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Uniqlo cut 90% of staff at one warehouse by replacing them with robots

• jumelles 8y ago
  This will likely be the new norm as the technology gets cheaper and cheaper.
• liquidise 8y ago
  Modern societies are going to have a very real problem to grapple with as this replacement goes from newsworthy to the norm. This could result in significant worker displacement with massive bottom-line ROI for companies in the next decade or two, particularly as minimum wages rise. I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Even if they do, it is unlikely those new positions will employ the same degree of skilled worker. Assuming a net unskilled job reduction due to automation in a couple of decades, what happens as this becomes pervasive in a society?
  • sharkweek 8y ago
    The lower class gets bigger and bigger, and is either kept just happy enough to not revolt or... At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force.
    • frlnBorg 8y ago
      That is a foolish thing to say
      • CPLX 8y ago
        Why? That's pretty much a summary of how social change has worked for the last 2000 years or so.
    • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force Not necessarily. The same robotic technology that decouples low-skill labour inputs and outputs is decoupling populations from force projection capabilities. Less cynically, there are organic ways for the situation to positively evolve (e.g. higher across-board labour productivity) without overt wealth redistribution.
      • mikepurvis 8y ago
        Can you expand on this? I don't understand which populations you're referring to as having become decoupled from force projection? In the US at least, there's 1+ gun for every man, woman, and child. Even if the elite class is backed by the entire US military, there's something to be said for overwhelming force of numbers.
        • endtime 8y ago
          The gun owners are typically on the other side of the aisle from those who support redistribution of wealth. Not saying that couldn't change or that desperation can't trump principle, of course.
          • setr 8y ago
            I don’t know if thats true: I think everyone wants a “fair” distribution of wealth. The question is in the definition of fair, and means to achieve it. Conservatives believe that distribution achieved by tax and regulation will hurt the total economic production of the US, and lead to everyone being worse off, though more equal (in the extreme: everyone is equally poor), and they also consider it fair that the distribution is unequal (as do liberals). Its just a matter of how unequal. But at least part of their definition of includes that they have the chance to increase their position, which is incompatible with tax/regulation at the extreme: if everyone has their incomes set in stone by the government, there is no chance to change in status. But losing all low-level jobs to robots, notably, removes that chance. For different reasons than the liberal (who dislikes it for the centralization of wealth/power, and the extreme polarization of wealth distribution), conservatives would intuitively be against it for the denial of opportunity across the board Tldr: everyone hates being poor/homeless, and too many people being homeless will cause a revolt regardless of their individual political leanings.
    • saas_sam 8y ago
      What if the lower class is getting simultaneously bigger and also better off? Do you think the bottom 10% is living as bad as they were in 1940? 1980? Things that used to be luxuries are now normal across all income brackets... That's a good thing. :-)
      • hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
        People don't compare themselves to how people lived 80 years ago. They compare themselves to other people, today. So saying "Look poor people, who cares if you can't afford decent housing, or health care, or quality food - you've got a cell phone!" will not quiet the social unrest that a growing underclass will cause.
        • tathougies 8y ago
          Overall though, more people have healthcare, more people have housing, and more people have food than ever before. No one is arguing, 'cellphone, hence no poverty'. People are merely arguing that the lowest 10% are no longer destitute.
          • hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
            Yes, I agree the lowest 10% are no longer as destitute, but my point is the dangerous social unrest that is likely to be caused (some would argue already has been caused) by widening inequality is not something that absolute measures of living standards will have much bearing on.
            • tathougies 8y ago
              You attacked a very poor interpretation of the parent comment then. Claiming ' they may have iphones, but they don't have food ' is patently ridiculous.
            • manigandham 8y ago
              That remains to be seen. There's clearly a certain level of "comfort" where the majority of people become satisfied enough, and the quality of life at the bottom is rapidly increasing as technology and the world matures. The rise of the middle class in China and India seems to be the biggest indicator of this approaching steady state.
    • ardy42 8y ago
      > At some point this boils over and the ultra wealthy are forced to redistribute wealth either through new political policy or by violent force. There's also the dystopian possibility that automated forms of social control are developed neuter the ability of any kind of popular political movement from challenging the elites. That automation could be anything from systems of censorship, surveillance, and propaganda to police androids. I think it makes some sense to deliberately cultivate and preserve IRL communities and networks that aren't very tech-mediated. By no means are they a panacea, but I think they have fewer vulnerabilities to tech-based automated control.
      • core-questions 8y ago
        Do you have a license for this post?
