US auto industry installed 135K robots and added 230K jobs

http://robohub.org/us-auto-industry-installed-135000-robots-and-added-230000-jobs/

by spacey2 • 10 years ago

66 48 10 years ago

visarga3• 10 years ago

US gained 230K jobs and 135K robots, other countries probably lost 1 million jobs to compensate. Automation goes full speed ahead, but what about sharing in the benefits?

plafl• 10 years ago

I don't know, but maybe it had a net positive impact on the world. Maybe not everything is about reducing labor costs, maybe it improved car quality or assembly speed. It would be great to know what is the most important incentive auto companies have for installing robots.

croon2• 10 years ago

Hypothetical:

Let's say GP was right and 1M jobs disappeared. Robots are cheaper. Are cars going to get cheaper? My bet is on no. Where does that money go? Up. Who will buy the cars? Definitely not the 1M people losing those jobs.

I'm not saying we should go backwards, but just producing more stuff cheaper with less labor without a goal in sight isn't a net positive impact on the world, and the economic inequality will only grow steeper.

I'm saying this as a cushy white collar business owner that will likely be comfortably ahead of that curve. But we're still just lemmings scurrying to get ahead of everyone else, while a whole lot will be left behind.

This is what decided this election, regardless of anyones politics (I certainly didn't agree with the choice).

aaron6952• 10 years ago

Yes I suspect this too.

Look at a small part, in a small area and you see positive.

A lot of things are moving back home because of automation, devastating some countries.

Garment workers are about to be fucked. Robots are getting cheaper than cheap labour. So why not process it next door to the subsidized cotton.

But even from a selfish point of view, things currently at home are also going to be devastated.

One industries small renaissance at home is probably coupled with another's larger destruction.

madengr2• 10 years ago

I'm wondering why garment production wasn't automated years ago.

Pica_soO• 10 years ago

There was a third worldwar when the replicator was invented. Gene Roddenbery warned us!

spiderfarmer• 10 years ago

Sharing. In the current political climate of the US? Good luck with that.

aeturnum• 10 years ago

I think it's always worthwhile to look carefully at happenings that appear to cut against the grain of the conventional wisdom. It makes sense that the opportunity cost for these jobs is the loss of jobs overseas and that we should consider the morality of such a system. It's also likely that our understanding of the job / automation tradeoff is flawed and things like this can help us better understand how we misunderstand it.

Alternatively, this could be an aberration and not generally applicable - but either way it's worth looking at the thing itself and not immediately pivoting to secondary concerns.

ousta• 10 years ago

did it create blue collar jobs or only white collars?

bluedino• 10 years ago

Can't possibly be 230k blue collar jobs. GM and Ford both employ about 50,000 hourly workers each in the USA, with FCA coming in around 30,000.

throwaway40483• 10 years ago

With automation, it's very rare (never?) to go from white collar to blue collar. I think you can safely assume that it's white collar.

deebeeoh• 10 years ago

At a time when automation is under fire for decimating employment, we get a report that implies robots = jobs.

Moving on from this waste of time...

bobjordan• 10 years ago

I can definitely confirm that robots are even replacing low-wage workers here in Guangdong Province area of China, especially in these dirty manual labor jobs that nobody likes to do anyway, like part painting production lines and surface grinding and polishing for die-cast parts. The local provincial government is actually encouraging this and has tax credits in place for companies that are automating in these somewhat-dirty factories, like the grinding-polishing factories. The factory owner of our primary die-casting partner even pitched me to invest in starting another company making these industrial robots. There is going to be a lot of low cost but capable robots coming in the next few years.

mistermann• 10 years ago

If China comes up with a reasonably "correct" way to navigate this transition to sophisticated automated manufacturing, they should be able to easily leapfrog the US because their political structure doesn't have to go through the more difficult problem of negotiating between affected parties. Western countries would have to politically argue for multiple years before making the smallest change.

BatFastard• 10 years ago

It just has the issue of hundreds of millions of unemployed workers, a big issue then it is in the U.S. since it has been going thru this same issue for 20 years. In China it will happen much faster.

tonyedgecombe• 10 years ago

"In the last six years, (2010–2015), according to the IFR (International Federation of Robotics), US industry has installed around 135,000 new industrial robots. The principal driver is automation in the car industry. During this same period, (2010–2015), the number of employees in the automotive sector increased by 230,000."

Correlation isn't causation.

jgalt2122• 10 years ago

perhaps not, but the more automated a factory is the less the labor costs matter to the whole. For this reason, I think automation is the key to bringing back manufacturing and manufacturing jobs to the US.

Not that total war, of a conventional nature, is likely to repeat itself, but the US won WWII largely on the back of its unparalleled manufacturing capabilities.

blakeshall• 10 years ago

That and the fact that our factories weren't being regularly bombed.

wheelerwj4• 10 years ago

The US won world war 2 because the British gave us a shit ton of IP, which we then built in our factories, which weren't being bombed to shit like the rest of Europe, because of two gigantic oceans separating us from war.

To repeat the poster above you, correlation doesn't equal causation.

twoslide• 10 years ago

This is more about falsification. Many view automation as a substitute for human labour. This is some evidence that contradicts these expectations (although it is far from conclusive).

ascotan2• 10 years ago

True. It could have been 0 robots and 500K jobs. Therefore +1 robot != +n jobs.

nanogal• 10 years ago

Key issue is that a lot of the discussions about robots (the hardware kind) and jobs are not based on numbers and facts. I think we need more data - this is a start.

petra2• 10 years ago

Ah Great!. so they created 230K jobs between 2010-2015. but: there was a ~200K jobs loss during the 2008 recession. So only 30K additional jobs between say 2010-2015.

How do robots enter the picture ? Hard to tell from the data.

deelowe• 10 years ago

They dont. Theres nothing to say this data is correlated in any way.

wheelerwj4• 10 years ago

Pretty sure some research will indicate that the Robotic Industries Association is a lobbyist organization and not at all an unbiased in any way.

fshean• 10 years ago

Actually according to the US Bureau of Labor there were 340,000 jobs lost in the auto industry from 2007 to 2009. So it's actually a net loss of 110,000.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/04/art5full.pdf

petra2• 10 years ago

Thank you. Now the original article makes sense.

jazzyk• 10 years ago

Also, some of the recent gains were driven by an unsustainable subprime auto loans - another mini-bubble about to burst.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/09/30/losses-jump-for-su...

madengr2• 10 years ago

So why did it decrease in 2015 for auto robots?

samfisher83• 10 years ago

The economy has gotten better. The price of oil has greatly dropped which has improved car sales. That could be the reason too. We really need to do some regression analysis to figure out what is the reason for the increase.

US auto industry installed 135K robots and added 230K jobs

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