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I think the article has it backwards. The US and similar nations will be the least affected by this. Nations like India will be hit the hardest. Humans are fle

I think the article has it backwards. The US and similar nations will be the least affected by this. Nations like India will be hit the hardest. Humans are flexible. Machines typically aren't. The more automation exists in a facility, the less flexible it becomes. Until we hit AGI, I think there is a cap on how automated a facility should (not can) become. A critical piece of this is that highly automated systems are expensive, and difficult to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion. Thus, using humans to tie systems together limits the amount invested in automation, and can save you money in the long run. US manufacturers are already aware of this, as some are dealing with the effects of aging overly automated production lines. All of this depends on what you're making and what quantity, but until we reach AGI, over-automating is a mistake manufacturers have made and will make again. In the US and similar, we've automated about as much as we could given existing technology. Newly available technology raises the automation cap a bit, but not that much. Contrast this with nations which are just getting to the point where mass automation is available and have a spiking per capita income. They're much more likely to see massive amounts of automation, proportional to their increasing wages.

epberry 8y ago
I agree with this. I think people are looking at the wrong layer for automation. Frontline workers will exist for a long time because of their flexibility and dexterity. I think automation will largely impact one level up - at the supervisor/manager level. My bet is on cameras and computer vision to be the enabling technology for this.
contingencies 8y ago
Nations like India will be hit the hardest When the majority of the population is essentially living extremely efficiently on a vegetarian diet without so much as personal transport, one should expect very little economic shock from issues as remote and abstract as gradual technology change. In addition, in many parts of India electricity is not yet reliable enough and corruption too endemic to allow the confident adoption of industrial automation. highly automated systems are expensive, and difficult to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion Highly automated systems are cheaper and more capable than ever, and getting cheaper. They are easy to justify on a budget because they pay for themselves in saved wages, 24x7x365 operation, and reduced error. Two examples are the dozens of companies now producing (1) industrial robot arms; and (2) warehouse goods transport robots at scale in China. You can design automated systems for modular upgrade, it just means accepting the costs for that up front. Often it doesn't make sense to do so, because by the time it matters you can probably design a new facility to pilot new off-the-shelf technology before retroactively updating prior sites. I believe major western companies use this approach for iterating data center designs, for example. In the US and similar, we've automated about as much as we could given existing technology. Newly available technology raises the automation cap a bit, but not that much. Strongly disagree. Just a few examples of areas the US has dropped the ball on despite access to technology would be: mobile payment, sustainable energy, transport, agriculture, health care, retail banking. From outside this often seems to be the case because the US domestic macro-economy is against change for reasons of monopoly, litigation, regulatory configuration, educational focus or similar. It seems that the technologies and social configuration being deployed in China today are likely to be the forebears of living arrangements for the majority of urban populations globally in the near future: package dropboxes (HiveBox), mobile payment (WeChat), high speed rail, nationalized critical infrastructure, etc. This is largely because they have, versus the US, what Tony Fadell recently described as "last mover advantage" and a population comfortable with socially mandated solutions. https://overcast.fm/+Lkc1bqy8c https://overcast.fm/+Lkc1bqy8c
- sdinsn 8y ago
  > When the majority of the population is essentially living extremely efficiently on a vegetarian diet without so much as personal transport, one should expect very little economic shock from issues as remote and abstract as gradual technology change That does not make sense...
  - contingencies 8y ago
    if(population.de_linked_from_technology && population.resource_consumption_effectively_trivial) { assert(is_irrelevant(gradual_technology_change)); }
    - intertextuality 8y ago
      Rewriting the same incongruent phrase in pseudo-code does nothing to help your case. The phrase doesn't make sense logically. You don't have to be an avid consumer of technology to be affected by gradual technology change.
      - contingencies 8y ago
        Have you been to rural India? Many people don't even have reliable power. Industrial automation trajectories are so far removed from their reality as to be fairy tales.
- contingencies 8y ago
  Just read a paragraph very relevant to the reasons why the US has, arguably, lost it. A leading Chinese history scholar on the criticality of the Renaissance on birthing modernity in Europe... The further I penetrate into the detailed history of the achievements of Chinese science and technology before the time when, like all other ethnic cultural rivers, they flowed into the ocean of modern science, the more convinced I become that the cause for the breakthrough (occurring only in Europe) was connected with the special social, intellectual and economic conditions prevailing there at the Renaissance, and can never be explained by any deficiencies either of the Chinese mind or of the Chinese intellectual and philosophical tradition. In many ways this tradition was much more congruent with modern science than was the world-outlook of Christendom. - Joseph Needham, page 2, Part 2 (Science and Society in East and West: General Conclusions and Reflections), Volume 7, of Needham's Science and Civilisation in China (2004) This posits the question: are the social, intellectual and economic conditions prevailing in the US the root of its problems? Perhaps that swamp should be drained first.
vinni2 8y ago
> Nations like India will be hit the hardest. Which is why India is banning things like self driving cars. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40716296 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40716296
- kamaal 8y ago
  That is not the kind of productivity that is the problem. People are talking more on the lines of factory and industrial automation. Please note in countries like India, land fragmentation, and lack of machinery to do mass farming/industrializing food production is the core of the problem. There are also a range of things that might have to be done. Including taxing agricultural returns, defragmenting land ownerships, and changing nonsensical laws like letting only the farmers progeny be farmers. Then of course letting import of equipment to industrialize food production etc etc. But India being India, I expect these things to happen at the very last moment. Like when everything is about to melt.
- aitchnyu 8y ago
  The Union transport minister still wants level 2 features like adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning etc even as he banned level 3 vehicles. https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/new-vehicle-will-soon-have-intelligent-breaks-to-stop-automatically-and-avoid-accident-352594.html https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/new-vehicle-will-soon-...
- b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago
  I'd wager they are banning 'self-driving-cars' for the fact India is extremely crowded and the number of pedestrians and scooters. The swarm of mopeds there is like a horde of locusts.
kamaal 8y ago
>>Nations like India will be hit the hardest. This is what a minister in the Central Government has to say: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/there-are-no-jobs-quota-won-t-guarantee-employment-says-union-minister-nitin-gadkari/story-69xBxMVXkMc1fONtgUSUUI.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/there-are-no-jobs-... This situation in India has been pretty much anticipated since the late 1980s. I'm guessing eventually India will pass laws and enact reforms to increase agricultural productivity and some kind of UBI scheme on the longer run.

