or ghetto, but in most of them the people are not morally deteriorated to anything like the same degree.
It does not appear people do well in life when they do not feel needed. And in a world where computers and robots do just about everything, there will be very little need for most of us.
Possibly we’ll develop other ways of life that give us a sense of purpose, but I’m not terribly optimistic on the subject.
The same is true about the history of the industrial revolution in Europe and America.
It is noteworthy that most of the writers glorifying the “sturdy yeoman” life were themselves aristocratic slaveowners such as Jefferson.
Most of the actual yeomen moved to the city and got a factory job as soon as they had the opportunity.
Automation extends easily into law enforcement as well. A total police state is inevitable. Life is going to change. Some people will be leaving for Mars.
Or does a loss of a sense of purpose and of being needed tend to contribute to drug use?
Chicken and egg and all that.
I’ll hold off on a household robot. My kids tortured the Roomba vacuum cleaner to death. Now that they are old enough for chores, they’d probably like one right now, but I’m not buying another.
This article discusses possible employment areas even after robots take over manufacturing.
http://tamarawilhite.hubpages.com/hub/The-Great-Shift-and-the-Future-of-Employment
Just the two of us and only a cat to tease the roomba, although we are in the market for a puppy in the future. We will be moving within the next 18-24 months and I will see what sort of house we end up with. Roomba and the floor washing version are too limited, IMO.
We are getting older and there are many household chores I would love to delegate and a shortage of affordable help. Right now, I’d guess we pay out over $1100/year in various services. I’ve seen $20k estimates for an eventual household/yard work robot and I would guess they would be available, eventually, on some sort of long term lease. I’m hoping we can stay in our home until we die and we will definitely have less than 20 years to go when/if the household robot becomes a reality. We would prefer it to Meals On Wheels or a live-in au pair.
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