China’s Troubling Robot Revolution

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/opinion/chinas-troubling-robot-revolution.html

by prostoalex • 11 years ago

88 63 11 years ago

It's going to be really weird if China's ruling 'socialist' party ends up being forced to become an actual neo-socialism with things like a guaranteed stipend because there are not enough actual jobs to do...

This whole automation revolution has really just begun to highlight the old problem that many people don't own any of the things that generate the fabulous, effort-free wealth. But now instead of people missing out on the dream of 3-day-work-weeks they were promised fifty years ago and having to work just as hard as before, they have no work at all. The body/mind they expected to be able to rent out has literally no value as an asset.

harigov2• 11 years ago

The body/mind they expected to be able to rent out has literally no value as an asset.

Agreed. I wonder if the concept of job makes sense anymore.

LoSboccacc• 11 years ago

Job will still make sense for a while, but as society we need to prepare better for the future.

The world is changing and we're still debating if our youth should get less education and benefits or if we should let in more immigrant so we can compete on labor prices on the global market. That's so short sighted!

That train left long ago, and it was pointless to try to board anyway. If the ruling elite would stop for a second being such assholes toward anyone, treating everybody not up the chain as 'resources', maybe they could focus to be competitive in the world of tomorrow.

Most unskilled/unqualified job will just vanish overnight at some point in the near future, and then what? we're still under-educating our youths. industrial automation, robotics and artificial-x will be the field that will drive innovation in the next 20 years.

if your country is still not pushing for them to be in the curriculum of everyone, prepare to be facing loads unemployment problems down the road. avoidable problems, dare I say.

tormeh3• 11 years ago

The body/mind is still valuable because it belongs to a human and humans like seeing other humans do shit for them. Makes them feel important. The future jobs lie in artisanal goods and various kinds of prostitution.

Automation won't decrease the total amount of jobs, but I'm worried about inequality.

viola11• 11 years ago

That's a great comment! I am in awe of the cynicism and misanthropy it contains. Machiavelli himself would go "Dang, that's dark dude".

- Man, Uber just perfected self driving cars and closed my account with them, what am I gonna do now? - I hear prostition is still around.

- Shit, some kid in Senegal just released a database server that can create a sensible schema from an excel sheet, even creating translation layers between the insanity the end user put in and the sensible internal representation! There are no DBA jobs left in the world, what am I gonna do? - I heard those rich actors in Hollywood have acquired a taste for their own "best boys" with strong "grip"...

NoGravitas• 11 years ago

Inserting obligatory reference to Fully Automated Luxury Communism[0].

[0]http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/18/...

vidarh3• 11 years ago

Capitalism "eating itself" by getting too efficient to continue to provide work for everyone was Marx central thesis for why a socialist revolution would be inevitable, so nothing "neo" about it.

mason240• 11 years ago

Where did he predict that?

saiya-jin2• 11 years ago

yeah, and having real world socialism with vastly underperforming economy, forcing everybody to have a job, creating pointless jobs to to fill this criteria (and unleashing state terror on those who don't fit in).

if you think i'm joking, unfortunately no. had lived in socialist country and i can still see the damage on people 20 years after we switched to democracy. people went to jail if they refused to work. if they spoke against the regime, things might got worse. economy-wise - our neighbor Austria after WWII borrowed from us money to rebuild itself. after 40 years of socialism, when curtain fell, they were light years and more ahead of us, in everything, thank you central planning. i felt like a poor beggar coming there first time.

Sorry if my reaction offended anyone, i'm just too allergic of anything reeking of socialism. nothing beats first hand experience

nugget2• 11 years ago

If you think structural unemployment due to automation will be a problem in the US, just wait until 500 million Chinese factory workers are put out of work. A generation ago they may have been content to remain in poverty and ignorance but now, like the sans-culottes of 18th century Paris, they know what else is out there. There's a reason many wealthy Chinese desperately want to expatriate and it's not because they see peace and tranquility in their homeland's future.

bduerst3• 11 years ago

China has had a rising middle class for a while now, and just like with the agricultural automation brought on by the combustion engine, their manufacturing laborers will shift into service, skilled, technical, and professional positions.

functional_test• 11 years ago

Did you actually read the article? Here's the most relevant quote:

The reality, however, is that China has struggled to create enough white-collar jobs for its soaring population of college graduates. In mid-2013, the Chinese government revealed that only about half of the country’s current crop of college graduates had been able to find jobs, while more than 20 percent of the previous year’s graduates remained unemployed.