epberry 8y ago

I agree with this. I think people are looking at the wrong layer for automation. Frontline workers will exist for a long time because of their flexibility and dexterity. I think automation will largely impact one level up - at the supervisor/manager level. My bet is on cameras and computer vision to be the enabling technology for this.

contingencies 8y ago

Nations like India will be hit the hardest When the majority of the population is essentially living extremely efficiently on a vegetarian diet without so much as personal transport, one should expect very little economic shock from issues as remote and abstract as gradual technology change. In addition, in many parts of India electricity is not yet reliable enough and corruption too endemic to allow the confident adoption of industrial automation. highly automated systems are expensive, and difficult to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion Highly automated systems are cheaper and more capable than ever, and getting cheaper. They are easy to justify on a budget because they pay for themselves in saved wages, 24x7x365 operation, and reduced error. Two examples are the dozens of companies now producing (1) industrial robot arms; and (2) warehouse goods transport robots at scale in China. You can design automated systems for modular upgrade, it just means accepting the costs for that up front. Often it doesn't make sense to do so, because by the time it matters you can probably design a new facility to pilot new off-the-shelf technology before retroactively updating prior sites. I believe major western companies use this approach for iterating data center designs, for example. In the US and similar, we've automated about as much as we could given existing technology. Newly available technology raises the automation cap a bit, but not that much. Strongly disagree. Just a few examples of areas the US has dropped the ball on despite access to technology would be: mobile payment, sustainable energy, transport, agriculture, health care, retail banking. From outside this often seems to be the case because the US domestic macro-economy is against change for reasons of monopoly, litigation, regulatory configuration, educational focus or similar. It seems that the technologies and social configuration being deployed in China today are likely to be the forebears of living arrangements for the majority of urban populations globally in the near future: package dropboxes (HiveBox), mobile payment (WeChat), high speed rail, nationalized critical infrastructure, etc. This is largely because they have, versus the US, what Tony Fadell recently described as "last mover advantage" and a population comfortable with socially mandated solutions. https://overcast.fm/+Lkc1bqy8c https://overcast.fm/+Lkc1bqy8c

