
Coronavirus may mean automation is coming sooner than we thought - airstrike
https://liwaiwai.com/2020/04/21/coronavirus-may-mean-automation-is-coming-sooner-than-we-thought/
======
noelsusman
I think most of the predictions about permanent changes caused by the virus
will turn out to be wildly wrong. Companies will view this as a rare event
that's not worth spending significant resources to prepare for. The march
toward more automation will press on just as it did before the virus, governed
largely by the price of labor vs. the price of automation.

~~~
uses
From what I've seen the thinking about permanent change is more that, massive
changes are being made now, and inertia will mean those changes will stay in
place, because they'll actually turn out to be better anyway. It's just that
the cost of implementing or even considering those changes was too high
before, but it's necessary now.

~~~
WorldMaker
I think a lot of that is going to depend on the types of investors left in the
stock market and the types of Highly Paid Consultants that Sell Their Vision
after all of this.

At the moment it seems equally likely that some companies come out of all of
this with the "lesson" that remote work caused their downturn in productivity
and stock value (who can remember that every other company experienced the
same when your investors only care "what have you done lately?" and "what have
you done 'proactively'?") and we'll quickly see a return to "everybody needs
to be in the office together" culture back backed by the same consultants that
learned the wrong lessons after Marissa Mayer's Yahoo! house cleaning and were
still badly ratcheting companies towards as miserable as possible colocation
strategies.

It seems about 50/50 to me right now which group will prevail. At least with
US public traded companies the only inertia seems to whatever shiny fad stock
traders are enamored with versus whatever misery HPCs manage to sell on golf
courses in C-Suite handshakes. (ETA: Some of whom, the worst stock investors
and HPCs are the same people, of course.)

~~~
perl4ever
Well predicting _some companies_ will do something can't be wrong.

But working from home will expose a lot of stuff that _can_ be done from home,
a lot of employees who turn out to _prefer_ working from home, and a lot of
CEOs and accountants and so on will realize a lot of money can be saved on
real estate. People are being quoted in the news along these lines, you don't
have to anticipate it.

~~~
anpago
Agreed but it will also expose many who simply can't work at home also.

I am a advocate for working from home. But I know plenty of people and roles
who are suffering a great deal from working from home.

------
airstrike
My take on this whole offshoring / automation conundrum is that although the
current crisis won't immediately constitute a boon for automation, it will
certainly pose the question in countless boardroom meetings. It's a question
that's been asked before, but it's never been as top-of-mind as it is now, and
that's first step to get the human and capital resources behind it to actually
see this come to fruition.

From what I've heard in the manufacturing industry, automation is great
conceptually but there are still many finer motor tasks for which the
technology just isn't there yet, so cheap labor is the solution. Perhaps in
hindsight these managers will find that concentrating all of that cheap labor
in pretty much just one geography (China) isn't exactly the definition of
redundancy, so supply chains in the long term will need to be redefined.

Slowly, geographies like Vietnam, Mexico, India and even the U.S. should
benefit from this desire to diversify away from China. This "next generation"
of factories will be smarter and pave the way for more advanced automation
involving finer motor tasks.

> "The demand for smart factories is likely to grow with increased
> diversification of production locations – from China to Vietnam, India, and
> even the US." _(Morgan Stanley Research. Investing in the Second Machine Age
> – Picking the Winners. July 19, 2019)_

~~~
nradov
Most likely supply chain managers will establish "second source" policies,
just like the US Defense Department has always done for many products. They
won't necessarily move away from China entirely, but will build factories in
other countries as well.

~~~
bilbo0s
Yeah, this crisis has illustrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that you need
second-, third-, fourth- sources if you can. Especially for critical goods.
Moving to Vietnam doesn't do anything to solve the fundamental problem. It may
not even make sense to build a second- source in vietnam. You want geographic
and, to the extent that it's possible, population isolation.

So finding someplace along one of South America's coasts would be attractive.
Australia would be extremely attractive if we could get automation right
because labor costs there are just too high. Africa would also be attractive
in the extreme. You wouldn't even have to take the resources off of the
continent. Lowest labor costs around. Plus, two enormous coasts full of warm
water ports.