      • amoshi 8y ago
        I think this will happen. Brings to mind Google's secret project The Selfish Ledger, especially how it can be used for "Behavioural Sequencing"... [0] As tech gets better it'll become easier to analyse the masses and make good predictions - how much can the masses put up with? How much further can we push them before the boiling point is reached? [0] https://youtu.be/QDVVo14A_fo?t=439 https://youtu.be/QDVVo14A_fo?t=439
      • whycombinater 8y ago
        "And just before the nuke hit, he reflected on what a great life he had. Under his watch, Skynet raised the percentage of female programmers to an even 50%." Of course, some would see that that's actually a DYStopia, I mean, where are the trans?!
      • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        >automated forms of social control are developed Legalisation of drugs fits in here IMO, it's a salve for the people to keep them from mounting rebellions. Making hard drugs cheap and widely available probably is a relatively effective way of killing off a proportion of your poorest citizens without raising too great an alarm. Things like VR could placate the people too, give them a fake "luxury existence" and they're less likely to rebel.
    • TaylorAlexander 8y ago
      An alternative, which I advocate for, is that the lower class form productive collectives, stop contributing to the ultra wealthy, and generate their own real wealth. Much of the worlds wealth exists in wealth-generating infrastructure and information that is accessible to all of us. If we simply divest from the ultra wealthy and build a new economy based on cooperation, we can construct a system that inherently lifts us all. Automation will increase our productivity. In the end, the question is simply how we share the result of that gain. Normal capitalist corporations are designed to funnel wealth to a few board members, but cooperatives could succeed here too, where the wealth they generate is more naturally shared amongst all the workers. It’s not a silver bullet, but I feel as though it would represent a real improvement. We have to do something about how we distribute the creation of new wealth, and I don’t think we should wait for someone else to make this change for us - we must take action to realize the potential here! EDIT: I also think some billionaires are sympathetic to these issues and would be willing to contribute. But if we form large economic collectives, we can amass enough power to force the wealthy to notice when we divest.
      • tathougies 8y ago
        One concrete step can be getting rid of the capital requirements (by regulation) to invest. The idea of 'qualified investors' is literally a way to keep poor people poor, and rich people rich, by cutting off poor or middle class people from the major vehicles of wealth creation. It is ridiculous that I cannot invest in the IPO of a company in my local neighborhood because, while I have enough money to satisfy the business, I don't have enough money to satisfy uncle sam's onerous requirements. But yes, cooperatives like Mondragon are good examples, and also incredibly traditional.
        • mschuster91 8y ago
          These capital requirements are regulations that have been introduced as a response to companies fleecing the poor-ish, the uneducated and those who had a bit of cash, but decided to put it into one (fraudulent) investment. Drop them and you'll see what already is happening in the cryptocoin scene: people getting exploited left and right. Point is, no sofa investor will be a shark and get rich, contrary to the ICO promises.
    • bachbach 8y ago
      Everybody who thinks this believes in some replay of the 19th-20th centuries - personally I do not buy it because I think computation is qualitatively different to mechanization. Moravec's Paradox strongly implies that the middle class is automated before the working class is. I think anybody who doesn't understand that isn't worth listening to since it's the most concrete result in A.I for half a century. It's not about the bottom - it's about the middle and underclasses - that is different to the past.
  • ed_balls 8y ago
    state-backed jobs with negative income tax/UBI/wealthfare. This is what gonna happen in Japan. USA? no idea, some kind of revolution. The biggest problem will be in countries like Bangladesh.
    • apazzolini 8y ago
      The second (third?) most recent Sam Harris podcast episode with Yuval Noah Harari discusses this. We normally talk about UBI in the context of one country, but like you said, third world countries will suffer the most. Automation killing basic factory jobs will have a much larger effect outside of first world countries, and unfortunately there's no real way to address that disparity from the context of policy in any one country.
      • int_19h 8y ago
        Realistically, we know how the First World countries are going to solve it, because many of them are already in the process of implementing that solution. They'll dump some token amount of humanitarian aid to relieve their conscience, and meanwhile set up electrified razor wire fences with automated turrets and drones at their borders. They're not going to share as much as would be necessary to implement something like UBI worldwide, even at local levels of "subsistence wage".
  • krupan 8y ago
    We've been replacing jobs with automation for a century. It already is the norm. Why are you so worried? EDIT: more thoughts I just finished reading an Asimov novel written in 1955. There were computers in this book. They were people. Computer was a job title. Now we have machines that do that job, and we have an entire new industry employing lots and lots of people that didn't exist before that one job, Computer, was automated.
    • core-questions 8y ago
      It's a good sentiment, but the replacement of fast-food workers with robots won't really open up a whole new field in the same sense. Robotics and AI are wonderful and interesting fields, but honestly, let's not kid ourselves, most people who are flipping burgers probably aren't going to go on to work in the field of building their own replacements.
