
Robots 'to replace up to 20M factory jobs' by 2030 - dazbradbury
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48760799
======
Zenst
All well replacing mundane jobs with robots, but what will those displaced
workers do. Also come 2030, the population will of increased, which will be
mostly in the demographics who lost their jobs to robots in the first place.

But then the whole cost effective argument is from a company perspective, what
it costs them on the balance sheets.

The fallout and full cost of loosing workers is very much ringfenced for
companies, but the social impacts can be far far deeper and far more costly to
a community than any saving made on a balance sheet.

So I get the whole workers rights perspective, equally, I'm mindful that some
jobs really are not fit for humans, just because they can do them, don't mean
we can't technology them away. But a balance is needed, so if they had a robot
tax as many have raised and mooted in the past, then perhaps that could be
used to find education, free recreational activities. Otherwise we will just
fuel an endless supply of humans in production line style that feel useless in
society and become statisticaly abandoned or worse.

Certainly won't need 20M robot maintenance jobs, let alone the skill set from
picking fruit and moving onto robot maintenance for many will be a transition
out of their reach.

So all yay for robots replacing menial jobs, but let's make sure such
displaced menial workers are afforded some education and opportunity into
better jobs. Otherwise it will not end well socially.

~~~
BurningFrog
The first thing to understand in these discussions is that this has been
happening continuously for 250 years. The Industrial revolution never stopped.

For all these 25 decades, people have worried a lot about what will happen to
everyone losing their jobs to new technology. It's always turned out that new
jobs kept appearing as the old ones disappeared, and the result of the
increased productivity the "lost jobs" represent has manifested in
proportionally increased wages. It's hard to compare directly, but we're about
30x richer per person then 250 years ago. And also a lot more people.

Right now we're supposed to be in the middle of a Job Automation Holocaust.
THIS TIME IT'S (as usual) DIFFERENT! And yet if you lift your gaze from the
theories and look at real world indicators, unemployment is extremely low.

Now, it's of course true that this time it actually _can_ be different, and I
don't mind people making arguments to that effect. I have less respect for
those who argue like this is a brand new disaster falling from the sky, not
the prevailing trend since centuries.

~~~
tzs
One thing that is different this time is that we are more directly replacing
humans.

When we replaced, say, horse drawn wagons with trucks, yes, we killed off a
lot of jobs associated with wagons. Wagon drivers, wagon builders, horse
trainers, horse feed suppliers, etc., might have lost some or all of their
work.

But trucks needed drivers, truck makers, mechanics, fuel supply, and so on, so
a lot of new work was created.

Now suppose we replace human driven trucks with self-driving trucks, getting
rid of a lot of truck driver jobs, and also a lot of jobs related to
supporting truck drivers.

Yes, the self-driving trucks will create some new work. But a self-driving
truck is pretty much just a regular truck with some extra sensors, a computer,
some actuators to let the computer operate the controls, and some software.
The sensors, computers, and actuators are all commodity items or close to it.

So rather than create new jobs sufficient to counter the lost jobs of truck
drivers and those who support truck drives, switching to self-driving trucks
just increases demand a bit for some commodity hardware, and requires some
extra training for truck mechanics to maintain the new equipment.

We're starting to transition from a type of industrial revolution where people
using machines are replaced by people using very different machines, to a type
where people using machines are being replaced by very similar machines that
require fewer or no humans to operate.

~~~
jerkstate
Prior to the industrial revolution something like 80% of the US population was
in agriculture and now it's 1.5% and we are still at near full unemployment. I
think the idea that humans will somehow run out of useful stuff to do once we
have robots doing the current set of things is a very fixed-mindset way of
thinking. If there is money kicking around, people will find productive stuff
to do and build companies to do things that weren't possible before.

~~~
spaced-out
Sure, there will be new work created, but what makes you so sure that new work
will go to humans? Why wouldn't the guy doing things that were not possible
before just buy robots do those new jobs?

~~~
iguy
Well, we kind-of define work as being that done by humans.

My laptop does more number-crunching than all the human computers of last
century every morning, but we don't count this as work taken away from anyone.

Humans find new things to do, providing services (or amusements) to each other
which were not previously thought necessary. The entire services sector of the
economy is things that basically weren't done 100 years ago (or were done on
such a tiny scale as not to matter). And we all work hard to afford these new
things, by making other such new things (like websites!), partly as a game of
keeping up with the neighbors, rather than being content with our great-
grandparents' living standards.

~~~
BurningFrog
Yeah, another way to say the same thing is that an unemployed human is an
underexploited resource. Capitalism is really good at not letting those go to
waste.