Anyway, the idea would be to set things up so that if one region goes to the
dogs, you just switch to the other.

EDIT: Now I think about it, there are some pretty large political issues in
africa right now, so maybe africa wouldn't be the best place. Populism could
easily end up landing you in the same situation as white farmers in Zimbabwe.
Anyway, the fundamental idea still stands. Balance manufacturing from Asia and
N America more towards S America, and Australia.

------
hpoe
As soon as this thing hit this was one of my first thoughts, once things
recover there are going to be a lot of companies looking for ways to automate
things because robots don't get sick, they don't have to worry about social
distancing they keep going until you tell them to stop or the power gets cut.

I do wonder however if this effect will be hampered by the number of
unemployed. More unemployed people means a greater supply of laborers and that
translates to lower costs.

Of course on the flip side it may be that many companies are starting to see
what is actually necessary for their company to operate and will run with a
leaner staff moving forward.

The future will be wild that's for sure.

EDIT: When I say "translates to lower costs" I mean lower costs for labor,
realized what I said could be ambiguous.

~~~
baron_harkonnen
The flip side is really the question: Where does the money come from to buy
the things produced by the robots if people are no longer being paid to
produce things?

If you answer something like UBI, then you're just passing the buck and the
obvious question is, "where does that money come from?"

This problem is secretly baked into the structure of the current crisis. More
automation is inevitable, I'm not arguing about that, but it will only
exacerbate the problem.

~~~
FeepingCreature
The money is minted, which is to say printed, by the central bank. That is
where the money comes from. That is where all money comes from.

~~~
airstrike
That's not where the _value_ of money comes from, though

~~~
mikepurvis
But there isn't much value in people spending their lives driving delivery
cars or bagging groceries either.

The point of UBI proposals is that there _is_ enough total value in our
national economies to meet everyone's basic needs— the question of where the
money/value "comes from" is simple, it comes from taking it back from where
it's been concentrated over decades of inadequate taxation.

~~~
vorpalhex
You're conflating financial value with moral value. There's a lot of financial
value in delivery or bagging even if there's no moral value.

Printing money doesn't increase financial value it only increases liquidity.

> it comes from taking it back from where it's been concentrated over decades
> of inadequate taxation.

Again you're not increasing the financial value, you're changing how it's
disbursed. Whether your fuel is in the form of gasoline or electricity you
still have a finite amount of it and once you burn through it, it's gone
unless you're adding more to the system.

~~~
mrec
Could you expand on what you mean by "moral value" here? Something like job
satisfaction, self-actualization etc?

"Moral" as a descriptor seems likely to derail the argument here. There's
nothing immoral about delivering groceries; it's providing a genuinely useful
service, and _can_ be intrinsically rewarding as evidenced by the hundreds of
thousands of people volunteering to do it for free in the UK at the moment.

~~~
vorpalhex
I am responding to the parent's line:

> But there isn't much value in people spending their lives driving delivery
> cars or bagging groceries either.

The parent is conflating different meanings for the word "value". The
grandparent is talking economic value, eg receiving money for labor. Clearly
there is economic value for delivery services since I'm happy to pay them and
their drivers do infact get paid.

Therefore the parent must intend a different meaning of value. The most likely
meaning (that makes sense in this context) is moral value. There may be great
moral value in being a doctor for instance - saving the lives of others.

I am not saying that it is the case that there exists no moral value in
delivery jobs or grocery. I am saying that even if it were the case that those
jobs have no moral value they still have economic value.

(I would argue all work well done has moral value, but that's irrelevant)

~~~
mikepurvis
I do mean economic value— the jobs _literally don 't pay very much_, mostly
because there's a sizable pool of people willing to do them because they lack
alternatives.

In a UBI world where those people weren't working to avoid starvation and
homelessness, it's likely that much of this bottom-tier work would start to
look more like the kind of job a middle class teenager does while living with
their parents— they're not there to survive, they're there to earn
supplementary cash for a video game or prom dress. I'd expect then that:

\- Employers would experience some frustration with the flakiness of non-
desperate personnel, and would be willing to pay at least something of a
premium for labour that sticks around.

