

No Humans, Just Robots – Amazing Videos of the Modern Factory - kkleiner
http://singularityhub.com/2010/02/11/no-humans-just-robots-amazing-videos-of-the-modern-factory/

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rauljara
Near the beginning of the 20th century, a lot of theorists predicted that our
increase in per worker productivity would leave a population with huge amounts
of leisure time. The average person would only have to work a couple of hours
a day for all of humanity's basic needs to be met. With robots, we may
eventually reach the point where people don't need to work at all in order to
meet humanity's basic needs. Unless something drastic happens to our economic
system, however, I seriously doubt it will translate into a shorter work day.

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philwelch
Someone still needs to build and maintain the robots. How we avoid turning
this into some sort of aristocracy is the interesting question.

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jared314
I think it is more probable for the mechanics to get pushed lower rather than
elevated to some higher status.

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RoboTeddy
Will there be jobs in 20 years for anyone with an IQ under 90?

Are we going to end up with vast structural unemployment?

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csmeder
This will create wealth. Wealth will mean that art, health and relaxation will
be in high demand.

100 years ago over 90% of people were farmers. Now 2% of people work on farms,
does that mean we have 88% unemployment?

.

No we don't. Instead we have Yoga instructors who charge $80 an hour for a
private lesson. We have artists who charge $500 for a hand made bowl.

.

The more we have robots automate the more wealth we will have, the more wealth
we have the the greater the number musicians, artists and yoga instructors we
will have.

.

Creating wealth doesn't destroy jobs long term, "A rising tide raises all
boats", however short term many people will be displaced and have no jobs
during the transition. (Short term could be many years).

.

In the long run this is better. Do you think UPS sorting employees would
rather be doing this
[http://www.core77.com/blog/technology/a_different_sort_of_as...](http://www.core77.com/blog/technology/a_different_sort_of_assembly_line_inside_a_ups_shipping_facility_15929.asp)
or creating art work?

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exit
But being a yoga instructor / bowl maker is just as (if not more) time
consuming as being a farmer used to be. And those are insecure jobs which
people have to struggle to make ends meet with.

~~~
Semiapies
Historically, farmers went hungry when harvests were poor.

How many yoga instructors, janitors, or receptionists starve in bad markets?

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thinkbohemian
Good collection of videos, though many corporations are finding that robots
are costly to purchase, install, and maintain and are very inflexible in their
tasks. People on the other hand are free to purchase, take no installation,
and maintain themselves (granted you still have to pay them). Most importantly
they are very flexible. You could give them a new task every day and they
would adapt. If you've ever toured a Toyota factory, you would be surprised by
the large amount of work not being done by machines.

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petercooper
I find that site hard to read whenever it gets linked here.. it just looks
like a badly done TechCrunch knock off. Distracting :-(

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dkimball
Wait just a second, didn't we have an article about the exact same thing, but
about how it was _worrisome_, not _amazing_, just two weeks ago?
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086492>)

What is this, Pravda?

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sailormoon
A day ago I made a comment here about how I wasn't sure that a large
population of available working-age people is the huge advantage everyone
seems to think it is anymore, and this is exactly the kind of thing I had in
mind. Look at that flexpicker video. Bet you didn't think a robot could stack
pancakes. Well baby, a robot can sure stack pancakes all right. How long
before it can flip burgers? I bet they already can and it's just a matter of
cost.

Wouldn't want to only have repetitive manual labor skills in about 10-15
years' time when these things drop in price to below $10k or so. Robots are
going to cut through the service and manufacturing sectors like a 2 megawatt
laser through room temperature butter.

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marshallp
It's not really a matter of cost of the robot, the limiting factor of more
widespread adoption is actually just that there aren't enough people building
automation systems (the robot and machine vision combination), a worker
shortage.

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ippisl
Building , as in assembling ? or building as designing those system ?

~~~
marshallp
integrating off the shelf robots, computers, machine vision software to create
a specific 'automation machine' for a specific production line