------
caseymarquis
Globally. The title is somewhat misleading. That's roughly 0.4% of global jobs
in 2019 being lost over a decade; So, something like 0.04% per year. I think
society will survive.

If anything, those numbers are underwhelming. Having worked with industrial
robots it's not surprising that they won't be taking over the world any time
soon.

Robots are a large up front investment in a company's immediate processes.
This investment is only good if the processes remain mostly static for a very
long time. Even then, there is a major cost when processes finally change.
It's stupidly similar to software development in so many ways.

Mass automation already happened, at least in my country (USA). The data shown
in the article seems to indicate most of the increased use will be in
countries like China. Rising wages are likely the dominant factor driving
increased adoption in that situation, not new technology.

Everyone I know who actually buys robots views them as a trade off, not a
panacea. As robots' capabilities slowly improve, their use will increase a
bit, but operator guided machinery (ie CNCs, injection molding, task specific
machines for things like packaging) glued together with flexible human workers
isn't going anywhere until we hit something resembling AGI.

Can't speak to the use of robots outside of manufacturing, but that's not what
the article is about.

~~~
aerophilic
Curious your thoughts on the upcoming wave of low cost “co-bots”. While still
too expensive to make the analogy of the PC vs the mainframe, they have
started approaching the 15-30k/base price. While obviously less capable, much
like the PC, I believe they will have effective uses.

Thoughts on how this might change the equation?

~~~
Sileni
In the larger scale type of manufacturing I'm working with, those small bots
tend to have trade-offs that mean they're not really worth choosing over a
larger, more traditional manufacturing robot, or a solution without robotics
at all. Mounting difficulties, lack of range of movement, and lack of
robustness being the core issues. In most scenarios, you're better off
avoiding robots and going for something statically mounted. Failing that,
choosing a Kawasaki model that's been in production the last 30 years. Then
you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's going to run for the next decade
without a hitch. You can find operators with experience relatively cheap.
Every imaginable mounting head exists and has been in production long enough
to know the issues you're going to face with it.

The big robot will survive in large scale manufacturing for the same reason
Java survives in enterprise; it's part of the culture at this point. It does
its job well, it hardly ever fails, and it's relatively easy to bring someone
up to speed on working with them. Like Java, you'll probably see a number of
companies pop up that prefer a newer technology, because it fits their use
case well. But I'd expect the bulk of total money spent to continue to be on
the kinds of industrial robots we work with now.

The place I can see small robots making an impact is knowledge work, such as
laboratories or design. And realistically, in those fields we've never been
time constrained. It's more common, in my experience, that the limiting factor
is the number of good ideas a person can come up with. There's no way to
reduce "hours formulating an idea" short of AGI. Scientists have to read
papers, designers have to study a company or product to make all of the
branding coherent.

All of that said, the newer, low cost bots will probably move the needle, but
they won't accelerate the pace of automation significantly. More likely,
they'll contribute to maintaining the current acceleration.

------
danhak
I can imagine at least two hugely positive outcomes from the rise of robots
and automation:

1) Human labor will no longer dominate COGS--global shipping and logistics
will. There will therefore be a massive onshoring of manufacturing back to the
developed world. As a result, we will stop subsidizing human rights abuses and
substandard living conditions around the globe.

2) In developed countries, this massive onshoring of automated production will
make it clear that low-skill, high-paying factory jobs are forever a thing of
the past. Simultaneously, xenophobia--"they took our jobs"\--may cease to be
an effective political tool. Perhaps this will trigger an honest discussion
around UBI and revamped social safety nets.

~~~
berberous
On your first point, manufacturers moving to places with lower cost human
labor with laxer standards does not 'subsidize' substandard living conditions,
it raises them. Look at the massive economic growth that has occurred in
places like China. If we pull out, standards in poor countries will get worse
not better.

~~~
hobofan
It may raise living conditions, but the point about "human rights abuses"
still stands.

------
mc32
This is okay on countries with a graying population like East Asia, North
America and Europe.

This is bad news for most of the Southern Hemisphere with young populations
which will continue to grow till the end of this century.

Unless something changes economically or in pop growth, there are going to be
massive economic problems.

~~~
maxerickson
If the robots are cheaper than human labor, there will be more goods available
and the goods should be cheaper.

The problem will be that we are used to matching supply and demand by
rewarding productivity, not real shortages.

Ironically, the very best jobs in extremely productive economies like the US
are detached from productivity and linked to perception and politics and the
like (or do people believe that every $10 million CEO is that much better than
the next guy on the list).