\- That premium and the promise of even greater reliability gains would lead
to increased automation pressure at the bottom end.

\- Poor people who used to work themselves to the bone just surviving (eg,
Stephanie Land) actually have the time to take training programs and ready
themselves for higher-value work.

~~~
greedo
<\- Employers would experience some frustration with the flakiness of non-
desperate personnel, and would be willing to pay at least something of a
premium for labour that sticks around.>

That labor cost premium would have to be reflected in higher prices. I'm not
paying a premium for marginal items. That's the whole definition of premium...

<\- Poor people who used to work themselves to the bone just surviving (eg,
Stephanie Land) actually have the time to take training programs and ready
themselves for higher-value work.>

Not everyone is cut out for higher-value work, and the amount of higher-value
work is also limited. Rembember Carlin's Axiom [1]

The reason these jobs don't pay very much isn't just because there's a large
pool of people willing to take them. In fact, many menial job positions have a
hard time being staffed because the labor pool is not big. The reason they pay
poorly is because they have low economic value. They add little marginal value
to a product or service.

For example, if I want a hamburger, I can cook one at home for approximately
$1.50. A nice bun, 1/4lb of fresh meat, some condiments. If I get a Quarter
Pounder from McDonalds, it's around $4. So I normally only buy one for
convenience; when I'm too far from home, or too tired to cook. Now if that
ends up $8, then I'll cook one at home every time I want one.

[1]George Carlin — 'Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize
half of them are stupider than that.'

~~~
mikepurvis
> I'm not paying a premium for marginal items.

Conflict diamonds and non fair trade coffee are also cheaper than what
replaced them. Obviously these kinds of ethical externalities exist on a
scale, but the point is that it's more complicated than just arbitrarily
declaring an item or class of labour as "marginal" and moving on.

> Not everyone is cut out for higher-value work...

The snide value judgment aside, lots of artists/writers/musicians/etc
begrudgingly participate in the "low value labour" market as a means of
staying afloat while they pursue their real passion on the side. Isn't all of
this just a further argument for taking on as a society the obligation to meet
people's basic needs? Do we really need to hold people's livelihoods hostage
just so that upper middle class software professionals can still get a $4
hamburger whenever they want it?

~~~
vorpalhex
It's not the middle class that needs the $4 hamburger. They're going to get
overpriced cocktails and three course meal deals at a sit down experience.

And yes quite a few people want to be artists or musicians and can't. They
should be able to try but also at some point we need a mechanism for them to
realize they may need to try a different career path if it's not working out
and they aren't creating value.

With UBI, you're just making a subset of the population pay for everyone else.
Sometimes that tradeoff makes sense - food stamps - but when you end up just
increasing inflation and hurting those who it's meant to benefit then it seems
like tail chasing.

------
lostapathy
Worth noting that a lot of niche industries only work today because we have
better automation to support oddball things that aren't truly "mass produced."
More and better automation will enable even more of these segments to exist.

Mechanical keyboards are a good example. There's a wide variety of plates,
cases, and circuit boards available today that would be infeasible to make by
hand, and were not cost effective to make just a few years ago. But here we
are today with an appreciable hobby and market that wouldn't exist if not for
improvements in manufacturing efficiency.

------
lnsru
The automation is here and is used everywhere right now if it makes
economically sense. Good overview of the pricing here:
[https://blog.robotiq.com/what-is-the-price-of-
collaborative-...](https://blog.robotiq.com/what-is-the-price-of-
collaborative-robots) Basic robot $50k, advanced application - $100k. One can
hire lots of workers for the money. Especially during recession.

~~~
m_ke
People are working on cheaper arms and we should soon have ones for under
$10K. Ex: Pieter Abbeel from UC Berkeley
[https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/04/09/meet-blue-the-low-
cost-...](https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/04/09/meet-blue-the-low-cost-human-
friendly-robot-designed-for-ai/)

[https://github.com/berkeleyopenarms](https://github.com/berkeleyopenarms)

~~~
ipsum2
I don't believe the github has the STL files or instructions on how to
actually make the robot, just the API and simulations are open source.

