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 ...
If you like complex machinery and heavy construction check out this railroad rail laying machine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4aALRa9jjg
Quite true.
I’ve seen some numbers on economic levels over the centuries.
In 1800 UK was the wealthiest nation on earth. Its average income was about the same as most sub-Saharan countries today. There were of course rich people in UK then, but then there are rich people in every African country too.
There is a measurement of economic level that is based on a multiple of the absolute subsistence level, that at which survival is just barely possible. Can’t remember what it’s called. It gets around the whole problem with comparing currencies and purchasing power from one period to another, which are huge.
But I’ve only ever seen it used for ancient and medieval societies, even though it’s obviously fully applicable to today’s societies. I suspect the reason it isn’t used today is that it would make even the poorest in a modern society look pretty well off by comparison with the past.
No doubt.
The question is how many people did the system she runs displace? I seriously doubt it is only one, as if so the company would have no incentive to make the capital investment in the equipment.
Extrapolate this out over the entire economy and you have exactly what I'm talking about. Increased demand for those who function effectively with the new equipment, and greatly reduced demand for those who can't or won't.
I find the discussion of these issues interesting.
Liberals immediately fall back on their normal position, the answer is government intervention and regulation.
Conservatives, as can be seen by this thread, equally automatically jump to the conclusion that reduced government intervention and the free market will solve the problem. Obviously, I prefer this approach and hope they're right.
But what if neither approach will solve the problem??
What do we do then?
There is also the Flynn Effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
overall societal IQ increases over time, about 3 points per decade.
That is on of the ongoing developments in the economy, I don't we will ever see bubble type unemployment rates again.
High 'unemployment' will be the norm. Not everyone can code and be a engineer. Enjoy the wage arbitrage!
True. And nobody has a clue why. It seems to hold across most societies.
Your chart 1 shows pretty clearly that the increase in recent years is not a straight line progression. The rate of increase is itself increasing.
Which has enormous implications for the future.
It will be all about the energy needed to power the robots, and in wartime, all you have to do is disable the energy source, then you are truly screwed. Nobody will know how to do anything by hand anymore, and very quickly things will return to a medieval existence.
My own speculation is that improved pre-natal and childhood nutrition has an effect.
Also migration from rural to urban has a stimulating effect.
Whether those gains can be sustained over the long term is open to question.
1. A modern nation's contraception/abortion policies have a way of culling the ranks of its less intelligent cohorts.
2. The proportion of mentally retarded people in a modern society tends to diminish over time, due to medical advances and selective abortion.
Item #2 is an interesting one, for the results seem to be clear in some "high-intelligence" nations like Japan. I don't think I've ever seen a mentally retarded Asian in my life.
Unfortunately, you are flat wrong.
In modern societies, less-successful members of society invariably have a MUCH higher birth rate than more successful members.
The abortion/infanticide of the truly retarded may indeed reduce their numbers as a percentage of the total, but then they’re not really the problem, as they’ve always been a small percentage. The left end of the bell curve.
The problems at present is the “dull normal,” say 80 to 90 on the IQ scale, of whom there are about the same number as the “bright normal,” or 110 to 120. There are a large number of these people. And they’re mostly those who are reproducing. IOW, they are “the fittest” in Darwinian terms despite not being fit at all in an economic sense.
There is little demand (in the economic sense of the term) for the dull normal in our economy, and the IQ level for which there is no demand continues to creep upwards yearly.
I don't disagree with that, and that doesn't contradict what I've posted here. My point is that the decline in birthrate for one group as a percentage of its prior birthrate is actually higher than it is for the other group.
Look at black Americans, for example. They represent something like 12% of the U.S. population but account for more than a third of all documented abortions. At 35 million abortions since 1973, we've basically eradicated 10-15 million black people who now don't show up in any of our statistical analyses of IQ, living standards, criminal records, etc.
What do you think the collective IQ of the U.S. would be if all of these people were alive today? I don't know the answer, but I suspect my previous post is applicable to this.
With higher quality...
I wonder if a robot could replace my dentist.
.....how many people did the system she runs displace.....
None. The facility is new, the products are new
Ahh, I see your point and agree as far as it goes.
However, I suggest that when we combine my point and yours, we’ll find that the net effect is that they account for a somewhat reduced rate of decline in IQ.
Not a gradual increase, which is what the Flynn Effect shows.
Much of this labor can be consumed into caring for the graying population.
I don’t think you get my point.
Absent the investment in the new equipment, the parts she is now making would have been made either by an older plant or by a new plant using older technology. In either case she and the equipment she operates displaces those who would otherwise have done the work.
This is similar to those who claim “Walmart creates jobs.”
Well, no, mostly it doesn’t. When Walmart moves into a community and hires 500 people, there are not 500 more people employed in retail sales. There simply can’t be, because the net amount of retail sales in the community remains the same. In fact, given Walmart’s lower prices, the total sold may go down slightly.
Since Walmart is more efficient in its use of labor, the 500 jobs it “creates” are more than counter-balanced by a net loss by other retailers of more than the 500 jobs. I’m leaving out, obviously, the possibility of creation of other jobs by the money saved by the lower WM prices.
I am, of course, discussing net jobs in a sector, not individual jobs by company or worker.
Older is obsolete and therefore not really germain.
We live in the present and must either adjust or cease to exist. Walmart is the application of technology and thought to retailing and by force of competition eliminated a complete evolved system of distribution and sales that is no longer needed.
The fundamental basis is not jobs, but profit. Companies exist to make money. Companies hire workers, provide jobs if you will, because brains and sweat are required to make a profit.
The fact that the number of jobs might decline as the result of applied technology and of applied thought may create unemployment. It should be noted that prior to Obama we were operating at beyond full employment to the point it was necessary to import workers and many of them were illegal. This event happened simultaneously with the technical revolution eliminating jobs.
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