
So, Where Are All Those Robots? - misnamed
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/so-where-are-all-those-robots/528666/?single_page=true
======
Suncho
Depending on our economic policies, there are a few different ways
automation's impact on labor can express itself. The key thing that automation
does is that it substitutes for labor thereby making labor less valuable.

If labor is less valuable, it doesn't have to mean fewer jobs. It doesn't even
have to mean fewer hours worked. It can just mean less money going to labor
(i.e. lower wages).

If our economy is operating below its productive capacity, which it is, then
our levels of production are constrained by how much people can spend. And if
consumers get their incomes from labor, then automation means consumers have
less spending money.

If consumer incomes are constrained by wages, you'd therefore expect our level
of production to decrease with increased levels of automation. And because
economic policies are keeping the hours worked high, you'd expect the amount
of production per man hour to decrease.

Hence...

 _" 1\. The U.S. economy is in a productivity recession."_

Furthermore, if firms need to keep production levels low in order to clear
markets, you'd expect that they wouldn't have much of a need to figure out
ways to boost production.

Hence...

 _" 2\. Companies don’t seem to be investing in technology nearly as much as
they used to."_

Technology and automation allow the use of resources to be more efficient. One
of those resources is labor. That means that in cases where we're actually
using labor for production -- instead of, you know, just as an excuse to give
people incomes -- we can get that labor really cheap.

 _" 3\. Globalization is a much bigger deal than automation for work and
wages."_

Globalization _is_ automation.

But because we're Americans and we believe in the American dream, we need to
force the labor market to provide incomes for hard-working Americans.
Naturally, since many jobs amount to little more than token busy-work, we
should then expect the labor market to become exceedingly boring and
uneventful. After all, these are just fake jobs propped up by economic policy.

Hence...

 _" 4\. The U.S. economy’s creative-destruction engine is broken."_

 _" This isn’t what the end of work was ever supposed to look like."_

Yes it is. This is exactly what it's supposed to look like.

~~~
vlehto
> The key thing that automation does is that it substitutes for labor thereby
> making labor less valuable.

I think you may have gotten this backwards.

If you replace four pipe bending guys with pipe bending robots and highly
trained maintenance mechanic, do you really think the highly trained mechanic
is going to get paid less than single pipe bending guy?

Automation should increase wages for those lucky enough to get employed.

>Globalization is automation.

Globalization predates automation by at least few centuries.

~~~
halomru
But if a pipe-bending machine has a total cost of ownership of $100 per
operating hour, your four pipe bending guys have a job as long as employing
them costs less than $25/h. Where before they might be able get a higher wage,
their wage is now capped and the cap is decreasing over time.

Of course there's other reasons to employ people (parent mentioned spending
power, I would add political influence to the list). But the labor part of the
employment decreases in value.

~~~
vlehto
If labor part decreases in absolute value, then the bikes too get cheaper in
healthy competition. So the net effect is just inflation.

Historically the period from inventing the assembly line to the large scale
deployment of factory floor robots is roughly from 1920 to 1990. The same time
period saw the highest wages/GDP ratio in US than ever before or ever since.

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xg15
> _For now, I think it’s hard to make the case that automation is even a
> tertiary concern for the 2017 labor market. But the next recession will tell
> us much more._

No one is claiming it is a concern for 2017, no? My understanding is that the
debate is more what happens in the next 10-15 years and not about the short-
term situation.

~~~
Numberwang
Exactly. Wait 10 years for the self driving cars to take over which will set
30% of all male workers without a job.

~~~
tomhoward
I'm with you on that concern, but on the other hand, it wouldn't be the first
time society has seen a rapid mechanisation of significant parts of the
economy (e.g., agrarian workers, textiles workers).

Yet every time it happens, there's a reorganisation, and eventually the people
(or the kinds of people) who did those jobs are employed doing new things.

Is there some reason why everything is suddenly different this time?

Here's a couple of ways that spring to my mind, for how society could absorb
the labor that would be freed up if driver automation happened:

\- As increasing numbers of professional people around the world are becoming
cash rich but time-poor, there is, and should continue to be, a growing demand
for people to provide domestic services like cleaning, home maintenance,
personal administration tasks, child-care, etc.

\- As the number of machines continue to grow, there will be growing demand
for people to work on the machines. Whether it's designing, programming,
manufacturing, testing, transporting, fitting, servicing, cleaning, replacing,
or disposing of the machines, there will be plenty of work for people of all
kinds of aptitude.

~~~
kasey_junk
No and thats precisely what is worrying. Those massive switches in the past
have come with all manner of social unrest, revolutions, war and changes to
the basic fabric of daily life.

We are just now seeing the impact of the introduction of computers into the
workforce and that is causing all manner of issues, but the response to that
so far is _the best case scenario_ when compared to say the industrial
revolutions 300 years of massive change.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>come with all manner of social unrest, revolutions, war and changes to the
basic fabric of daily life.

No need to be a Pollyanna. Unemployment rallies didn't lead to war, they were
just unpleasant.

