
UN Report: Robots Will Replace Two-Thirds of All Workers in the Developing World - elberto34
https://futurism.com/un-report-robots-will-replace-two-thirds-of-all-workers-in-the-developing-world/
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contingencies
That's timely.

I just had a discussion with the taxi driver on the way to the airport here in
southwest China about education. He seemed to be suggesting that, given I
spoke Mandarin and English, I would be well-regarded as a teacher. I had to
explain that the type of thing I do is not really available in the syllabus of
universities or schools in China, and that while I'd investigated opening one
the government policy made it a prohibitively difficult and unstable
proposition to run a non-standard syllabus. I arrived at the airport, and had
a 10 minute wait to get in the door, because people were employed to manually
wave an explosives-detection wand over everyone's bag. Entering the main hall,
the flights display did not have my flight listed. I asked a nearby shiny
sash-wearing airport employee what was up. She directed me to the right place
immediately. Evidently, nobody had bothered to update the computer.

The manual-only (despite the zero luggage encouraged nature of the airline)
check-in wasn't yet opened, so I went up to the F&B level, where I met some
Nepalis en-route back to Kathmandu from studying computing in Korea who needed
to change money to eat and couldn't, because the manual change bureaus weren't
open. I then had a ridiculously bad meal ordered from a place where the lights
were only half functional where neither the table nor environment were
properly cleaned. During the meal, manual cleaners and their trolleys wafted
about the dining area without urgency. After the meal I opened my laptop and
had to go through a dated SMS code-sending procedure to get on the airport
wifi.

Robots and automation would have improved the experience on so many levels,
but I don't want the world to turn in to a shiny fascist utopia like
Singapore. I'm literally on the way to the Pearl River Delta (Hong
Kong/Shenzhen) on a project to build food-making robots - [http://infinite-
food.com/](http://infinite-food.com/) \- but the human question is a strong
one and it unsettles me. In a wholly automated future, where is the sense of
worth going to come from for the average citizen? Where does it come from now?

Somehow, after witnessing the miracle of transformation that is modern China
(I've spent most of my adult life here), I can only believe that the human
spirit will find a way, at least in this society. After all, on the grand
scale of things, if we're all fed, clothed, housed, but simply bored... it's
not a bad problem to have: onward to robotic noodles!

~~~
mc32
In some ways Japan may be addressing their demographic challenges in a way
that works for Japan. For years the west (businesses, academia, think thanks)
has tried to convince Japan they needed to open immigration to address low
birth rates --however, given their aging population and the advances in
robotics and automation, their holding back the popular tide might make their
transition into automation easier as they are naturally drifting to an economy
which needs fewer people...

Much of the west would also have plateauing or decreasing populations if it
were not for the importation of foreign populations.

Even advanced economies will be unable to provide middle class lifestyles to
everyone if most people are not being productive in some way. We may just have
to get used to most people doing more with less. That might mean living
healthy but more frugal and less consumerist lives.

~~~
istorical
> Even advanced economies will be unable to provide middle class lifestyles to
> everyone if most people are not being productive in some way.

This doesn't really make sense to me.

If we look purely at the economy in terms of its inputs and outputs - in terms
of goods and services - we won't suddenly have less goods and services. We'll
have the same or more goods and services with lower costs (because robots will
be cheaper than people - otherwise we'd just employ people). So you have the
same end result (the goods and services) with less operating costs - seems to
me like if you don't change anything you'd either 1) see business owners
growing their share of wealth while the hordes of unemployed starve - or 2)
you'd increase taxes and increase welfare spending and things would net out
such that the average person's quality of life could be preserved.

Of course, if you're argument assumes that we're hurtling straight towards
option 1, then yeah that makes sense.

But it doesn't mathematically make sense to me that automation _has_ to mean
people become destitute.

------
glangdale
This is a bit of a capsule summary of better, longer pieces, and a bit
hyperbolic. The policy brief is better and is still an easy read:
[http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pd...](http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pdf)

The thing that always scares me reading any of those "X% of workers losing
their jobs to automation" stories is thinking about what proportion of the
(100-X)% of workers have jobs that (to a lesser or greater extent) depend on
the idea that the X% are employed and have surplus income to spend.

~~~
abiox
i think that's essentially how recession works. some job market or region
becomes outmoded or otherwise disadvantaged; the lack of wages means the
workers lack income to engage with other businesses, which are in turn
financially impacted, and so on, spiraling out.

~~~
glangdale
Exactly. The feeling of being in a 'house of cards' is never so strong as when
I'm around my own, rather hipster neighborhood - where you have a lot of
handsomely paid 'creatives' doing jobs that seem like the frothiest portion of
our current economy and spending their money on ridiculously priced burgers,
etc. These folks have jobs that are about as far as you could get from being
automated, but I would be very surprised to see any of them keep their jobs if
there was a nasty crunch.