      • krupan 8y ago
        "the replacement of fast-food workers with robots won't really open up a whole new field in the same sense" No, it won't look exactly like moving from human computers to machine computers. It won't look exactly like moving from manual farming to tractors and combines. It's hard to imagine what it will look like, but it seems overly pessimistic to just assume that this time automation is going to turn out terribly.
        • JoeAltmaier 8y ago
          Just because its been terrible before? The industrial revolution was a time of starvation and death for the families of the displaced. The issue isn't how to keep people busy. That's not a very worthy goal. In the '50s we dreamed of a society where robots took the yoke from our shoulders and let us live better lives. Now that it's happening, all we can talk about is how to get people back to work!
    • cgag 8y ago
      Do you honestly believe this isn't going to be a problem?
  • justfor1comment 8y ago
    Most likely two outcomes. Either everyone will be given a basic income for meeting their needs or the robot revolution will make goods so cheap that very little money/effort will be needed purchase things. Most of the jobs may move to the entertainment and healthcare industry.
    • core-questions 8y ago
      What if we're not satisfied with mincome and soma, and we want something more? With no framework to provide for useful productivity, what will young people end up doing? A lazy population with no way to differentiate and striate financially will find other ways of anteing up over each other, including criminal acts...
      • matz1 8y ago
        Meh, if anything think vr, internet, video games will keep most people occuppaid. Lazy population will be too lazy to bother each other.
    • int_19h 8y ago
      > or the robot revolution will make goods so cheap that very little money/effort will be needed Any such robot revolution would drive the cost of labor down faster than it'd drive the cost of goods. It might just not be immediately visible from every vantage point in society, because economic sectors will be taken out one by one - so today you live like a king because of all that cheap stuff, and tomorrow you can't afford it because you have no job, and hence no paycheck. So some form of basic income would still be needed for many.
  • petra 8y ago
    high skill jobs are at risk too. It's reasonable to assume, given recent tech developments(AI, low code for software, generative design for graphic design/engineering and architecture, blockchain for professions working on trust in transaction like accounting, some automation in the legal field, automation in insurance) that many high-skill professions will suffer unemployment too. And can someone with high-skill job always shift to another high-skill job? pretty hard, many high skill jobs have very high barriers to entry. And could they aim for the low skill burger flipping job ? Who will get the job, some spoiled engineer, or someone who is used to working hard doing hard labor for low pay and may be younger ? So why is everybody under the assumption that high skill jobs are safe ?
    • albertgoeswoof 8y ago
      I don’t think a single one of your examples have resulted in the loss of jobs from those areas. If anything it’s the opposite.
    • lgessler 8y ago
      Software engineering seems safe, if that is what you are primarily thinking of in your question. Developing software at the same level of a skilled engineer is a problem we'd only be able to solve with general AI. Even if program synthesizers (things that take declarative high level requirements and produce code) worked (and they don't at the level required for an non-technical user to use), most engineers today must be involved in the design process, and finding requirements and formulating solutions is a skill that requires humanistic and non-technical intuition.
      • gpm 8y ago
        It's not at all clear that software engineering is safe. Sure there will probably always be a few programmers, but as tools (and soon I expect AI) gets better those programmers can do more and more of the work. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find the number of software engineers decreasing in the not too distant future. The only reason it hasn't already is that we've managed to grow the number of things software developers are doing at the same rate as the increase in number of software developers * the increase in efficiency per software developer. And in some parts of software development (e.g. games) it has.
  • nerdponx 8y ago
    The source of the problem is simple. Real societal value is generated through this activity, but it is reaped entirely by Uniqlo and its stakeholders. Yes, consumers are also a stakeholder, but your typical consumer will receive very little or no direct benefit from this change. Eventually, yes, the profits will be reinvested, but the impact will be so diluted as to be a noticeable. Some small fraction of it will probably also go to tax evasion, being expatriated or sequestered by wealthy upper management. Meanwhile, a whole lot of people are suddenly out of work, imposing significant negative externalities on them and their families. This could conceivably ruin a marriage, or turn a good parent into a raging alcoholic. It may well be that the negative gain to society (in the form of laying off so many employees) has severe follow-on effects, and in terms of net welfare this could do more harm than good. The effects of leaving the workers out of the profit-sharing is more than just a matter of equity. Without redistribution of the welfare created by automation, it's perfectly conceivable that the net welfare gain is negative due to the negative second-order effects outweighing the positive second-order effects. This is the stuff they don't teach you in Econ 101, but it's how things really work.
    • ColanR 8y ago
      The other thing they don't teach you in Econ 101 is that treating corporations as obligated to keep and preserve jobs prevents them from creating societal value, and treating workers as entitled to a job disincentivises the invention of new methods of creating societal value. It causes stagnation of the economy.
      • knieveltech 8y ago
        And what is Econ 201's solution to pervasive unemployment, or lack of spending power due to underemployment? Is that also classified as "societal value"?