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/081024-great-
depressi...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/081024-great-depression-
photogallery-photogallery.html)

Economies are constantly changing and retraining and job migration are our
norm, not our exception. Regardless of the current political climate, the
reality is that you're not entitled to keep a job in some dying industry.
Change has always been here, as much as we try to deny it. Hence the admission
that we can't keep this train running and things like UBI are becoming
politically feasible.

~~~
mcguire
The Great Depression also played a part in the rise of nazism and fascism, and
the abject terror of communism on the part of the rest of the world. And the
rise of socialism in many of them.

And the Great Depression wasn't an industrialization-related economic shift;
it was more of a hiccup following the tectonic shifts in the nineteenth
century part of the industrial revolution.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>And the Great Depression wasn't an industrialization-related economic shift;

Again, that's not my point. It was large amounts of unemployment up to 50% in
urban areas. If the GP is correct it should have led to a civil war, but it
didn't.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot)

------
eksemplar
Coming.

I work in public digitization and we're still a lot of years from implementing
things like self driving cars. We're running tests of course, but a lot of
places the road markings, or lack there off, aren't good enough for the
current tech. Heck, in Denmark we also have a lot of specialized road sings
that the AIs can't read yet.

Similarly RPA and machine learning are just in the trial stages with very few
human resource available to make good use of it.

What we can tell from all these tests and proof-of-concepts though, is that
the technology is going to be viable sometime in the future.

No one can predict exactly what will happen of course. As I've already
mentioned it'll certainly create new jobs, but those jobs will require higher
educations, and I think that's the challenge which worries us in politics.
Because the people that are going to be replaced by self driving cars won't be
easily reschooled for something else.

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flyinglizard
Good luck buying an industrial robot right now. Anecdotal maybe, but from my
personal experience all top 3 players are experiencing supply shortages due to
strong demand.

~~~
Agathos
Who are the top three?

~~~
gridit
I was curious too and found this list (sorry about the parent site):

[https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2015/07/21/top-8-indus...](https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2015/07/21/top-8-industrial-
robot-companies-and-how-many-robots-they-have-around-the-world/812/)

1\. Fanuc

2\. Yaskawa

3\. ABB

4\. Kawasaki

The first one mostly has openings in Michigan, concerning machine vision and
embedded NN -- from what I can tell.

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im3w1l
Calm before the storm.

Regarding point 2, can this be explained by the trend of turning CAPEX into
OPEX by leasing and similar? I only heard about it in passing so maybe thats
just a misunderstanding on my part.

------
awinter-py
Another article about productivity from an author who can't distinguish
between measurable economic TFP and the common-use concept of productivity.

In fact, TFP (which is what they're charting) is the mystery factor that
explains why earnings grows differently than its inputs, labor and capital.

It makes no sense to me to talk about TFP when moore's law is making devices
cheaper and VCs / ad revenue are subsidizing omnipresent software.

The ATMs argument is tired -- even if it's right it's 30 years old.

Foxconn replaced 60k workers on their shenzhen campus with robots. How can
this article not cite that?

Weak.

------
agentgt
I'm a fervent watcher of the show "How it's Made" and it blows my mind how an
enormous amount of manufacturing is still done by hand. Particularly any
seamstress, weaving, buffing, sanding or carving.

The show generally covers North American manufactures where you would expect
far greater automation but empirically I have observed the opposite.

For example the other day I watched a Canadian worker skillfully weave a
hammock. It looked like it could have been automated but I lacked the
mechanical mind to envision how.

So given that manufacturing is actually a small subset of the economy but
probably the most viable for automation (ie robots) its sort of disturbing to
see an almost regression particularly in North America (again my empirical
observations).

Service based jobs like hospitality I would imagine to be far harder to
automate (or maybe not).

~~~
mrfusion
I've also noticed on that show how specialized all the machinery is. Even
changing the size of a part might require a whole new machine.

I have to imagine there are big wins waiting for by have more general
manufacturing equipment that can itself be mass produced.

------
elorant
One thing the general media don't seem to understand is that the whole
discussion about robots isn't so much about AI but mostly about automation. We
don't need intelligent machines to get there, we're already automating
jobs/tasks. In our industry for example bots are everywhere.

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SirLJ
"Globalization is a much bigger deal than automation for work and wages."

I think this pretty much sums it up...

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Simulacra
The robotics market isn't coming for several more years, in my opinion, so I
think the reason why there is a sounding of an alarm now is because by the
time we realize it and it does get here it's too late for the labor market

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rndmwlk
Quick aside from the point of the article...the "Growth in labor
productivity..." and "Capital Investment in IT..." graphs are one of those
fudged to present a particular point of view stats.

Wow, so capital investment slowed from 2007-2016. I wonder if anything
happened during that time period that may have deflated these growth rates.

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k__
So we are basically faster at creating new jobs than automating existing ones?

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j7ake
they're already here... but unfortunately these algorithms are becoming the
masters, an increasing workforce relies on an app to tell them where to pick
up customers or where to pick up amazon products.

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deepnet
Where too is the once promised paperless office ?

IMHO the robo jobpocalypse is as overhyped as the paperpocalypse was in the
early 1980's

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Were you making a joke perhaps? Paper disappeared from offices.

~~~
deepnet
I agree, paper is absent from many offices, yet very many business still use
some paper.

As the amount of businesses and transactions has increased by several orders
of magnitude the overall effect is that more paper is being used than ever
before.

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LoSboccacc
yeah where are them?
[https://m.imgur.com/ZiJ0n6Q](https://m.imgur.com/ZiJ0n6Q)

sheeesh of course robototization adoption is slowing, most manufacturing is
already there and until the next tech generation comes we reached the optimum
split between local automated vs cheap manual outsourced

~~~
gcatalfamo
You seem to have a very skewed perspective on the state of automation in SMEs