------
ivanhoe
Robots can only reduce costs of the production, but to earn any money
corporations first need to be able to sell their products to someone, they
need consumers. And you can't have starving, homeless consumers. You need to
come up with some jobs so that majority of people still can earn money every
month, so that you can sell them things regularly and finance all those fancy
robots with a stable cash flow. Without that the whole economy as we know it
would break. Not to mention that there would be a revolution or something long
before that point. Transition, of course, will not be nice to many currently
poor and unskilled workers, they'll be victims of the progress and this will
continue for the few next generations for sure. But it's just a transition,
jobs will eventually shift to something new, as they did before.

~~~
Houshalter
Consumers aren't really necessary. The economy will just start to allocate
resources to the people that still have money to spend. Like the rich people
that own the robots, or the government. Think more yacht and tank factories.

~~~
vixen99
What a thought! No shopping malls, no supermarkets, no consumer product
companies, no mass transport, no advertising (so no Google or FB etc.,) and so
on. Numbers of the rich will rapidly dwindle and those yachts might lack for
the odd amenity while the tank & robot factories risk being stuck for spare
parts. A logistics headache at the very least!

------
Jabanga
UN report authors don't understand economics.

If robots ever get cheap enough to replace sweatshop labor, that will mean a
substantial increase in the number of people in the developing world that will
be able to afford these robots. The same way smartphones were only found in
the developed world a decade ago, and now are owned by over two billion people
in the developing world, hundreds of millions of people in the developing
world will be able to afford robots if prices come down enough.

This will profoundly increase the number of businesses that people in the
developing world will be able to operate, and improve the quality of life of
the average person there.

------
PeterisP
The article casually mentions universal basic income (UBI) as a possible
solution, but it's not, at least not for _this_ issue.

It is plausible to implement UBI (assuming political will to do so, which is
debatable in most places) or some other wealth transfer solution in an
advanced, wealthy technological society, where you tax the mostly automated
production of goods and services to provide basic needs for all those people
who are not necessary for economic production; even as the math of UBI doesn't
IMHO really work out right now yet, it's plausible that it will in the coming
decades with growing automated productivity and all those people becoming
_actually_ economically unnecessary. Especially with the re-shoring discussed
in the article moving lots of production capacity back to developed countries,
reversing globalization and international integration, making them more self-
sufficient.

However, it seems quite implausible that this re-shoring will result in the
developed world funding an UBI for these two thirds of all workers in the
developing world. I don't see the political will being there for at _least_ a
generation if not much more - there will be painful debates about doing UBI
for _their own_ people, where in addition to moral imperative and nationalism
you also have a practical reason for the elites and producers to spend a small
fraction of their wealth for 'bread and circuses' to ensure local social
stability around their homes; but any proposals to do the same for the whole
world simply won't fly.

It seems far more believable that these countries will rather choose to invest
some resources in "building a wall", literally or metaphorically. Currently,
importing labor is economically useful for many developed countries for
demographic reasons; but as labor becomes useless, we can expect them to
follow their interests and restrict migration even as the desire for migration
grows.

------
jnordwick
Technology wlll replace 90% of All Workers in the US (mid. 1800s)

~~~
abiox
i think that the idea that new jobs will always be created is a bit faith-
based.

historical precedent tends to be relatively narrow, centered on the use of
human physical labor. traditionally this has reduced the demand for such, and
moved people into forms of work requiring some amount of thought and decision
making that was not (yet) automatable.

once automation begins aggressively competing with human thinking, decision
making and creative efforts... we'll be facing a distinctly new challenge.

~~~
astrange
Unless automation reduces the price of everything to free, we'll still have a
market economy with supply and demand. Human demand is infinite, so the same
forces that create jobs are still working.

If everything is free, then we're post-scarcity and work doesn't matter
anyway.

~~~
Houshalter
There's no law of economics that says the value of human labor can't fall.
When it falls below minimum wage you get unemployment.

Similarly, when horses became less valuable then the cost of feeding them,
they were taken to the glue factory.

~~~
astrange
It would be weird if human labor became worthless and that didn't lower the
cost of living, though. If it doesn't balance itself out there is some
automation owner out there capturing all the value, and we can just have them
shot as counterrevolutionaries.

~~~
abiox
> It would be weird if human labor became worthless and that didn't lower the
> cost of living, though

it's something that could very well happen in a depression and extensive
structural unemployment.

the problem with economic events is time. most simple models and equations
don't "balance out" instantaneously, so to speak, due to the temporal lag
between decisions and consequences.

as businesses pursue better quarterly profits and shiny year-over-year results
through automating the previously un-automatible and reducing the labor force,
they risk creating unemployment but not zero or near-zero cost goods.

the consequence of unemployment isn't felt immediately, which is why it can be
very hard to stop things from spiraling out of control. but at some point
purchasing power drops off, reducing sales... and on it goes.

at some point we might reach "free shit made and delivered by robots", but
there's a substantial, possible rather brutal gap between here and there.

------
Animats
Foxconn plans to replace most of their workers with robots in the next few
years. They already replaced 40,000 humans.

~~~
crdoconnor
Foxconn said they'd replace about a million workers around ~2007. They employ
more people now than they did back then.

Robots are a convenient villain.

~~~
Animats
But now they have a Foxbot that works. It took them three generations of
robots to get one that can do phone assembly, but they finally succeeded.

------
boznz
Since this is inevitable by most opinions the real question should be how do
we increase the number of jobs by 66%

~~~
Mao_Zedang
Service industry

------
Mao_Zedang
Triggering mass immigration.

~~~
abiox
which, of course, is the true tragedy in all of this.