        • stale2002 8y ago
          I'm not sure if you have noticed, but unemployment is at a multi decade low. We are not seeing pervasive unemployment, we are seeing the opposite. A situation where there are too many jobs, and not enough workers to fill them So econ 201 would say that there isn't any societial problem right now.
  • fixermark 8y ago
    In the US, the biggest plurality employment sector by a long shot is long-haul transportation. It's going to be an interesting next 25-or-so years as self-driving vehicle technology moves to Level 4 or 5 readiness and the people with a significant vested interest in long-term investment in driving down transportation cost displace a major chunk of America's workforce.
  • brycehamrick 8y ago
    The "job" as a foundation of modern life is the result of the industrialized revolution and, while it served its purposed, is something we need to abandon as quickly as possible. Corporations don't have a monopoly on economic value creation. We should be, as a government and society, encouraging independent tradesmen/women, entrepreneurship, and artisanry. If we can manage that, job loss due to automation is no longer an issue.
    • DrNuke 8y ago
      Jobs are a way to exert social control, though. The dystopian solution is to reopen gulags and labor camps to re-educate people. Oh, wait...
    • cycrutchfield 8y ago
      You realize that "cottage industry" is not necessarily an aspirational concept, right?
    • nerdponx 8y ago
      We can't manage it until we remove employment as the sole condition for access to basic services like healthcare. We also need to ensure that people are able to retrain themselves if/when their job becomes obsolete.
      • Schwolop 8y ago
        The rest of the world _has_ worked this first point out. The US is close enough to the only developed country that ties healthcare to employment. The second point is a given in the more socialised parts of Europe, and is a core tenet of most support programs for the involuntarily unemployed elsewhere. Which is to say; I don't get your point. Sounds like everywhere but the US could do this right now.
      • grecy 8y ago
        > We can't manage it until we remove employment as the sole condition for access to basic services like healthcare Many countries don't have that limitation.
  • golemiprague 8y ago
    It is not a problem, it is a blessing, it means countries will not have to keep sustaining the pyramid scheme of population growth and will not need massive immigration which only cause problems in the long run. This is how Japan can keep its culture and healthy society while not increasing its population, actually reducing it which is also good for the environment.
  • forkLding 8y ago
    Theres already a lot of automation at car factories and places which heavily rely on machinery to produce goods. I remember seeing that the only people needed is people to repair the machinery if it broke down and the whole manufacturing process being automated with self-driving carts moving around the materials. Note this was a Toyota factory, so it could be skewed.
  • nirelBRACIT0S 8y ago
    As Steve Jobs used to say: “if you can’t buy an iPhone you deserve nothing”
  • mc32 8y ago
    Doesn’t that depend on the characteristics of the work robots are replacing in modern economies? Let’s take Japan, ftom the article. They are replacing warehouse workers. Demographically, Japan is experiencing a shrinking workforce. So, the issue isn’t exactly whether ribots replace workers, but whether the pace of replacement is in sync with the reduction in the aging workforce.
  • keerthiko 8y ago
    Modern societies need to figure out distribution of economic power that isn't based on employment. Of all the things corporations should be held responsible for, directly propping up low-skill labor employment opportunities shouldn't be one of them. Employment and jobs should stop being used as fundamental economic indicators. The naive approach would be to just increase overall corporate taxes, reduce payroll taxes (so companies are mildly incentivized to pay humans) and more effectively redistribute tax income to society. The problem with this is the geographic inflexibility of this approach, as Amazon could be sucking up tons of resources from Florida and no amount of taxation on Amazon really pays back to Florida. Surely we can eventually come up with a better system to let companies optimize their business practices (net value++) and redistributing those improvements across society?
  • TYPE_FASTER 8y ago
    The US already sent most of these jobs offshore a few decades ago. Automation has been improving efficiency, and slowly decreasing the physical labor market, since then (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/welcoming-our-new-robot-overlords https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/welcoming-our-...), but the majority of the physical world jobs being displaced by automation will be in China.
  • MisterOctober 8y ago
    Truly. Minimum [to say nothing of market!] wages are climbing fast in my state, and I have heard real chatter from business owners about implementing [robot] automation on the production line / warehouse sooner rather than later. Another industry I have knowledge of, orcharding, is moving toward harvest automation at an astonishing rate, driven mainly by the rapidly-escalating cost of labor [having to pay for H2B visa costs, the disappearance of harvest-following migrant worker bands in favor of more professionalized workers who demand pay greater than the prevailing minimum wage, regulations that require orchardists provide quality housing [at a cost upwards of $10k/worker/year] and pay for rest periods, rising liability / workers' comp insurance costs, etc. Adoption of automation in the orcharding sector is increasing as cost of equipment falls -- for example, two years ago, a typical apple harvest machine [which replaces a crew of, say, ~20 humans] cost in the neighborhood of $500k, whereas today viable models are available at half that. My understanding is that the vineyard industry is even further along in implementing automation, owing to the relative simplicity of their harvest process.
