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UN Report: Robots Will Replace Two-Thirds of All Workers in the Developing World
- glangdale 10y agoThis 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.pdf http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/presspb2016d6_en.pd... 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 10y agoi 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 10y agoExactly. 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.
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoTriggering mass immigration.
- abiox 10y agowhich, of course, is the true tragedy in all of this.
- jnordwick 10y agoTechnology wlll replace 90% of All Workers in the US (mid. 1800s)
- abiox 10y agoi 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 10y agoUnless 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 10y agoThere'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.
- Animats 10y agoFoxconn plans to replace most of their workers with robots in the next few years. They already replaced 40,000 humans.
- crdoconnor 10y agoFoxconn 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 10y agoBut 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.
- contingencies 10y agoThat'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!
- nthcolumn 10y agoBut we won't all be "fed, clothed, housed, but simply bored.." we will be surplus to requirements. A comparatively tiny elite will own the robots to feed, clothe and house themselves and also to protect what they have from the horde. So no change there really.
- boznz 10y agoSince this is inevitable by most opinions the real question should be how do we increase the number of jobs by 66%
- Mao_Zedang 10y agoService industry
- ivanhoe 10y agoRobots 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.
- chii 10y agowhat do you say about the argument put forward by this video? https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU
- Houshalter 10y agoConsumers 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 10y agoWhat 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!
- increment_i 10y agoI've heard this argument and I think it's a fallacy. I think the point is that automation will indeed "break" the economy in a drastic fashion. Money and consumers is just an efficient abstraction - what's really happening is that two parties are exchanging value (i.e. trading). If the middle/consumer class bottoms out, and automation renders their labour valueless, the owners of the automated, robotic outfits simply need to trade within themselves to keep their endeavours worthwhile. Of course, I suppose I'm taking things to overly simple, probably dystopian logical extremes here. Nevertheless, the guy in charge of the fully robotic organic farm only needs to trade with the guy with the fleet of robotic mechanics and both parties have realized a profit. There was no need for a bunch of consumers and their cash to make this transaction.
- PeterisP 10y agoThe 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.
- Jabanga 10y agoUN 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.
- bobbington 10y agoLol, do they mention that new jobs will be developed? Humans are incredibly creative, and will find a way to adapt.