sdinsn 8y ago
> When the majority of the population is essentially living extremely efficiently on a vegetarian diet without so much as personal transport, one should expect very little economic shock from issues as remote and abstract as gradual technology change That does not make sense...
- contingencies 8y ago
  if(population.de_linked_from_technology && population.resource_consumption_effectively_trivial) { assert(is_irrelevant(gradual_technology_change)); }
  - intertextuality 8y ago
    Rewriting the same incongruent phrase in pseudo-code does nothing to help your case. The phrase doesn't make sense logically. You don't have to be an avid consumer of technology to be affected by gradual technology change.
    - contingencies 8y ago
      Have you been to rural India? Many people don't even have reliable power. Industrial automation trajectories are so far removed from their reality as to be fairy tales.
contingencies 8y ago
Just read a paragraph very relevant to the reasons why the US has, arguably, lost it. A leading Chinese history scholar on the criticality of the Renaissance on birthing modernity in Europe... The further I penetrate into the detailed history of the achievements of Chinese science and technology before the time when, like all other ethnic cultural rivers, they flowed into the ocean of modern science, the more convinced I become that the cause for the breakthrough (occurring only in Europe) was connected with the special social, intellectual and economic conditions prevailing there at the Renaissance, and can never be explained by any deficiencies either of the Chinese mind or of the Chinese intellectual and philosophical tradition. In many ways this tradition was much more congruent with modern science than was the world-outlook of Christendom. - Joseph Needham, page 2, Part 2 (Science and Society in East and West: General Conclusions and Reflections), Volume 7, of Needham's Science and Civilisation in China (2004) This posits the question: are the social, intellectual and economic conditions prevailing in the US the root of its problems? Perhaps that swamp should be drained first.

vinni2 8y ago

> Nations like India will be hit the hardest. Which is why India is banning things like self driving cars. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40716296 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40716296

kamaal 8y ago
That is not the kind of productivity that is the problem. People are talking more on the lines of factory and industrial automation. Please note in countries like India, land fragmentation, and lack of machinery to do mass farming/industrializing food production is the core of the problem. There are also a range of things that might have to be done. Including taxing agricultural returns, defragmenting land ownerships, and changing nonsensical laws like letting only the farmers progeny be farmers. Then of course letting import of equipment to industrialize food production etc etc. But India being India, I expect these things to happen at the very last moment. Like when everything is about to melt.
aitchnyu 8y ago
The Union transport minister still wants level 2 features like adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning etc even as he banned level 3 vehicles. https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/new-vehicle-will-soon-have-intelligent-breaks-to-stop-automatically-and-avoid-accident-352594.html https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/new-vehicle-will-soon-...
b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago
I'd wager they are banning 'self-driving-cars' for the fact India is extremely crowded and the number of pedestrians and scooters. The swarm of mopeds there is like a horde of locusts.

kamaal 8y ago

>>Nations like India will be hit the hardest. This is what a minister in the Central Government has to say: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/there-are-no-jobs-quota-won-t-guarantee-employment-says-union-minister-nitin-gadkari/story-69xBxMVXkMc1fONtgUSUUI.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/there-are-no-jobs-... This situation in India has been pretty much anticipated since the late 1980s. I'm guessing eventually India will pass laws and enact reforms to increase agricultural productivity and some kind of UBI scheme on the longer run.