So, Where Are All Those Robots?

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/so-where-are-all-those-robots/528666/?single_page=true

by misnamed • 9 years ago

82 62 9 years ago

eksemplar• 9 years ago

Coming.

I work in public digitization and we're still a lot of years from implementing things like self driving cars. We're running tests of course, but a lot of places the road markings, or lack there off, aren't good enough for the current tech. Heck, in Denmark we also have a lot of specialized road sings that the AIs can't read yet.

Similarly RPA and machine learning are just in the trial stages with very few human resource available to make good use of it.

What we can tell from all these tests and proof-of-concepts though, is that the technology is going to be viable sometime in the future.

No one can predict exactly what will happen of course. As I've already mentioned it'll certainly create new jobs, but those jobs will require higher educations, and I think that's the challenge which worries us in politics. Because the people that are going to be replaced by self driving cars won't be easily reschooled for something else.

flyinglizard• 9 years ago

Good luck buying an industrial robot right now. Anecdotal maybe, but from my personal experience all top 3 players are experiencing supply shortages due to strong demand.

bamboozled• 9 years ago

Well, how about that for irony.

Agathos• 9 years ago

Who are the top three?

gridit• 9 years ago

I was curious too and found this list (sorry about the parent site):

https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2015/07/21/top-8-indus...

1. Fanuc

2. Yaskawa

3. ABB

4. Kawasaki

The first one mostly has openings in Michigan, concerning machine vision and embedded NN -- from what I can tell.

bad_alloc• 9 years ago

Can confirm. We've been waiting half a year for one arm. It's not only production, training courses are packed and support technicians are hard to get hold of.

elorant• 9 years ago

One thing the general media don't seem to understand is that the whole discussion about robots isn't so much about AI but mostly about automation. We don't need intelligent machines to get there, we're already automating jobs/tasks. In our industry for example bots are everywhere.

LoSboccacc• 9 years ago

yeah where are them? https://m.imgur.com/ZiJ0n6Q

sheeesh of course robototization adoption is slowing, most manufacturing is already there and until the next tech generation comes we reached the optimum split between local automated vs cheap manual outsourced

gcatalfamo• 9 years ago

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

im3w1l• 9 years ago

Calm before the storm.

Regarding point 2, can this be explained by the trend of turning CAPEX into OPEX by leasing and similar? I only heard about it in passing so maybe thats just a misunderstanding on my part.

Suncho• 9 years ago

Depending on our economic policies, there are a few different ways automation's impact on labor can express itself. The key thing that automation does is that it substitutes for labor thereby making labor less valuable.

If labor is less valuable, it doesn't have to mean fewer jobs. It doesn't even have to mean fewer hours worked. It can just mean less money going to labor (i.e. lower wages).

If our economy is operating below its productive capacity, which it is, then our levels of production are constrained by how much people can spend. And if consumers get their incomes from labor, then automation means consumers have less spending money.

If consumer incomes are constrained by wages, you'd therefore expect our level of production to decrease with increased levels of automation. And because economic policies are keeping the hours worked high, you'd expect the amount of production per man hour to decrease.

Hence...

"1. The U.S. economy is in a productivity recession."

Furthermore, if firms need to keep production levels low in order to clear markets, you'd expect that they wouldn't have much of a need to figure out ways to boost production.

Hence...

"2. Companies don’t seem to be investing in technology nearly as much as they used to."

Technology and automation allow the use of resources to be more efficient. One of those resources is labor. That means that in cases where we're actually using labor for production -- instead of, you know, just as an excuse to give people incomes -- we can get that labor really cheap.

"3. Globalization is a much bigger deal than automation for work and wages."

Globalization is automation.

But because we're Americans and we believe in the American dream, we need to force the labor market to provide incomes for hard-working Americans. Naturally, since many jobs amount to little more than token busy-work, we should then expect the labor market to become exceedingly boring and uneventful. After all, these are just fake jobs propped up by economic policy.

Hence...

"4. The U.S. economy’s creative-destruction engine is broken."

"This isn’t what the end of work was ever supposed to look like."

Yes it is. This is exactly what it's supposed to look like.

vlehto3• 9 years ago

The key thing that automation does is that it substitutes for labor thereby making labor less valuable.

I think you may have gotten this backwards.

If you replace four pipe bending guys with pipe bending robots and highly trained maintenance mechanic, do you really think the highly trained mechanic is going to get paid less than single pipe bending guy?

Automation should increase wages for those lucky enough to get employed.

Globalization is automation.

Globalization predates automation by at least few centuries.

halomru3• 9 years ago

But if a pipe-bending machine has a total cost of ownership of $100 per operating hour, your four pipe bending guys have a job as long as employing them costs less than $25/h. Where before they might be able get a higher wage, their wage is now capped and the cap is decreasing over time.