  • __s 8y ago
    I'd suggest reading The Driver, by Garet Garrett
  • Bombthecat 8y ago
    I like the movie elysium.
  • unicornporn 8y ago
    ≥ I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Increasing productivity is kind of the point with automation. So unless demand drastically increases, it seems highly unlikely.
  • grey-area 8y ago
    I'm not of the opinion that this automation will create an equal number of jobs for the ones they replace. Historically people do shift to other tasks and society adapts, but this takes a generation and we can expect massive disruption, suffering and unrest in the coming decades across the world as manual labour (drivers, pickers, sorters, assemblers) are replaced by machines.
• taneq 8y ago
  It's OK, the staff will just find new jobs as electronics engineers and machine learning researchers. /s
  • hrktb 8y ago
    I see the /s, but these workers are well educated, as any average Japanese is, relatively speaking. It’s not that of an ordeal for them to move to another job.
    • x220 8y ago
      >move to another job And when that job gets automated?
      • darkstar999 8y ago
        We used to be 90%+ farmers. We'll find a way.
        • lghh 8y ago
          Yes, we plan on finding a way. That's why we're discussing alternatives. We can find a way by accident.
          • codefined 8y ago
            So, the first shift was manual labour being automated during the industrial revolution. Now slowly intellectual jobs are being replaced. The only unique aspect a human has after this are emotional jobs (psychiatrist, etc). There are not enough emotional jobs that can be created to fulfill 7 billion people (a quickly rising number). I think we're going to need a shift in the mindset of people. Jobs aren't required, we should instead look at increasing recreational activities available to people and try to enjoy our lives.
            • x220 8y ago
• excalibur 8y ago
  How about instead of selling robots to companies to replace their laborers, we sell robots to the workers to do their jobs. You keep getting paid as long as you keep your robot running.
  • ardy42 8y ago
    > How about instead of selling robots to companies to replace their laborers, we sell robots to the workers to do their jobs. You keep getting paid as long as you keep your robot running. You're basically talking about the democratization of capital. Companies and their owners will resist it tooth and nail, since they want to reap the dividends. I don't think we'll get to a world like that, with former laborers owning the automation that replaced them, without some kind of radically new regulatory regime or an outright revolution.
    • merpnderp 8y ago
      Yeah, you'd have to curtail the freedom of some people to own robots and drastically limit how others could use them. This is a non-starter for most voters.
      • ardy42 8y ago
        > This is a non-starter for most voters. Only to the degree that they've been trained to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and identify more with the interests of the owners than their own personal interests.
        • dymk 8y ago
          How do you think a law would work, which would only allow floor workers to own/operate robots, but not the workers (the CEO/warehouse foreman) that oversee other workers?
          • ardy42 8y ago
            > How do you think a law would work, which would only allow floor workers to own/operate robots, but not the workers (the CEO/warehouse foreman) that oversee other workers? I don't think "most voters" who don't see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires would shed a tear if CEOs, business owners, members of the management and ownership class, etc. had their ability to own robots limited. At least after some consideration of what where most labor was replaced by automation would look like. So I object to the idea that such a law would be "a non-starter for most voters." I'm not a legislator who's spent a lot of time thinking how such a law would be implemented, but you could probably accomplish with some kind of per-capita ownership limit. A CEO could still own robots, but not any more than a pleb to make a difference. They'd have to employ the pleb's robots instead of buying all they need themselves. That gets around the problem of classifying people. There's still the problem of determining the overall number to be rationed, and that probably requires a bit more thought than I have time to give right now. Though part of it could probably be modeled after the present-day labor market.
• harlanji 8y ago
  Any word about their severance packages? That’s what determines if I keep shopping there. Salary for a reasonable job search period and I can’t hold it against them.
• kpil 8y ago
  Well, Parkinsons law seems to be intact so we will all work in middle management in a few decades, all responsible for requesting service level agreements from each others legal department AIs.
• apercu 8y ago
  I worked in a warehouse for a summer in school because the hours fit around my other job and the pay was little higher than some other options (retail). But the Teamsters union ran the show and it was so political that I went back to the food/beverage service business. All that said, it's too bad that warehouse work isn't going to be an option for many people. There are fewer and fewer jobs for a lot of people. Note: I support Unions and wish we had more. That union, however....
  • saas_sam 8y ago
    Just curious but why do you think other unions are better than the one you had experience with? (Not looking to argue just genuinely curious in your perspective, thanks.)