NicoJuicy• 11 years ago

So 500 million unemployed people will suddenly become skilled, technical and professional without education? I don't think so.

anigbrowl3• 11 years ago

I disagree. You can automate away factory jobs faster than you can train factory workers the news kills they need to prosper in the service economy, and automation is happening in the service sector as well.

crdb3• 11 years ago

The factory workers are as unlikely to be "out of work" as the female population post-the power loom replacing their daily work as thread spinners. Manufacturing is already moving out of China and into cheaper countries.

No economy is truly a zero sum game and China is no different. In 2 generations - even if there are some troubled waters in between - these factory workers' children will be white collar workers or even managers of American white collar workers ;)

Post-war Japan was a miserable place with mass starvation, homelessness and unemployment, today it is the third largest GDP in the world with first world standard of living. There was even a bubble complete with massive foreign investment (remember what the building in Die Hard was called?) with a 95% drop in property prices in between then and now. China is currently where Japan was in the 1960s, and back then it looked pretty much the same.

victorhooi2• 11 years ago

Have you taken a look at Japan recently?

They've been in recently for over a decade - probably close to 20 years now. As in, their economy has been going backwards, and shrinking.

That, and they also have deep-seated structural problems (e.g. aging population, incredibly high-saving rates with little spending - might be "good" for individuals, but not good for the overall economy is everybody does it/)

jqm• 11 years ago

Maybe they will follow the lead of the US and create more positions in things like HR, Insurance Sales and Law. Or an ever expanding cadre of mid-level managers with the main job of playing politics against each other. If this isn't enough to attain full employment, they can then create a large number of professional meeting attender positions and mandate companies hold many more meetings.

qyv• 11 years ago

Perhaps the technological singularity that we end up facing is not one of AI but one of nation-scale automation?

deelowe2• 11 years ago

I would phrase it as mechanization becomes a better investment than human capital.

It's the tipping point where humans, more often than not, no longer provide value. I can't help but feel we are VERY close.

anthony_barker• 11 years ago

Peter Drucker forecasted this 30 years ago. Agriculture went from 50% -> 2% of the workforce. Same is happening with Manufacturing. The main issue is training.

itistoday2• 11 years ago

HN discussion on this article from two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9697058

ChrisArchitect• 11 years ago

goddamn, yeah, how does this get posted twice

narrator• 11 years ago

"This is clearly unsustainable. After all, there eventually has to be a return on all those investments. Factories have to produce goods that are profitably sold. "

Nope. In China loans go bad all the time and the government prints up some money to buy and resell the debt at a discount and things keep moving right along. They have a different system In China. This is so hard for anybody in America to get since economics is taught as if it's the physical structure of the world when it's really just a game with a bunch of rules that structure the society in a certain way.

EGreg3• 11 years ago

Well as long as China is doing enough to import whatever it needs, it's fine. Most countries need certain imports, and that's the market discipline that limits what they can do. They want tourists, they want dollars, etc. If China was a completely closed system with no needs then yes, they could probably get away with a lot more.

sitkack• 11 years ago

Don't we do the same thing in the states? Except we loan money to huge banks at 0% who turn around and sell that money back to the people @ 5+%

mc32• 11 years ago

As I mentioned once before, one can only hope they can figure a way out of this conundrum. Given the relative strength of the central gov't to direct economic policy, perhaps they'll trike upon a solution to automation and software eating jobs and thus people's source of making a living.

They are going to hit this economic obstacle on a massive scale first --before the jobs even get to migrate to the interior where there are masses of impoverished and underemployed or underproductive workers.

