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Robots 'to replace up to 20M factory jobs' by 2030
- true_tuna 7y agoThat seems low
- ladberg 7y ago2030 isn't that far away. Do you think we could automate more than 2M jobs/year for the next 10 years? I kinda doubt it.
- oneplane 7y agoA lot of 'jobs' are just repetitive unschooled work. Hardly something you indefinitely need a human for.
- meruru 7y agoOn a long enough scale all jobs are.
- oneplane 7y agoTrue, but not the scale of a current human lifetime. Mostly because humans are not good with change (which is ironic because humans change everything around them). At the same time, at some point if all 'jobs' are no longer needed that would either mean humanity no longer exists or that scarcity no longer exists. In all other cases we'd still have some weird mix of what we have today and what we may have in the future.
- true_tuna 7y agoI work in robotics automation. The industry is poised for massive improvements in orchestration efficiency. Robotics currently does not take advantage of several known and trusted technologies. That alone will be huge. If we count the automation of driving jobs and efficiency improvements due to machine learning, I’d say the number is low.
- AareyBaba 7y agoWhat are these known and trusted technologies ?
- sitkack 7y agoFeedback for one, many industrial robots operate entirely open-loop. It was invented in 1927, so robotics has some catching up to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-feedback_amplifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-feedback_amplifier
- deelowe 7y agoCan you elaborate? I'm not seeing the connection.
- Nyandalized 7y agoRobotics could be much more efficient, require less maintenance and cause less havoc when malfunctioning. That alone reduces the amount of jobs required by a fair bit
- deelowe 7y agoWhat does this have to do with robots running "open loop?"
- Spooky23 7y agoAbsolutely. Government agencies i’m familiar with dropped about half of their processing and tabulation staff in the 90s. An agency with 12,000 employees in 1989 has 5,000 today. About another 50-75% will be gone in a decade or two. Most of the case management, IT, program staff and big legal shops are bloated with legacy paper processing and old business process. As that disappears, so will the jobs.
- yread 7y agoJust think of how many IT departments will disappear into the clouds
- randomdata 7y agoJob is a rather loaded term. How, exactly, are we defining it here? If your job was to weld two pieces of metal together and a robot now welds those pieces of metal together, but you transitioned to oversee the operation for quality control, strictly speaking, you lost your job to automation, but you didn't lose your 'job'. Will two million people per year give up tasks they currently do to robots? Probably. That doesn't seem unrealistic at all. Will two million more people per year find themselves in the unemployment line? Probably not. What's interesting is that (in the US), while manufacturing represented a larger share of the workforce in the past, the absolute number of people involved in manufacturing is relatively unchanged. The so-called decline of manufacturing is more a result of population growth than anything. Automation has allowed individuals to produce more, but it hasn't eliminated the people. The jobs that they do have no doubt changed considerably due to automation.
- GarrisonPrime 7y agoPerhaps because the majority of factory jobs have already disappeared. Not much left for the 'bots to replace.
- crdoconnor 7y ago>But this report presents a more nuanced view, stressing that the productivity benefits from automation should boost growth, meaning as many jobs are created as lost. Way to bury the lede, Rory.
- true_tuna 7y agoHigh technology jobs that you can only get if you went to college and got a technical degree. Which is disproportionately available to families who are already wealthy. Meaning the working class gets hollowed out, the rich and powerful get more rich and powerful and the unemployment and related addiction crisis get even worse. Yay! Brave new future.
- pault 7y agoWell, given that many of the readers of this forum, including myself, never went to college yet manage to pull down a healthy six figure salary, I think the actual situation is a bit more nuanced. Developers making a cushy living are firmly within what used to be considered the middle class, and if you take into account the stagnation of wage growth over the last 40 years we're all getting fucked. Also, many white collar office jobs are paying relatively poorly these days, and those are more likely to require a degree than a job in tech. A $50k salary in 2019 isn't what it used to be.
- chrisco255 7y agoDevs making more than six figures anywhere but the bay area and perhaps NYC are upper middle class, probably in the top 10% of earners in their area, may even qualify as wealthy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- melling 7y agoGuess they’ve started removing the “possibility“ from headlines. People have stopped clicking with the words “may” or “could” in the title? “Up to 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world could be replaced by robots by 2030, according to analysis firm Oxford Economics.”
- codetrotter 7y agoTitle looks fine to me. It says “up to 20M jobs”. I always take that to mean anywhere between zero and the stated number. So “may”/“could” is sort of implied IMO.
- mrfusion 7y agoI feel like I’ve heard this before.
- ZhuanXia 7y agoAnd, in fact, it has happened before.
- stcredzero 7y agoAnd it will happen again. https://www.reddit.com/r/BSG/comments/76z43l/help_with_all_of_this_has_happened_before_quotes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BSG/comments/76z43l/help_with_all_o...