  • mjevans 8y ago
    It would be better for all if there were enough unions for a choice to be had there, and if negotiations were across all unions and businesses 'in a sector' at a time. This way there isn't a dramatic power imbalance... * Big corp VS single worker * Monopoly on labor (Union required) VS single corp * Monopoly on type of job (Union required) VS single worker That gives a choice at every possible side, and also gives the worker the option of switching unions if the political leadership of one is poor or they have bad support/promotion. It also gives sets of businesses and sets of worker pools the opportunity to reach the most amicable agreement for the compensation and treatment of works as possible. This does nothing to reflect larger economic imbalances caused by things like minimum wage, but it could slow or reverse the deterioration of the middle class and increase stability of workers within an area which would promote more investment in having a community there and fixing things like insane housing costs.
  • briandear 8y ago
    > That union, however.... Exactly. All unions become "that union" when given enough power and influence.
    • lexs 8y ago
      That's a gross generalisation and I would strongly disagree, this boogeyman of the evil union gets trotted out every time in tech forums like hackernews.
• DrNuke 8y ago
  You do not need to be a socialist to understand there is something inherently going badly wrong for the masses here.
  • endtime 8y ago
    Wouldn't a socialist be happy that the laborers are no longer being exploited?
    • DrNuke 8y ago
      The masses still need to eat or are we just letting them starve?
      • endtime 8y ago
        Socialists generally tend to favor starvation, I believe.
        • mschuster91 8y ago
          I'm a socialist and yet I believe that neither Stalin's Gulags nor Mao's mass hunger deaths are something that should be repeated. Authoritarian socialism has been proven to not work, what the world desperately needs is liberal/libertarian socialism. We can learn from history - ok, those who openly fly the Nazi flag not, but majority of society can see the problems like homelessness, drug epidemics and exploding rents.
          • refurb 8y ago
            Libertarian socialism? So a minimal govt that owns all the means of production? My head just exploded.
            • fucking_tragedy 8y ago
              The word libertarianism originally referred to a socialist school of thought[0]. > Traditionally, libertarianism was a term for a form of left-wing politics; such left-libertarian ideologies seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production, or else to restrict their purview or effects, in favor of common or cooperative ownership and management, viewing private property as a barrier to freedom and liberty. In the United States, modern right-libertarian ideologies, such as minarchism and anarcho-capitalism, co-opted the term in the mid-20th century to instead advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights, such as in land, infrastructure, and natural resources. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
• pg_bot 8y ago
  I will remind the doomsayers in this thread that someone getting a job is not mainstream news. You should not treat humans as machines that are only capable of performing a single task. We are not left to the dustbin of history if replaced by machinery. Humankind's desires and creativity seems to be limitless which gives me optimism when thinking about the future.
• zawerf 8y ago
  I've heard the argument that this situation is unique to japan due to their aging population and low birthrate. They don't have cheap teenagers to exploit at minimum wages which is why automation is even financially worth it. The amount they are spending ($887 million) can hire 60,000 years of labor at $15,000/yr.
  • mschuster91 8y ago
    The point is, it's introduced there because it's profitable even if the robots suck but are more productive as a human. The experiences gained, though, will lead to the robots becoming cheaper and cheaper until the robots are on par with Western wages, and then hell will break loose. Japanese society right now is paying the R&D and the western countries, especially the US, will suck up all the profits. The one question that remains, though: who will buy all the products when large swaths of the population don't have a job to feed themselves?
  • gkanai 8y ago
    > I've heard the argument that this situation is unique to japan due to their aging population and low birthrate. There are many other countries (Italy, S. Korea, others) that have the same aging population and low birthrate.
• kmlx 8y ago
  Japan has always embraced automation, is a staple in robotics and overall could prove to be a good model to have instead of the constant fear mongering about automation in the west. It’s not like this sort of change hasn’t happend before; it’s just that now we have the internet which amplifies our fears (and there’s also lots more of us on the planet).
  • cloudbubble 8y ago
    I remember I read an article about how in Japan, they see robots as their friend, as something innate with spirit because in Shinto everything has a spirit, so they embrace them much more easily. Whereas we in the west see robots as our enemy, something to compete against.
    • mschuster91 8y ago
      Japanese companies generally have a better employee relationship. Granted, some parts of it are exploitative, but at least workers are treated like family and not like exchangeable cogs like in Western cutthroat capitalism. There's respect and decency shown, whereas in the US it is common and legal to be fired on the spot, in some states even for no reason.