Of course there's other reasons to employ people (parent mentioned spending power, I would add political influence to the list). But the labor part of the employment decreases in value.

tormeh• 9 years ago

1) That's not the real ratio, and we know it.

2) Those pipe-bending guys are now unemployed and willing to work for les thanks they did at their previous job.

elementalest2• 9 years ago

In the second last paragraph the author agrees what you argue in your comment is possible:

Finally, it’s conceivable that the ostensibly tranquil and low-turbulence economy is masking something more disruptive underneath the surface. Ryan Avent, the author of The Wealth of Humans, has thought about this question deeply and offered a plausible explanation. In his telling, automation has created an abundance of labor, including machine labor and human labor. Just as rising supply typically leads to falling prices, the oversupply of labor has put a downward pressure on wages. Companies, seeing that they have access to cheap labor in a slowly growing economy, invest less in new risky technology, which leads to less productivity growth. High employment, low productivity, low wage growth, and automation can all live together in the same story.

bovine3dom• 9 years ago

The whole point of the economy is to allocate our scarce resources in the way that maximises the benefit to society.

Automation is a way of reducing costs; it is a way of making our scarce resources go farther.

On the micro level, it is a Kaldor-Hicks improvement [0]. This means that there are winners (all of society because goods are cheaper) and losers (people who have lost their jobs) - but, overall, there is a net gain. We can tax some portion of this net gain (e.g, with income tax, or corporation tax if you are really worried about foreigners) and compensate the losers (with training so they can be employed in a different industry).

In many ways, the "arguments" people have against automation are similar to those against immigration, and are befallen by the same fallacies. The difference is that we don't have to give robots health care. We already have a nice case study on rapid automation (and how the sky didn't fall in) - just look at the Luddites.

My main concern with current levels of automation is that, with patents and network effects, we are creating a new generation of monopolies (Google, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB) with very little oversight.

[0] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kaldor–Hicks_efficiency

eli_gottlieb2• 9 years ago

But because we're Americans and we believe in the American dream, we need to force the labor market to provide incomes for hard-working Americans. Naturally, since many jobs amount to little more than token busy-work, we should then expect the labor market to become exceedingly boring and uneventful. After all, these are just fake jobs propped up by economic policy.

Or in short, work is ending, but instead of creating a post-work economy, we're creating bullshit jobs.

David Graeber did nothing wrong.

deepnet2• 9 years ago

Where too is the once promised paperless office ?

IMHO the robo jobpocalypse is as overhyped as the paperpocalypse was in the early 1980's

rwmj• 9 years ago

As a remote worker, the paperless office is here today (for me). I interact hundreds of times a day with colleagues around the world, and paper is involved perhaps only twice a year (to print plane tickets).

majewsky• 9 years ago

Same here. Not remote, but I've only handled paper forms on very few occassions, mostly when the law requires written form.

lukasm• 9 years ago

In the past 2 years the only things I was given in paper were, contract, insurance form and a ticket train. Now I have tickets on my phone.

eeZah7Ux• 9 years ago

Were you making a joke perhaps? Paper disappeared from offices.

deepnet2• 9 years ago

I agree, paper is absent from many offices, yet very many business still use some paper.

As the amount of businesses and transactions has increased by several orders of magnitude the overall effect is that more paper is being used than ever before.

aninhumer• 9 years ago

Honestly, the fact that so many offices still rely on paper makes me even more concerned about the decline of job availability in the near future.

We already know how to create paperless offices that are successful and reduce labour requirements, and yet so many businesses still aren't taking full advantage of that. That's a lot of lost jobs before we even start considering new technology replacing people.

awkwarddaturtle• 9 years ago

There are a lot less paper than there used to be or could be. But paper is still cheap and of course there are legal reasons for using paper for legal documents/etc.

But ask the people in the printing presses, wood mills, etc how "paper" is doing. Just because it isn't gone doesn't mean that there are headwinds for paper.

People used to say the same thing about pay phones. Cellular phones will never replace pay phones/etc. Look how quickly they disappeared.

But I agree, paper is going to be around for a while, but its usage is in decline.

halomru3• 9 years ago

In some applications paper will hold out for quite some time. Only recently screens with a resolution comparable to paper became practical, and it will take until the 2020s until they are widely deployed outside smartphones. And that screen technology still has problems with reading speed as compared to paper. And in terms of viewing multiple documents next to each other it might take one or two more decades for screens to catch up to paper in everyday use.