- Zenst 7y agoAll well replacing mundane jobs with robots, but what will those displaced workers do. Also come 2030, the population will of increased, which will be mostly in the demographics who lost their jobs to robots in the first place. But then the whole cost effective argument is from a company perspective, what it costs them on the balance sheets. The fallout and full cost of loosing workers is very much ringfenced for companies, but the social impacts can be far far deeper and far more costly to a community than any saving made on a balance sheet. So I get the whole workers rights perspective, equally, I'm mindful that some jobs really are not fit for humans, just because they can do them, don't mean we can't technology them away. But a balance is needed, so if they had a robot tax as many have raised and mooted in the past, then perhaps that could be used to find education, free recreational activities. Otherwise we will just fuel an endless supply of humans in production line style that feel useless in society and become statisticaly abandoned or worse. Certainly won't need 20M robot maintenance jobs, let alone the skill set from picking fruit and moving onto robot maintenance for many will be a transition out of their reach. So all yay for robots replacing menial jobs, but let's make sure such displaced menial workers are afforded some education and opportunity into better jobs. Otherwise it will not end well socially.
- m463 7y agoI wonder if this will be like secretaries and word processors. Everybody does their own word processing now, and the world has adjusted. In the same way, I would like to do my own robotic assembly now. Or even have a personal factory. (Maybe a cornicopia machine in a suitcase, like charles stross wrote about in singularity sky) maybe business will be democratized and more companies will exist, with smaller org charts making more specific things of value.
- Spooky23 7y agoYou can do that today at great cost. Most consumer product companies are lawyers, buyers, salesmen and accountants. Drive by the headquarters of a brand company, they usually are about the size of a small/medium bank HQ. The products are designed and built in some factory in China or elsewhere. Maybe there’s an industrial design consultant.
- mc32 7y agoThis is okay on countries with a graying population like East Asia, North America and Europe. This is bad news for most of the Southern Hemisphere with young populations which will continue to grow till the end of this century. Unless something changes economically or in pop growth, there are going to be massive economic problems.
- maxerickson 7y agoIf the robots are cheaper than human labor, there will be more goods available and the goods should be cheaper. The problem will be that we are used to matching supply and demand by rewarding productivity, not real shortages. Ironically, the very best jobs in extremely productive economies like the US are detached from productivity and linked to perception and politics and the like (or do people believe that every $10 million CEO is that much better than the next guy on the list).
- wvenable 7y agoThe thing about robots is that you can also stop production instantly if demand goes down. You have much fewer costs when not at full capacity. It might even be true that robots might not be cheaper than human labor but have other advantages that make them preferable.
- jcims 7y agoYou likely will have more versatility in future robots allowing for capacity to pivot to various products based on the associated economics.
- wvenable 7y agoAlso robots are owned by the company, so they're assets, not liabilities.
- iguy 7y ago> robots is that you can also stop production instantly if demand goes down. You have much fewer costs when not at full capacity. I think you have this exactly backwards. In a highly automated factory the main cost is capital, i.e. the machines might cost decades worth of payroll. So having them sit idle is extremely expensive, or to say it another way, producing nothing saves you almost no money. A low-automation factory is the opposite. Big traditional garment factories are basically just sheds with some tables. Almost all the cost is workers, and in many places & times you only hire them when you get a big order. The automated garment-sewing machines (if we get there) can't do anything else. Factory robots aren't very C-3PO. Whereas the sweatshop workers can be assembling cellphones (or building rice terraces) next week.
- sergiotapia 7y agoI hope all those displaced people are given a path forward, every person deserves to make a living and have a good life. What happened to displaced workers during the industrial revolution?
- ghaff 7y agoMany were forced into terrible working conditions and work houses. It helped lead to communist revolutions. Lots of people starved. So not really a great template.
- sergiotapia 7y agoDefinitely not a good thing, I was asking because I wanted some insight into what's coming.
- tedmcory77 7y agoWow, add in those truckers that’ll lose those jobs from autonomous and some states end up VERY hollowed out.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoMost of Hacker News seems to want those states to suffer anyway.
- danhak 7y agoI can imagine at least two hugely positive outcomes from the rise of robots and automation: 1) Human labor will no longer dominate COGS--global shipping and logistics will. There will therefore be a massive onshoring of manufacturing back to the developed world. As a result, we will stop subsidizing human rights abuses and substandard living conditions around the globe. 2) In developed countries, this massive onshoring of automated production will make it clear that low-skill, high-paying factory jobs are forever a thing of the past. Simultaneously, xenophobia--"they took our jobs"--may cease to be an effective political tool. Perhaps this will trigger an honest discussion around UBI and revamped social safety nets.
- ekianjo 7y agoonshoring is highly doubtful since most developed countries are talking about taxing automation to death right now.