~~~
m_ke
Abbeel's new robotics company might be working on commercializing that
prototype ([https://covariant.ai/](https://covariant.ai/)).

I remember him mentioning the project in his robotics class, found it:
[https://youtu.be/xWPViQ6LI-Q?t=4075](https://youtu.be/xWPViQ6LI-Q?t=4075) he
claims it will be around $5,000

~~~
ipsum2
That's disappointing, it would be nice to see a true open source robot arm. I
believe Covariant is separate from the Blue robot arm though.

~~~
botwriter
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfJn7T4D-6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfJn7T4D-6k)

Maybe of interest

------
jellicle
> Automation coming sooner

I'd predict the opposite. The world will shortly have an international
depression, and to the extent that businesses are allowed to be open, there
will be 1000 applicants for every position. Wages will collapse. Demand for
products generally will be low, dampened by the fact that a huge number of
possible buyers are flat broke.

Those are conditions to retard the growth of automation, not increase it.
You're going to spend a zillion dollars automating to produce a product people
can't afford to buy while there are thousands of people outside your factory
saying "we want to make your shit by hand for nearly free"?

Next couple of years will be a LOW time for automation, not a high time.
(Which doesn't mean zero, obviously certain products are still going to be
produced by increasingly cheap automated processes.) But some big surge in the
rate of automation? No way.

------
drawkbox
We've already had massive automation events, the computer, the internet,
mobile, self-checkout, etc. Everytime these steps made life better mostly, and
more automated or at least allowed most people to be more independent.

The last mile of automation is costly, where the first ones were money savers.

Building physical robots and tuning them, maintenance, cleaning, updates,
security, new versions etc etc.

This last phase of robots, drones and self-driving vehicles will take a long
time to get right and it is much more costly to enter it. The speed of
innovation also makes it quickly out of date when you do commit to it.

The automation remaining involves mostly hardware which is more costly, the
initial ones were software that saved lots of money and wasted time.

------
cronix
I've thought about this too. A lot of businesses will come back to the US from
China. They'll likely be building new state of the art plants. Automation tech
has become quite abundant in the recent years. I mean, hobbyists are making
industrial-ish robot arms with arduino/rpi's for under $2k. The programming is
becoming much simpler as well using encoders and physically moving the robot
and having it record the moves instead of coding it all from scratch. Here's
one I've been looking at building:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfJn7T4D-6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfJn7T4D-6k)

~~~
ghastmaster
Production is not going to come back to the United States when we have
draconian labor laws. That is the reason it left in the first place. We are
going to be more dependent on foreign cheap labor as time goes on. We cannot
weaken our currency and tighten our labor laws and expect investment in
manufacturing at the same time.

~~~
tialaramex
"Draconian labor laws" make no difference if you don't have any labor. That's
key to grasping how different heavy automation makes things. Additional
overhead of (let's pick a nice round guess) $5000 per worker adds up fast in a
factory with 500 workers ($2.5M). But when you're only paying a maintenance
technician and a security guard it's ten grand, and there are a lot of things
a business might reasonably choose to do that cost ten grand without
flinching.

~~~
ghastmaster
My point is that the US industry has no compelling reason to invest in
automation when foreign labor is so cheap. It is cheap because labor here is
expensive. It is expensive because of regulatory and statutory intervention.
You are correct that we do not have any labor(somewhat hyperbolic of course).
I understand why in some cases automation makes total sense on the micro and
macro level. Are you trying to say that because it is expensive to employ
labor here automation will fill in the gap? If so, why? Labor is cheap in
other regions and money is getting tighter as we speak. Automation requires
heavy upfront costs.

~~~
tialaramex
You're 100% right so long as disease pandemics and other disruptive events are
discounted.

And I think in a board room in 2019 you could do that, you could say it makes
no sense to hedge against a disease pandemic, those never happen. It makes no
sense to optimise for locality when we can get cheap labour on the far side of
the globe and disruption won't happen.

