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US auto industry installed 135K robots and added 230K jobs
- visarga 10y agoUS 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?
- plafl 10y agoI don't know, but maybe it had a net positive impact on the world. Maybe not everything is about reducing labor costs, maybe it improved car quality or assembly speed. It would be great to know what is the most important incentive auto companies have for installing robots.
- croon 10y agoHypothetical: Let's say GP was right and 1M jobs disappeared. Robots are cheaper. Are cars going to get cheaper? My bet is on no. Where does that money go? Up. Who will buy the cars? Definitely not the 1M people losing those jobs. I'm not saying we should go backwards, but just producing more stuff cheaper with less labor without a goal in sight isn't a net positive impact on the world, and the economic inequality will only grow steeper. I'm saying this as a cushy white collar business owner that will likely be comfortably ahead of that curve. But we're still just lemmings scurrying to get ahead of everyone else, while a whole lot will be left behind. This is what decided this election, regardless of anyones politics (I certainly didn't agree with the choice).
- akytt 10y agoThat's not how capitalism works, you know. The prices will go down. Look at the car you get today and compare it to a car 10 years ago. Bang per buck has increased while brands like Dacia are coming in from below.
- visarga 10y agoDacia, my first car :-)
- kbart 10y agoCar industry is very competitive, so you can assume that decrease of the expenses will result in lower price. Maybe not directly price in currency, but better car for same money. Compare any new car to cars made even 10 years ago - they are better in pretty much any metrics. Heck, I remember times when air bags were counted as luxury and I'm not even that old. Take Tesla for example, such technologies and parameters were only available in luxury sport cars (Ferrari, Porsche etc).
- croon 10y agoSure, and my computer is a thousand times better than 25 years ago. It still costs LESS even disregarding inflation. That technology goes forward doesn't warrant price inflation. Like you said, your car hasn't gotten cheaper. So why would it going forward?
- witty_username 10y agoBecause of robotics.
- witty_username 10y agoIf money is going up (shareholders?) then one should invest in that car company. If it's going excessively to the managers, then the shareholders should change the management's compensation. It is a net positive (shareholders or management and consumers gain), but not necessarily Pareto efficient (some people lose). > Definitely not the 1M people losing those jobs. Why? They would get a lesser paying job, but I think they could still buy a cheap car.
- aaron695 10y agoYes 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.
- madengr 10y agoI'm wondering why garment production wasn't automated years ago.
- kasey_junk 10y agoLots 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.
- aaron695 10y agoIt's really hard http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21651925-robotic-sewing-machine-could-throw-garment-workers-low-cost-countries-out http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21651925-...
- Pica_soO 10y agoThere was a third worldwar when the replicator was invented. Gene Roddenbery warned us!
- visarga 10y agoActually I think we got a better chance of creating a self replicating factory than AGI. We have robots and materials, we just need to make the whole system 100% automated, and it's looking good with all the 3d printing and CNC innovations. Such a self replicating factory would be organized like a computer. It would have memory, which will be the storage space, and a data bus, which is the logistics system, and a CPU which is the collection of processing units (3d printers, cnc, ovens, presses, etc). We will program it with an API and define products like we define software, then the factory would compile it to production and actually produce it. When the factory is able to reproduce its own tools, it can create more of itself and jumpstart the process. You could also say it works like a cell or an organism - self reproducing, self healing, able to survive. We're self reproducing factories ourselves. It's the birth of a new life form, when robots don't need us to reproduce and repair themselves.
- spiderfarmer 10y agoSharing. In the current political climate of the US? Good luck with that.
- aeturnum 10y agoI think it's always worthwhile to look carefully at happenings that appear to cut against the grain of the conventional wisdom. It makes sense that the opportunity cost for these jobs is the loss of jobs overseas and that we should consider the morality of such a system. It's also likely that our understanding of the job / automation tradeoff is flawed and things like this can help us better understand how we misunderstand it. Alternatively, this could be an aberration and not generally applicable - but either way it's worth looking at the thing itself and not immediately pivoting to secondary concerns.
- ousta 10y agodid it create blue collar jobs or only white collars?
- bluedino 10y agoCan'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.
- throwaway40483 10y agoWith automation, it's very rare (never?) to go from white collar to blue collar. I think you can safely assume that it's white collar.
- deebeeoh 10y agoAt 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...
- bobjordan 10y agoI 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.
- mistermann 10y agoIf 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.
- BatFastard 10y agoIt 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago"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.
- jgalt212 10y agoperhaps 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.
- blakeshall 10y agoThat and the fact that our factories weren't being regularly bombed.
- wheelerwj 10y agoThe 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.
- rm999 10y agoYou'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.
- wheelerwj 10y ago
- nanogal 10y agoKey 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.
- petra 10y agoAh 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.
- deelowe 10y agoThey dont. Theres nothing to say this data is correlated in any way.
- wheelerwj 10y agoPretty sure some research will indicate that the Robotic Industries Association is a lobbyist organization and not at all an unbiased in any way.
- fshean 10y agoActually 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
- petra 10y agoThank you. Now the original article makes sense.
- jazzyk 10y agoAlso, 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-subprime-auto-loans/ http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/09/30/losses-jump-for-su...
- madengr 10y agoSo why did it decrease in 2015 for auto robots?
- samfisher83 10y agoThe 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.