Then again in a lot of office applications that is irrelevant, meaning paper is of little use to them.

k__• 9 years ago

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

j7ake• 9 years ago

they're already here... but unfortunately these algorithms are becoming the masters, an increasing workforce relies on an app to tell them where to pick up customers or where to pick up amazon products.

xg15• 9 years ago

For now, I think it’s hard to make the case that automation is even a tertiary concern for the 2017 labor market. But the next recession will tell us much more.

No one is claiming it is a concern for 2017, no? My understanding is that the debate is more what happens in the next 10-15 years and not about the short-term situation.

Numberwang2• 9 years ago

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

tomhoward• 9 years ago

I'm with you on that concern, but on the other hand, it wouldn't be the first time society has seen a rapid mechanisation of significant parts of the economy (e.g., agrarian workers, textiles workers).

Yet every time it happens, there's a reorganisation, and eventually the people (or the kinds of people) who did those jobs are employed doing new things.

Is there some reason why everything is suddenly different this time?

Here's a couple of ways that spring to my mind, for how society could absorb the labor that would be freed up if driver automation happened:

- As increasing numbers of professional people around the world are becoming cash rich but time-poor, there is, and should continue to be, a growing demand for people to provide domestic services like cleaning, home maintenance, personal administration tasks, child-care, etc.

- As the number of machines continue to grow, there will be growing demand for people to work on the machines. Whether it's designing, programming, manufacturing, testing, transporting, fitting, servicing, cleaning, replacing, or disposing of the machines, there will be plenty of work for people of all kinds of aptitude.

delecti• 9 years ago

Many driving jobs are more than just operating a vehicle. For example, delivery people have driving jobs, but the person walking in to drop off the package is still necessary without the driving portion. It will certainly hurt, but not as much as that 30% seems to suggest. Not to mention that the vehicles are capital expenses, so we'll see a gradual rollout of the self-driving commercial vehicles as old vehicles are retired and replaced over time.

drzaiusapelord4• 9 years ago

No one is claiming it is a concern for 2017, no?

Some are. If you look at recent-ish job growth you're only seeing part-time and retail growth, or other low paying jobs that have no upward mobility. The good jobs that lead to careers, decent wages, etc have been slowly been made more and more efficient. In the past you'd see a demand for more good jobs but now with all manner of automation its just not happening as much. A IT department just 10 years ago probably needed twice the staff as one does today. AWS/Azure/Whatever cuts out a lot of middle-men, and that's just one example of how things are moving. Every industry is being affected by automation and no, its not going to look like a sterotypical 1950s sci-fi robot.

I'd hate to be a recent grad without a super-marketable skill right now.

Simulacra• 9 years ago

The robotics market isn't coming for several more years, in my opinion, so I think the reason why there is a sounding of an alarm now is because by the time we realize it and it does get here it's too late for the labor market

agentgt• 9 years ago

I'm a fervent watcher of the show "How it's Made" and it blows my mind how an enormous amount of manufacturing is still done by hand. Particularly any seamstress, weaving, buffing, sanding or carving.

The show generally covers North American manufactures where you would expect far greater automation but empirically I have observed the opposite.

For example the other day I watched a Canadian worker skillfully weave a hammock. It looked like it could have been automated but I lacked the mechanical mind to envision how.

So given that manufacturing is actually a small subset of the economy but probably the most viable for automation (ie robots) its sort of disturbing to see an almost regression particularly in North America (again my empirical observations).

Service based jobs like hospitality I would imagine to be far harder to automate (or maybe not).

mrfusion• 9 years ago

I've also noticed on that show how specialized all the machinery is. Even changing the size of a part might require a whole new machine.

I have to imagine there are big wins waiting for by have more general manufacturing equipment that can itself be mass produced.

SirLJ• 9 years ago

"Globalization is a much bigger deal than automation for work and wages."

I think this pretty much sums it up...

rndmwlk• 9 years ago

Quick aside from the point of the article...the "Growth in labor productivity..." and "Capital Investment in IT..." graphs are one of those fudged to present a particular point of view stats.

Wow, so capital investment slowed from 2007-2016. I wonder if anything happened during that time period that may have deflated these growth rates.

awinter-py• 9 years ago

Another article about productivity from an author who can't distinguish between measurable economic TFP and the common-use concept of productivity.

In fact, TFP (which is what they're charting) is the mystery factor that explains why earnings grows differently than its inputs, labor and capital.

It makes no sense to me to talk about TFP when moore's law is making devices cheaper and VCs / ad revenue are subsidizing omnipresent software.

The ATMs argument is tired -- even if it's right it's 30 years old.

Foxconn replaced 60k workers on their shenzhen campus with robots. How can this article not cite that?

Weak.

So, Where Are All Those Robots?

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