10 ms·

So, Where Are All Those Robots?

82 points by misnamed 9y ago

eksemplar 9y ago
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.
flyinglizard 9y ago
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.
- bamboozled 9y ago
  Well, how about that for irony.
- Agathos 9y ago
  Who are the top three?
  - gridit 9y ago
    I was curious too and found this list (sorry about the parent site): https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2015/07/21/top-8-industrial-robot-companies-and-how-many-robots-they-have-around-the-world/812/ https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2015/07/21/top-8-indus... 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.
- bad_alloc 9y ago
  Can confirm. We've been waiting half a year for one arm. It's not only production, training courses are packed and support technicians are hard to get hold of.
elorant 9y ago
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.
LoSboccacc 9y ago
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 9y ago
  You seem to have a very skewed perspective on the state of automation in SMEs
im3w1l 9y ago
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.
Suncho 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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.
deepnet 9y ago
Where too is the once promised paperless office ? IMHO the robo jobpocalypse is as overhyped as the paperpocalypse was in the early 1980's
- rwmj 9y ago
  As a remote worker, the paperless office is here today (for me). I interact hundreds of times a day with colleagues around the world, and paper is involved perhaps only twice a year (to print plane tickets).
  - majewsky 9y ago
    Same here. Not remote, but I've only handled paper forms on very few occassions, mostly when the law requires written form.
- lukasm 9y ago
  In the past 2 years the only things I was given in paper were, contract, insurance form and a ticket train. Now I have tickets on my phone.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  Were you making a joke perhaps? Paper disappeared from offices.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deepnet 9y ago
    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.
- aninhumer 9y ago
  Honestly, the fact that so many offices still rely on paper makes me even more concerned about the decline of job availability in the near future. We already know how to create paperless offices that are successful and reduce labour requirements, and yet so many businesses still aren't taking full advantage of that. That's a lot of lost jobs before we even start considering new technology replacing people.
k__ 9y ago
So we are basically faster at creating new jobs than automating existing ones?
j7ake 9y ago
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.
xg15 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  Exactly. Wait 10 years for the self driving cars to take over which will set 30% of all male workers without a job.
  - tomhoward 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
Simulacra 9y ago
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
agentgt 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
SirLJ 9y ago
"Globalization is a much bigger deal than automation for work and wages." I think this pretty much sums it up...
rndmwlk 9y ago
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.
awinter-py 9y ago
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.

82 points by misnamed 9y ago

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.

flyinglizard 9y ago

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.

bamboozled 9y ago
Well, how about that for irony.
Agathos 9y ago
Who are the top three?
- gridit 9y ago
  I was curious too and found this list (sorry about the parent site): https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2015/07/21/top-8-industrial-robot-companies-and-how-many-robots-they-have-around-the-world/812/ https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2015/07/21/top-8-indus... 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.
bad_alloc 9y ago
Can confirm. We've been waiting half a year for one arm. It's not only production, training courses are packed and support technicians are hard to get hold of.

elorant 9y ago

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.

LoSboccacc 9y ago

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 9y ago
You seem to have a very skewed perspective on the state of automation in SMEs

im3w1l 9y ago

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.

Suncho 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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.

deepnet 9y ago

Where too is the once promised paperless office ? IMHO the robo jobpocalypse is as overhyped as the paperpocalypse was in the early 1980's

rwmj 9y ago
As a remote worker, the paperless office is here today (for me). I interact hundreds of times a day with colleagues around the world, and paper is involved perhaps only twice a year (to print plane tickets).
- majewsky 9y ago
  Same here. Not remote, but I've only handled paper forms on very few occassions, mostly when the law requires written form.
lukasm 9y ago
In the past 2 years the only things I was given in paper were, contract, insurance form and a ticket train. Now I have tickets on my phone.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
Were you making a joke perhaps? Paper disappeared from offices.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deepnet 9y ago
  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.
aninhumer 9y ago
Honestly, the fact that so many offices still rely on paper makes me even more concerned about the decline of job availability in the near future. We already know how to create paperless offices that are successful and reduce labour requirements, and yet so many businesses still aren't taking full advantage of that. That's a lot of lost jobs before we even start considering new technology replacing people.

k__ 9y ago

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

j7ake 9y ago

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.

xg15 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
Exactly. Wait 10 years for the self driving cars to take over which will set 30% of all male workers without a job.
- tomhoward 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.

Simulacra 9y ago

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

agentgt 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

SirLJ 9y ago

"Globalization is a much bigger deal than automation for work and wages." I think this pretty much sums it up...

rndmwlk 9y ago

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.

awinter-py 9y ago

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.