Japan has not been able to age out of this problem, that's to say they have not figured a way to transfer the wealth generated by automation into the general population, so you get older people doing redundant jobs or menial jobs. In other words there isn't an "automation fund" which diverts wealth to the underemployed and those whose jobs have become redundant an unnecessary.

So perhaps the solution is something akin to the Alaska Permanent Fund fund; however, instead of being funded by mineral wealth, gets funded by wealth generated through (hw) automation and efficiencies brought on by software. This fund then gets redistributed based on a combination of need as well as a per-capita flat rate.

eru• 11 years ago

So perhaps the solution is something akin to the Alaska Permanent Fund fund; however, instead of being funded by mineral wealth, gets funded by wealth generated through (hw) automation and efficiencies brought on by software. This fund then gets redistributed based on a combination of need as well as a per-capita flat rate.

As a reasonable proxy for that kind of wealth generation, you can just tax income.

sanxiyn• 11 years ago

According to one analysis, fully 43 percent of Chinese workers already consider themselves to be overeducated for their current positions.

The obvious conclusion is that there should be less education in China.

shard• 11 years ago

All that computing power going to waste. IF only there's a way to harness that power, maybe for folding@home or bitcoin mining...

powerapple• 11 years ago

the world needs more jobs of designing softwares to share photos with a time limit.

knodi123• 11 years ago

jeez man, I hate to ruin your day, but I just designed a program that designs programs to share photos with a time limit. better find a new niche, quick quick.

knz42• 11 years ago

Have the workers own the robots, not the elite of company executives. Then redistribute the profits made by the robots to their new owners.

The idea of having the workers own the means of production is hardly new, it's just not very popular in the West. Not surprising that the NYTimes missed mentioning that entirely. It would be deliciously ironic if socialist China was the nation that would show the rest of the world how to deal with pervasive automation socially and economically.

cbd1984• 11 years ago

Have the workers own the robots

How do you prevent them from getting bought out?

anigbrowl3• 11 years ago

Astute question. The west's answer seems to be inaccessible but privately-managed pension funds.

anabis• 11 years ago

Have the workers own the robots I am pretty sure that workers are free to buy publically traded stock.

I also would probably not invest if I were in their position.

EGreg3• 11 years ago

That was Karl Marx's whole solution. Make the workers own the factories.

We have a better way of socializing wealth. It's called the public stock market. Workers can buy shares of any corporation on it, not just their own, and they are protected by regulations.

Having said that, I think that we should tax the machines. We are building a cage for ourselves with machines empowering organizations to monitor and control us better. Like China making a rating for every citizen. Organizations aren't people and they use people to perpetuate themselves - those people who have other ideas (like "enviroentalism" or "concern for the elderly") have to acquiesce to the corporation's interests first. And with machines, the corporations will pursue profits ahead of loyalty to workers.

My point is, we should use our democratic governments to tax the corporations for benefiting from automation, and redistribute the money to the population as unconditional basic income. As machines replace people I won't need those taxi drivers and mcdonalds workers to do anything for me. I want them to have a check coming so they can educate themselves or just go consume things they need.

It would also be nice if countries would quit being in the mindset that every generation must be more numerous than the last - social security will be taken care of by increased automation, while overpopulation is not something you can take care of that easily.

Want everyone to be richer and better off? Have less kids.

stupidcar• 11 years ago

It'll be grimly ironic if, having dragged behind the rest of the industrialized world for decades, suffering with all the attendant poverty and problems that dogged pre-industrial societies, then rapidly caught up, China end up being one of the first countries to shoot right past it to a totally post-industrial society, with all the new problems that are predicted to accompany it.

vonnik• 11 years ago

Martin Ford has one argument to make -- the robots are coming! :( -- and he makes it again and again in any context possible, even when that point is a rhetorical stretch. China has a lot of problems, many of them on a grander scale than any other country because of the size of its population. The robots are no where near the top of the list. The real issue here is that China has succeeded so well at manufacturing that it is no longer the center of low-cost labor that it once was. When wages rise, capital is substituted for labor; i.e. companies rely incrementally more on robots than humans. Not a lot new there.

China’s Troubling Robot Revolution

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