- berberous 7y agoOn your first point, manufacturers moving to places with lower cost human labor with laxer standards does not 'subsidize' substandard living conditions, it raises them. Look at the massive economic growth that has occurred in places like China. If we pull out, standards in poor countries will get worse not better.
- hobofan 7y agoIt may raise living conditions, but the point about "human rights abuses" still stands.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- p-morais 7y agoOnshoring of manufacturing sounds like a catastrophe for the developing world to me. What you're describing doesn't sound like a service to the developing world at all, but rather a way for the developed world to continue hoarding wealth while also righteously patting themselves on the back for ending "exploitation". Do you think substandard living conditions will cease to exist the moment we remove relatively high paying factory jobs and external revenue from impoverished countries?
- aantix 7y agoBut what about the positive headline? 20 million robots to produce one developer job by 2030?
- kingkawn 7y agoThe cost savings of the robots could be taxed to supplement social welfare programming
- harperlee 7y agoRobot are just means of production, capital. We don't need to invent robot taxes; we just need to increase taxes on those people/companies with the most capital and the most benefits (well, and close loopholes). The question about approaching full automation is whether all that wealth will be for humanity or for some selected rich people.
- markvdb 7y agoIt might be easier to tax physical bots though than the capital behind them. Just like with individuals as opposed to anonymous companies. Zero's and ones are easier to push around.
- harperlee 7y agoCapital in the economic sense is not just dollars, it includes buildings and trucks and cranes and agricultural tractors. The minute you overspecify a law to apply only to some products you are creating opportunities for loopholes. See this classic story about vans vs cars, and import taxes: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45875405 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45875405 Is a John Deere tractor a robot? What about a roomba? A 3d printer? What about a disassembled robot? The wheels of a robot? How do you define robot? What do you tax, the purchase of a robot? The use? The ownership? There are very tricky questions that try to fix an artificial problem. Tax the company or the person behind x, be x a robot, a field, or a brand that generates money (or not, if you are against taxes). This is not a new problem.
- markvdb 7y agoI agree about the principle you propose. I'm certainly not saying taxing the robots is how it should be, just that it might be easier. Governments might rather tax robots than properly deal with anonymous corporations playing extremely aggressive tax avoidance games. Pushing money around the world has become so much easier. Try to make countries give up on fiscal anonymity, tax avoidance marketing or even plain tax evasion marketing. It might work on some micro nations, but good luck trying it with countries like the US...
- gnusty_gnurc 7y agoI think the people that presume their intelligence will inform how automation plays out will be sorely disappointed when the future is nothing like they expected. To be honest, I don’t want to make any predictions about automation but I’m highly skeptical of the pessimism that dominates the discussion and fatalism around things like UBI.
- lm28469 7y agoThere isn't much to "expect", large scale automation is happening for more than 50 years now. It's similar to people saying "AI will revolutionise the world", it already is revolutionising for several decades. It seems to me that this notion became popular in the last few years and has been so simplified/vulgarised that people expect half the world to lose their job at once when "robots" and "ai" take over. Job automation isn't a single point in time, it's a gradual process that's been happening for as long as work existed. And as long as we run our current economic system there will be jobs to replace automated ones. Currently it seems like services are the new factory jobs (uber, food delivery, &c.). > Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The techno- logical developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities. - Guyd Debord, 1967
- Kye 7y agoService and retail workers will have to unionize before they have the pay and benefits that made manufacturing such good work. That's how factory workers did it. Service and retail work are approaching the living hell of the pre-union Industrial Age.
- carlsborg 7y agoNot sure how in advanced economies this can be anything more than marginal... Visited the volkswagon factory at their headquarters in Germany last year. One of the biggest manufacturing plants in the world. You get in a little buggy and get driven around for kilometers of factory floor and it’s nearly all robots. Barely any people to be seen.
- nickserv 7y agoIf a machine can do the work of 10 people, it should be owned by 10 people who rent it to the company benefiting from its labor.
- steve1977 7y agoThose 10 people are free to buy such a machine and rent it out.
- neuromancer2600 7y agoIf anyone is looking for the report that this article is referring to: http://resources.oxfordeconomics.com/how-robots-change-the-world http://resources.oxfordeconomics.com/how-robots-change-the-w...
- pluma 7y agoOkay, so socialism it is then. Or more palatable for HN: Universal Basic Income. Not that it matters if Earth is a flaming hellscape by 2050 thanks to the ongoing pollution that will likely only be made worse by this automation.