But the trouble is that when you make that presentation in 2021 every single
person in the room knows it isn't true, they all lived through this, they saw
it themselves.

Usually the next argument is the one you already brought up - but labour costs
in the US are too high. But a robot factory doesn't incur labour costs as I
explained.

~~~
ghastmaster
With the global lockdowns in place, you would have to consider the hedge. That
is the point of the article and your point. There will certainly be companies
that move toward automation. I wonder whether the moves toward automation at
the micro level are offset by the lack of growth in the macro. Is it a wash?
For how long? These are questions that we will find out.

------
zerotolerance
I have taken almost the opposite insight away from this whole ordeal.
Automation is inelastic. Retooling is expensive and slow. It depends on lots
of upstream suppliers having elastic production. Humans are on the opposite
end of the spectrum. They're great for on-demand additional capacity at a
cost.

------
Zenst
Certainly seems like an automated stream of Coronavirus riding agenda's.

Anything that has "Coming soon" or "Than we thought" always triggers a level
of credibility erosion in me, this just went full on.

Thing is with automation, what do you do with all those excess humans who are
no longer needed to work as I do recall the 70's champion the future would see
us all spend most of our time on leasure and 3 day working weeks. Seems a case
of some people end up working 6-7 day weeks and others none.

But automation has been on it's way for so long, it's not an overnight shift,
but a gradual one. Then the net result is never what is expected. Heck other
day people read abour Rumba and how ealy models failed sooner as people was
using them daily instead of weekly as previously. So the time saved in one
area of interacting with cleaning shifted to another of almost gamified
interaction, marking out area's, playing with it and stats. So whilst some
automation can do wonders, it can often shift the problem into something else
and still not save overall.

------
ChefboyOG
I don't fully understand the arguments in these kinds of pieces. Haven't
businesses always been economically incentivized to automate everything,
because that's just how labor costs work?

It seems implausible to me that the bottleneck to mass automation (or rather,
more widespread automation) is the willingness of corporations to invest in
it. The more feasible blockers—the fundamental technology even existing, the
cost of research/production, etc—don't seem correlated to Coronavirus.

~~~
ashtonkem
Surprisingly, no.

When companies are making easy money, there is very little incentive to
improve efficiency, and a lot of incentive to continue the status quo. It’s
only during tight times do companies actually begin to seek out new
efficiencies.

Example: automated oil rig machines have existed for quite a while, but they
really didn’t see a lot of usage until the oil crash in 2016[0]. After this
crash the number of oil rig workers remained at low levels, even as oil rigs
starting to produce again. Those jobs were already vulnerable to automation,
it just took a financial crisis to trigger it.

[0] [https://medium.com/basic-income/the-real-story-of-
automation...](https://medium.com/basic-income/the-real-story-of-automation-
beginning-with-one-simple-chart-8b95f9bad71b)

~~~
ChefboyOG
That's fascinating, and makes sense. I didn't think of it until you brought it
up, but the risk/reward of investing in automation vs. maintaining current
margins certainly flips when current margins plummet.

------
anpago
There will be many Covid survivors with lung damage who once the air pollution
starts to increase find they struggle badly. In fact many of us may struggle
if as predicted levels dramatically and quickly increase as lockdowns are
lifted.

Plenty of us may also struggle with the noise pollution also.

There will be a massive push for clean air and possibly a more quieter world.

------
xster
This was all exactly what Yang was running on. His campaign must be fairly
bummed to have not stayed on message and instead making the various faux pas
with is supporters such as endorsing Biden and saying Asian Americans must be
more American in face of discrimination.

------
noarchy
I can't be the only one who has noticed the huge influx of articles and
comments for UBI in places like reddit and even HN, of late. It seems that the
ongoing crisis is fuelling a lot of agendas.