~~~
wvenable
The thing about robots is that you can also stop production instantly if
demand goes down. You have much fewer costs when not at full capacity.

It might even be true that robots might not be cheaper than human labor but
have other advantages that make them preferable.

~~~
jcims
You likely will have more versatility in future robots allowing for capacity
to pivot to various products based on the associated economics.

~~~
wvenable
Also robots are owned by the company, so they're assets, not liabilities.

~~~
iguy
> robots is that you can also stop production instantly if demand goes down.
> You have much fewer costs when not at full capacity.

I think you have this exactly backwards.

In a highly automated factory the main cost is capital, i.e. the machines
might cost decades worth of payroll. So having them sit idle is extremely
expensive, or to say it another way, producing nothing saves you almost no
money.

A low-automation factory is the opposite. Big traditional garment factories
are basically just sheds with some tables. Almost all the cost is workers, and
in many places & times you only hire them when you get a big order.

The automated garment-sewing machines (if we get there) can't do anything
else. Factory robots aren't very C-3PO. Whereas the sweatshop workers can be
assembling cellphones (or building rice terraces) next week.

------
mrhappyunhappy
The job loss and displacement due to improvements and automation are quite
scary to me. I often find myself thinking about what people will be left to do
after automation displaces most workforce and the leftover jobs get so
efficient that 1 person will do the job of 10.

Look at where web development was not that long ago. It used to take a few
people and many moving pieces to put together a website. You needed a designer
to design it. A developer to code it. A hosting company to host it. A
maintenance person to keep updating and make changes. Now, anyone can fire up
a webflow site in under a day. No coding needed, no hosting, do your own
maintenance.

Now this is only efficiency we are talking about. What happens when we get to
a place where you just pick some parameters and any website imaginable is spot
out on your screen for you? Imagine how many websites exist already, what’s to
stop that data from flowing into a large dataset where design is no longer
needed, code is unnecessary, updates are done through a cms. Algorithms
already draw art, ok, let’s modify them to make illustrations, logos, anything
creative. We just displaced 2 professions. Why stop there? Feed the machines
every imaginable font and let it create new fonts for us. Font designer gone.

This is only the industry I’m aware of. I can imagine others are no less prone
to automation and complete efficiency disruption.

What will people do when to get a basic job requires 20 years of education?
Are we to believe all humans will have advanced degrees to do those jobs? What
about those who simply can’t or won’t like doing that job?

------
carlsborg
Not sure how in advanced economies this can be anything more than marginal...
Visited the volkswagon factory at their headquarters in Germany last year. One
of the biggest manufacturing plants in the world. You get in a little buggy
and get driven around for kilometers of factory floor and it’s nearly all
robots. Barely any people to be seen.

------
sergiotapia
I hope all those displaced people are given a path forward, every person
deserves to make a living and have a good life.

What happened to displaced workers during the industrial revolution?

~~~
ghaff
Many were forced into terrible working conditions and work houses. It helped
lead to communist revolutions. Lots of people starved. So not really a great
template.

~~~
sergiotapia
Definitely not a good thing, I was asking because I wanted some insight into
what's coming.

------
tedmcory77
Wow, add in those truckers that’ll lose those jobs from autonomous and some
states end up VERY hollowed out.

------
gnusty_gnurc
I think the people that presume their intelligence will inform how automation
plays out will be sorely disappointed when the future is nothing like they
expected. To be honest, I don’t want to make any predictions about automation
but I’m highly skeptical of the pessimism that dominates the discussion and
fatalism around things like UBI.

~~~
lm28469
There isn't much to "expect", large scale automation is happening for more
than 50 years now. It's similar to people saying "AI will revolutionise the
world", it already is revolutionising for several decades. It seems to me that
this notion became popular in the last few years and has been so
simplified/vulgarised that people expect half the world to lose their job at
once when "robots" and "ai" take over.

Job automation isn't a single point in time, it's a gradual process that's
been happening for as long as work existed. And as long as we run our current
economic system there will be jobs to replace automated ones. Currently it
seems like services are the new factory jobs (uber, food delivery, &c.).

> Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and
> the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the
> following contradiction: The techno- logical developments that objectively
> tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity,
> because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent
> automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor
> productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to
> create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted
> into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible
> for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is
> serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are
> necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.

\- Guyd Debord, 1967

~~~
Kye
Service and retail workers will have to unionize before they have the pay and
benefits that made manufacturing such good work. That's how factory workers
did it. Service and retail work are approaching the living hell of the pre-
union Industrial Age.

------
mrfusion
I feel like I’ve heard this before.

