
US auto industry installed 135K robots and added 230K jobs - spacey2
http://robohub.org/us-auto-industry-installed-135000-robots-and-added-230000-jobs/
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bobjordan
I can definitely confirm that robots are even replacing low-wage workers here
in Guangdong Province area of China, especially in these dirty manual labor
jobs that nobody likes to do anyway, like part painting production lines and
surface grinding and polishing for die-cast parts. The local provincial
government is actually encouraging this and has tax credits in place for
companies that are automating in these somewhat-dirty factories, like the
grinding-polishing factories. The factory owner of our primary die-casting
partner even pitched me to invest in starting another company making these
industrial robots. There is going to be a lot of low cost but capable robots
coming in the next few years.

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mistermann
If China comes up with a reasonably "correct" way to navigate this transition
to sophisticated automated manufacturing, they should be able to easily
leapfrog the US because their political structure doesn't have to go through
the more difficult problem of negotiating between affected parties. Western
countries would have to politically argue for multiple years before making the
smallest change.

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BatFastard
It just has the issue of hundreds of millions of unemployed workers, a big
issue then it is in the U.S. since it has been going thru this same issue for
20 years. In China it will happen much faster.

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tonyedgecombe
"In the last six years, (2010–2015), according to the IFR (International
Federation of Robotics), US industry has installed around 135,000 new
industrial robots. The principal driver is automation in the car industry.
During this same period, (2010–2015), the number of employees in the
automotive sector increased by 230,000."

Correlation isn't causation.

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jgalt212
perhaps not, but the more automated a factory is the less the labor costs
matter to the whole. For this reason, I think automation is the key to
bringing back manufacturing and manufacturing jobs to the US.

Not that total war, of a conventional nature, is likely to repeat itself, but
the US won WWII largely on the back of its unparalleled manufacturing
capabilities.

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wheelerwj
The US won world war 2 because the British gave us a shit ton of IP, which we
then built in our factories, which weren't being bombed to shit like the rest
of Europe, because of two gigantic oceans separating us from war.

To repeat the poster above you, correlation doesn't equal causation.

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rm999
You're right that the fact that US factories weren't being bombed was
critical, but it's important not to underestimate the scale here. The USA was
a world powerhouse before wwii, with a higher gdp than all axis countries
combined. Switching to a high-throughput wartime manufacturing powerhouse was
straightforward.

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wheelerwj
I understand we produced a TON of stuff, and I don't mean to belittle it, but
to credit the success of the war on our ability to manufacture is an
oversimplification of the actual events.

Of course we had more stable manufacturing post world war 1, where we took
only 10% of the losses of the other developed nations, and 2% of the worlds
population was wiped out. It's not surprising that a country who lost only
0.13% of its people was able to move faster and build more stuff than a
country who lost 13% of its total population.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties)

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petra
Ah Great!. so they created 230K jobs between 2010-2015. but: there was a ~200K
jobs loss during the 2008 recession. So only 30K additional jobs between say
2010-2015.

How do robots enter the picture ? Hard to tell from the data.

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fshean
Actually according to the US Bureau of Labor there were 340,000 jobs lost in
the auto industry from 2007 to 2009. So it's actually a net loss of 110,000.

[http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/04/art5full.pdf](http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/04/art5full.pdf)

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jazzyk
Also, some of the recent gains were driven by an unsustainable subprime auto
loans - another mini-bubble about to burst.

[http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/09/30/losses-jump-for-
su...](http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/09/30/losses-jump-for-subprime-
auto-loans/)

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nanogal
Key issue is that a lot of the discussions about robots (the hardware kind)
and jobs are not based on numbers and facts. I think we need more data - this
is a start.

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samfisher83
The economy has gotten better. The price of oil has greatly dropped which has
improved car sales. That could be the reason too. We really need to do some
regression analysis to figure out what is the reason for the increase.

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visarga
US gained 230K jobs and 135K robots, other countries probably lost 1 million
jobs to compensate. Automation goes full speed ahead, but what about sharing
in the benefits?

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aaron695
Yes I suspect this too.

Look at a small part, in a small area and you see positive.

A lot of things are moving back home because of automation, devastating some
countries.

Garment workers are about to be fucked. Robots are getting cheaper than cheap
labour. So why not process it next door to the subsidized cotton.

But even from a selfish point of view, things currently at home are also going
to be devastated.

One industries small renaissance at home is probably coupled with another's
larger destruction.

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madengr
I'm wondering why garment production wasn't automated years ago.

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kasey_junk
Lots of it is, but a big driver for why automating garment work being more
costly than other kinds of automation is soft things, like cloth, are harder
to deal with consistently than hard things like metal.

It folds and distorts in shape in much less normal patterns, requiring more
sophisticated algorithms.

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ousta
did it create blue collar jobs or only white collars?

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bluedino
Can't possibly be 230k blue collar jobs. GM and Ford both employ about 50,000
hourly workers each in the USA, with FCA coming in around 30,000.

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madengr
So why did it decrease in 2015 for auto robots?

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deebeeoh
At a time when automation is under fire for decimating employment, we get a
report that implies robots = jobs.

Moving on from this waste of time...