~~~
symplee
Come on, you know the routine. No matter what your cause is: Never let a
crisis go to waste.

~~~
Slippery_John
If a crisis exposes a weakness in a system and you're making a good faith
suggestion is that really a bad thing?

The US government's attempts to keep people afloat have pretty clear major
issues, for instance. Is it really a bad thing to suggest that we should have
a system in place to handle these sorts of events, even on smaller scales,
rather than trying to rush something out when every day counts? I'm not
arguing for UBI per se, but if somebody thinks it's the right solution then is
it a bad thing to argue for it when an example of its usefulness is fresh in
everybody's mind?

Obviously there are plenty of bad faith suggestions going around too, but I
can't help but think platitudes like this do more to shutdown good ideas than
bad.

~~~
noarchy
Stimulus cheques handed out at an actual time of crisis is not the same thing
as an unending flow of such cheques during times of low unemployment and
economic stability. I think that distinction is being lost in this discussion.

A lot of people who are in favour of some kind of intervention right _now_
aren't necessarily going to want to turn this permanent.

~~~
mschuster91
> Stimulus cheques handed out at an actual time of crisis is not the same
> thing as an unending flow of such cheques during times of low unemployment
> and economic stability.

A regular flow of such cheques compared to crisis stimulus cheques has a
couple of advantages though:

\- you don't have any ramp-up time, not even if you decide to up the amount in
crisis time, as the system already exists

\- you don't need to coordinate with multiple levels of governments,
insurances, ... to hand out the checks

\- regular UBI could offset/replace many struggling programs, from food
assistance over child support to other financial aid, thus leading to less
overhead costs

~~~
SuoDuanDao
Most importantly, they provide a level of economic stability to the working
poor that wouldn't happen with emergency measures.

~~~
mschuster91
... which is probably the reason so many wealthy-ish are against UBI. A lot of
jobs would have to be paid their actual worth and in improved conditions
(farming, nurses, education, trash/sewage, "nannies", cleaning, meatpacking)
if those working the jobs would do it out of passion instead out of the need
to survive.

An awful lot of the wealth in Western states is based on this exploitation.

------
ck2
All I know is self-driving cars are going to be killing a lot of passengers
and pedestrians when corporations and programmers now get government liability
waivers, rush out the project and just say "oops" when the spot the bug in the
code.

I mean who goes to prison when a car runs someone over and no-one is driving?
What is a developer's motivation to be careful and defer to safety? We've
already proven a good chunk of the population are sociopaths, they don't care
who dies as long as they get their paycheck.

~~~
steveeq1
And what if the self-driving cars end up causing fewer deaths than human
drivers?

~~~
perl4ever
If you assume something will automatically happen, without a particular
mechanism, how likely is it to?

Seems to me that is a popular cargo cult few are immune to.

~~~
carlmr
>If you assume something will automatically happen, without a particular
mechanism

He didn't mention it, but there are some pretty obvious mechanisms for this to
be true:

1\. Automated drivers don't get tired.

2\. Automated drivers may "see" more of their environment than a human can.
Human sensors aren't upgradeable.

3\. Automated drivers don't get drunk.

4\. Automated drivers don't have emotions.

5\. Automated drivers aren't distracted by the infotainment system, the
children in the back seat, or even some thought about what just happened at
work.

6\. With time, automated drivers can be improved, while human weaknesses stay
constant.

There are of course drawbacks:

1\. Humans have intuition about situations they've never been in. Most
AI/machine learning still generalizes poorly.

2\. The programming may be buggy.

3\. The datasets may be inadequate.

So what will happen is definitely out there, but there are clear mechanisms
for this to happen.

~~~
perl4ever
A list of possible advantages is not what I mean by "a mechanism". It's very,
very much not. I'm not saying I disagree with anything in particular that you
listed, but you can list any number of things and it simply doesn't even
assert what those things sum up to.

------
ghastmaster
Automation requires investment. Recession means less capital for investment.
The estimate of $12 dollar meal implies that people would be spending the time
they use to cook the meal to work instead. That is idealistic. People
generally do not work every waking moment of their lives.

As we get to the bottom of the article we find the real point is to push UBI.
When money is created and given to people who do not work, that money becomes
worthless. What manufacturer is going to invest in robots to create products
for people who have monopoly money?