~~~
ZhuanXia
And, in fact, it has happened before.

~~~
stcredzero
And it will happen again.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/BSG/comments/76z43l/help_with_all_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/BSG/comments/76z43l/help_with_all_of_this_has_happened_before_quotes/)

------
aantix
But what about the positive headline?

20 million robots to produce one developer job by 2030?

------
true_tuna
That seems low

~~~
ladberg
2030 isn't that far away. Do you think we could automate more than 2M
jobs/year for the next 10 years? I kinda doubt it.

~~~
true_tuna
I work in robotics automation. The industry is poised for massive improvements
in orchestration efficiency. Robotics currently does not take advantage of
several known and trusted technologies. That alone will be huge. If we count
the automation of driving jobs and efficiency improvements due to machine
learning, I’d say the number is low.

~~~
AareyBaba
What are these known and trusted technologies ?

~~~
sitkack
Feedback for one, many industrial robots operate entirely open-loop. It was
invented in 1927, so robotics has some catching up to do.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-
feedback_amplifier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-feedback_amplifier)

~~~
deelowe
Can you elaborate? I'm not seeing the connection.

~~~
Nyandalized
Robotics could be much more efficient, require less maintenance and cause less
havoc when malfunctioning. That alone reduces the amount of jobs required by a
fair bit

~~~
deelowe
What does this have to do with robots running "open loop?"

------
neuromancer2600
If anyone is looking for the report that this article is referring to:

[http://resources.oxfordeconomics.com/how-robots-change-
the-w...](http://resources.oxfordeconomics.com/how-robots-change-the-world)

------
kingkawn
The cost savings of the robots could be taxed to supplement social welfare
programming

~~~
harperlee
Robot are just means of production, capital. We don't need to invent robot
taxes; we just need to increase taxes on those people/companies with the most
capital and the most benefits (well, and close loopholes).

The question about approaching full automation is whether all that wealth will
be for humanity or for some selected rich people.

~~~
markvdb
It might be easier to tax physical bots though than the capital behind them.
Just like with individuals as opposed to anonymous companies. Zero's and ones
are easier to push around.

~~~
harperlee
Capital in the economic sense is not just dollars, it includes buildings and
trucks and cranes and agricultural tractors.

The minute you overspecify a law to apply only to some products you are
creating opportunities for loopholes. See this classic story about vans vs
cars, and import taxes:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45875405](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45875405)

Is a John Deere tractor a robot? What about a roomba? A 3d printer? What about
a disassembled robot? The wheels of a robot? How do you define robot?

What do you tax, the purchase of a robot? The use? The ownership?

There are very tricky questions that try to fix an artificial problem. Tax the
company or the person behind x, be x a robot, a field, or a brand that
generates money (or not, if you are against taxes). This is not a new problem.

------
omilu
America already took the hit when most manufacturing moved overseas. This is
going to be a bigger impact on those developing countries which manufacture
everything.

------
nickserv
If a machine can do the work of 10 people, it should be owned by 10 people who
rent it to the company benefiting from its labor.

~~~
steve1977
Those 10 people are free to buy such a machine and rent it out.

------
pluma
Okay, so socialism it is then.

Or more palatable for HN: Universal Basic Income.

Not that it matters if Earth is a flaming hellscape by 2050 thanks to the
ongoing pollution that will likely only be made worse by this automation.

------
crdoconnor
>But this report presents a more nuanced view, stressing that the productivity
benefits from automation should boost growth, meaning as many jobs are created
as lost.

Way to bury the lede, Rory.

~~~
true_tuna
High technology jobs that you can only get if you went to college and got a
technical degree. Which is disproportionately available to families who are
already wealthy. Meaning the working class gets hollowed out, the rich and
powerful get more rich and powerful and the unemployment and related addiction
crisis get even worse. Yay! Brave new future.

~~~
markvdb
The US are the anomaly. In most of the developed world, higher education is
actually quite affordable. Technical education is also the easiest to get
funding for.

It turns out financial limitations are the easy factor to solve. Other, non-
financial limits to social mobility are so much more stubborn.

~~~
Nyandalized
In fact, in some northern countries like Finland, all education is completely
free, and the government pays you allowance so you can focus on studies.

The only requirement is to pass the entry exams, which anyone can take

------
melling
Guess they’ve started removing the “possibility“ from headlines. People have
stopped clicking with the words “may” or “could” in the title?

“Up to 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world could be replaced by
robots by 2030, according to analysis firm Oxford Economics.”

~~~
codetrotter
Title looks fine to me. It says “up to 20M jobs”. I always take that to mean
anywhere between zero and the stated number. So “may”/“could” is sort of
implied IMO.