• acd 8y ago
  The Question is if Robots should pay income tax? Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income. Tax wise do you replace the replaced workers with zero tax robots or do you tax robot workers? When a company do not pay tax or pay lower tax they do not pay for schools and roads. That is not cool. We still need roads and schools to build a future society. Ie the bigger question is that of income distribution. Do you give all the money gained from the robots to the very few percentage who owns the store? What if a majority of worlds work are automated by robots. How do you tax for the global warming that the store new low cost labor produces? In other words as products starts to almost cost zero to consume but we are having global warming. How do we price so that we do not over consume cheap meaningless stuff?
  • ajross 8y ago
    > Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income. Robots should pay tax in exactly the same way that the wheel, internal combustion engine, fire, chemical fertilizer, electric motor or stone axe paid tax. You're trying to do macroeconomics (calculate tax revenue) with a microeconomic analysis (looking at one task/job in isolation). What happens in practice is that the people displaced by productivity gains (shoemakers, maybe) eventually find work in the broader economy doing jobs (like programming computers) that were previously infeasible due to labor costs but now have access to cheaper labor. Obviously there are social aspects about distribution and justice inherent to rapid change like this. But they have nothing to do with tax revenue.
  • delecti 8y ago
    > The Question is if Robots should pay income tax? Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income. That's not a sensible question. Every tool or piece of hardware is an efficiency multiplier for the human benefiting from it. You wouldn't charge income tax to a carpenter's table saw, even though they're suddenly not having to use a handsaw that takes 10 times as long. There's no rational way to implement an income tax on efficiency boosting tools.
  • dgzl 8y ago
    From an initial speculation on the subject, I don't believe we should tax robot workers, on the basis that it would be too difficult to logically create legislation for, especially considering the tech-knowledge of our legislators. How would we measure? If it's per-robot, businesses would just figure a way of linking the computers together and calling them 'one'. If it's per-output, then what is a 'robot' vs computer/software, that exists in virtually every business already? Would it be fair giving small businesses another tax, for investing in computers and technology instead of human manpower?
• imagiko 8y ago
  I have wondered at what point will job cuts start affecting the overall supply demand equation as more and more people get out of work and will have less spending capacity. Who will buy more 'stuff' and how? We don't know at what rate the jobs will be replaced, if at all. What will be the equilibrium point then?
  • GoToRO 8y ago
    If everything will be automated then "time with a human" will be really expensive. Why work 8h/day when you can buy everything with very little money (automation)? You will work 1h/day and ask a full salary for it. The only problem are changes that come too fast and people have no time to adapt. Exactly what startups try to do, to disrupt stuff.
• cloudbubble 8y ago
  It's not just cutting out jobs that it is a problem, it's also the over-supply of clothing and 'fast-fashion' which is creating extra garbage. Auto-mating these things and making it cheaper and easier to move clothes around is only beneficial to those at the top of the capitalism chain - it's not particularly great for the planet.
  • hikarudo 8y ago
    The people buying those clothes are doing so because they see value out of doing it, so it's beneficial so them as well. Your point about externalities is still valid, though.
• throw2016 8y ago
  Technology is not stoppable and if jobs are going to be lost they will be. Ultimately all tech has been absorbed into society. But many also cynically use 'threats' of technology to scaremonger and try to keep wages low. This is incredibly exploitative. For instance this story itself is thin on details and talks up 90% without mentioning the actual numbers or details of the automation. Amazon bought Kiva and while the robots are used they continue to hire aggressively. If McDonalds or anyone else can use robots efficiently today they will. No company is employing workers out of goodwill but because they need them. If one must worry current trends show the environment may create far more disruption than automation.
• woodpanel 8y ago
  Actually sad since manual laborers are wonderful robots. It's just that they get pricier ever since. Things that make them less advantageous to robots are (e.g): - the used up demographic dividend of China (with no real replacement in sight) - western population decline - western population aging - west's much better off population, uninterested in manual labor (at least as mid/long term job) - rising minimum wages - rising costs of employment - tightening immigration laws etc.
• dvcrn 8y ago
  I love uniqlo doubling down on tech. One thing I found really interesting is that inside the labels are small rfid (I think?) chips. At the cashier, the person just folds them nicely, puts the pile of cloth on a metal pad and the system tells you how many items and how much it is. No manual code scanning!! The first time I noticed that I felt like a kid again discovering something magical. The next step was to have person-less cashiers with the same system which works great too. So a completely autonomous store was just the next logical way to go.
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  • bostonvaulter2 8y ago
    Do those tags stay on the clothes afterward? Or are those external to the clothes?
    • dvcrn 8y ago
      The staff told me it’s inside the price label so I’m guessing it stays on
  • calvinbhai 8y ago
    I haven't noticed that in the US stores (NJ specifically). Is this specific to some countries where Uniqlo operates?
  • ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
    Our local public library has a similar system. You check out your books by placing the pile on a sensor and a screen lists the books you placed there, then you scan your library card and it's done. To return them, you put them down a chute that scans them as returned instantly (then still goes into a bin for staff to return them to shelf). There's half a dozen of these automated checkouts, and 1 staff person elsewhere at a desk for support, questions, info, etc. There's also terminals all over the library that you can use to search for books, games, DVDs, etc, and it'll tell you where they are and if they're available or checked out, and if checked out, when they're due back so you can reserve them.
• teslaberry 8y ago
  i cannot wait until better robots replace these shitty lazy robots that are now coming in.
• flerchin 8y ago
  Automation has never been more prevalent, and total employment has never been higher.
• bamboozled 8y ago
  It would be good to see some actual figures here, how many staff were replaced? It says it’s a new warehouse, so why would there have been staff in the first place ? The trouble with percentages is they can easily be misinterpreted. Having spent my fair share of time in Japan, I’d bet there are still plenty of people working st that warehouse and around the clock.
• cwkoss 8y ago
  Seems like folding the clothes and placing them onto displays might be the hardest task to automate.
• lsy 8y ago
  This article needs a lot more detail before it can even begin to be used as an indicator of impending rapid mass technological unemployment. The huge, mostly mechanical system pictured in the Japan News article doesn't visually differ much from AS/RS systems that have been developing for fifty years. And according to the linked Reuters article, Uniqlo doesn't appear to be benefiting from AI or breakthrough tech, but is merely attempting to deploy automated warehouses, a relatively old technology, globally. Barring new details, this article doesn't describe the beginning of an avalanche of robot workers, but an established $XXm custom build process entered into by the latest company with sufficient scale, margins, capital, etc to make it worth the investment.
• nopinsight 8y ago
  There will be a great deal more demand in the healthcare sector all over the developed world in the coming decades. Japan is leading the way with the oldest demographics among large economies. Its demographics leads Western Europe by a decade or so and perhaps a couple more for the US. We should start training people for jobs like homecare assistance, nursing home care, etc and developing institutions and solutions for funding them. An apprenticeship program complemented by some classes might work better than college for these jobs. The jobs do require some skills but they are skills most people can acquire with good training. The latent demand is enormous and the work is potentially more fulfilling than moving stuff around a warehouse.
  • new_guy 8y ago
    By the time they're trained up the robots will have taken their jobs too. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/06/japan-robots-will-care-for-80-of-elderly-by-2020 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/06/japan-robots-w... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5014079/15-000-robot-look-elderly-Southend-care-home.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5014079/15-000-ro... I love technology, but honestly I find this terrifying. People aren't just going to be unemployed, they're going to be unemployable. This how workers must have felt during the first industrial revolution, I'd say we're in the second one now.
    • nopinsight 8y ago
      Home assistance and nursing assistant jobs require competence in a large number of highly varied tasks and many require human-style intelligence which is among the hardest to automate from our experience with AI research. (See Moravec’s Paradox.) It will be at least a couple decades, likely longer, until we can really automate those jobs cost effectively, which gives us time to reconfigure socio-economic systems to suit the burgeoning new industrial revolution. Check out the following predictions by a noted roboticist and former director of MIT’s CSAIL https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ Example from the page: Dexterous robot hands generally available. NET (Not Earlier Than) 2030 It will take at least a decade and often longer for a hardware product to become affordable to the masses. So we are talking about 2040 or later when most of home caring jobs will be at risk. Even then, the need for human interaction will still be there so it is unclear if most elderly would not want human services if it is accessible to them.
• m3kw9 8y ago
  For those who are making a big deal out of this here, please disregard any factories that use machines. Just because the machines were there first doesn’t make it different, they could have hired workers in place of the machines.
• somberi 8y ago
  Surfacing it from the POV of retailer's reality. Uniqlo's net profits(2) at ~ 20% are higher than what is mentioned below for American Retailers (2) From: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/the-pay-is-too-damn-low https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/the-pay-is-too... In 1960, the country’s biggest employer, General Motors, was also its most profitable company and one of its best-paying. It had high profit margins and real pricing power, even as it was paying its workers union wages. And it was not alone: firms like Ford, Standard Oil, and Bethlehem Steel employed huge numbers of well-paid workers while earning big profits. Today, the country’s biggest employers are retailers and fast-food chains, almost all of which have built their businesses on low pay—they’ve striven to keep wages down and unions out—and low prices. This complicates things, in part because of the nature of these businesses. They make plenty of money, but most have slim profit margins: Walmart and Target earn between three and four cents on the dollar; (2) https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/12/business/corporate-business/fast-retailing-net-profit-23-5-brisk-uniqlo-sales-u-s-china-trade-spat-impacts-limited-cfo/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/12/business/corpor...
• zeuslawyer 8y ago
  How are people going to pay for things if they're not earning income? Who are the customers going to be if not employees of organisations?