- caseymarquis 7y agoGlobally. The title is somewhat misleading. That's roughly 0.4% of global jobs in 2019 being lost over a decade; So, something like 0.04% per year. I think society will survive. If anything, those numbers are underwhelming. Having worked with industrial robots it's not surprising that they won't be taking over the world any time soon. Robots are a large up front investment in a company's immediate processes. This investment is only good if the processes remain mostly static for a very long time. Even then, there is a major cost when processes finally change. It's stupidly similar to software development in so many ways. Mass automation already happened, at least in my country (USA). The data shown in the article seems to indicate most of the increased use will be in countries like China. Rising wages are likely the dominant factor driving increased adoption in that situation, not new technology. Everyone I know who actually buys robots views them as a trade off, not a panacea. As robots' capabilities slowly improve, their use will increase a bit, but operator guided machinery (ie CNCs, injection molding, task specific machines for things like packaging) glued together with flexible human workers isn't going anywhere until we hit something resembling AGI. Can't speak to the use of robots outside of manufacturing, but that's not what the article is about.
- aerophilic 7y agoCurious your thoughts on the upcoming wave of low cost “co-bots”. While still too expensive to make the analogy of the PC vs the mainframe, they have started approaching the 15-30k/base price. While obviously less capable, much like the PC, I believe they will have effective uses. Thoughts on how this might change the equation?
- Sileni 7y agoIn the larger scale type of manufacturing I'm working with, those small bots tend to have trade-offs that mean they're not really worth choosing over a larger, more traditional manufacturing robot, or a solution without robotics at all. Mounting difficulties, lack of range of movement, and lack of robustness being the core issues. In most scenarios, you're better off avoiding robots and going for something statically mounted. Failing that, choosing a Kawasaki model that's been in production the last 30 years. Then you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's going to run for the next decade without a hitch. You can find operators with experience relatively cheap. Every imaginable mounting head exists and has been in production long enough to know the issues you're going to face with it. The big robot will survive in large scale manufacturing for the same reason Java survives in enterprise; it's part of the culture at this point. It does its job well, it hardly ever fails, and it's relatively easy to bring someone up to speed on working with them. Like Java, you'll probably see a number of companies pop up that prefer a newer technology, because it fits their use case well. But I'd expect the bulk of total money spent to continue to be on the kinds of industrial robots we work with now. The place I can see small robots making an impact is knowledge work, such as laboratories or design. And realistically, in those fields we've never been time constrained. It's more common, in my experience, that the limiting factor is the number of good ideas a person can come up with. There's no way to reduce "hours formulating an idea" short of AGI. Scientists have to read papers, designers have to study a company or product to make all of the branding coherent. All of that said, the newer, low cost bots will probably move the needle, but they won't accelerate the pace of automation significantly. More likely, they'll contribute to maintaining the current acceleration.
- mrhappyunhappy 7y agoThe job loss and displacement due to improvements and automation are quite scary to me. I often find myself thinking about what people will be left to do after automation displaces most workforce and the leftover jobs get so efficient that 1 person will do the job of 10. Look at where web development was not that long ago. It used to take a few people and many moving pieces to put together a website. You needed a designer to design it. A developer to code it. A hosting company to host it. A maintenance person to keep updating and make changes. Now, anyone can fire up a webflow site in under a day. No coding needed, no hosting, do your own maintenance. Now this is only efficiency we are talking about. What happens when we get to a place where you just pick some parameters and any website imaginable is spot out on your screen for you? Imagine how many websites exist already, what’s to stop that data from flowing into a large dataset where design is no longer needed, code is unnecessary, updates are done through a cms. Algorithms already draw art, ok, let’s modify them to make illustrations, logos, anything creative. We just displaced 2 professions. Why stop there? Feed the machines every imaginable font and let it create new fonts for us. Font designer gone. This is only the industry I’m aware of. I can imagine others are no less prone to automation and complete efficiency disruption. What will people do when to get a basic job requires 20 years of education? Are we to believe all humans will have advanced degrees to do those jobs? What about those who simply can’t or won’t like doing that job?
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoRobots could be even more effective, if somebody decided to keep marketing from ruining them. A big part for robots is that they "can be used by everyone, even untrained personal". So in order to have that USP for marketing, tons and tons of "easy-to-use" tools and software are generated. And they are in the same way bad, as the average click to program gui is bad. They allow for creation of a beginner system. And teach you all the bad habbits. And prevent the system from ever growing and maturing, as you have to keep it backwards compatible. What this market would actually need is a new robot, with a grown up language (java, c#) and a steam like marketplace- allwowing for all those factory workers, to buy third party software which only needs a wizzard - fill out forms installation type. Want some pick & Place? Download the Pick&Place-App for 5.000$, teach the origin, originx, originz, specify number of layers, specify sensors if existing, here is the generated interface for the plc, works next. Developed something in addition? Why not sell it in the hat-shop with a 20 % hat-shop markup? With that and some real competition you could steam roll away tons and tons of outdated, problematic robots. If there is trouble, allow for sale of support over the same plattform. All these walled in gardens, with 80s software, they are so ripe for the harvest.
- omilu 7y agoAmerica already took the hit when most manufacturing moved overseas. This is going to be a bigger impact on those developing countries which manufacture everything.