[Carlhole]

The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future
(Download a free copy at this link)

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hat will the economy of the future look like?
Where will advancing technology, job automation, outsourcing and globalization lead?
Is it possible that accelerating computer technology was a primary cause of the current global economic crisis—and that even more disruptive impacts lie ahead?

This groundbreaking book by a Silicon Valley computer engineer and entrepreneur explores these questions and shows how accelerating technology is likely to have a highly disruptive influence on our economy in the near future—and may well already be a significant factor in the current global crisis.

[Pops]

George Jetson's job was to push one button, repeatedly, for one hour, one day a week and he thought he had it pretty rough. I think this really is a big problem, and along with less regressive income tax and global trade the reason for the end of the middle class, thanks for the link.

GW & peak oil vs. globalization of labor markets & automation seem to be pulling in opposite directions don't they? One toward lower consumption and the other toward ever greater consumption - and on top is population growth.

The idea of taxing any kind of productivity and transferring it to consumers is a little hard for me to get my brain around as a substitute for wages but I guess that is the idea of a value added tax after all isn't it? Does a VAT add to the final cost of an item or does it only reduce the profit?

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'T')he idea of taxing any kind of productivity and transferring it to consumers is a little hard for me to get my brain around as a substitute for wages but I guess that is the idea of a value added tax after all isn't it? Does a VAT add to the final cost of an item or does it only reduce the profit?

[Pops]

I've mentioned my trade many times because it's the perfect example.

I apprenticed in a print shop back in the '70s when a simple typesetting machine was the size of a couple of washing machines - everything was photo/chemical based, all skilled hand work from photography/illustration to typeset to pasteup to film, masking/stripping, platemaking and of course printing. In large operations like newspapers, magazines or large print shops, each step might have had one or more people specializing in a single task and there could be a dozen specialties.

Today ALL those jobs are gone and have been for years. Even small-time custom photography and illustration is about passe with the huge amount of online stock - it used to cost 10x what royalty free image now costs on iStock just to have a search done at Getty or Comstock.

Today the designer emails a press-ready file to the printer who sends it to the platemaker (a laser imagesetter) that "prints" a plate ready for the press - in fact short-run digital is almost indistinguishable from offset and a gret value at below 1,000 copies and we all have a consumer version of one of those on our desktop.

Oh yeah, the designer can be anywhere so there really isn't a lower limit to his wage either.

It really is a big deal and no amount of trade restrictions are gonna do anything about it.

[vision-master]

< 500,000,000 should do the trick.

[patience]

What happens when automation is implemented is a matter of DECISION on the parts of both management and labor of a given company, and is affected by the nature of that particular company and industry. It can go a lot of directions.

This whole topic is a false dilemna that I am intimately familiar with and therefore disgusted when somebody wants to capitalize on the ingrained fears of the public by oversimplifying the problem to sell a book. I spent over 30 years as an engineer designing and implementing factory automation, and in all that time it ALWAYS resulted in MORE people being hired! That really flies in the face of what is proposed in this thread, but it is true.

What happens most often is that more goods are produced at a lower cost, sold at a lower price. The factories then grow, and employ even more people. Think electronics here, and the history of, say, calculator prices. The first commercial hand held calculator that I saw was made by Hewlett Packard, the HP-35: http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp35.htm and cost $400--sometime in the early 1970's!! I bought one of similiar capability a couple months ago for about twenty bucks, and in the meantime, the value of that twenty bucks went down dramatically. Are fewer people now employed making calculators?? No. In fact, there are a lot more people employed making them now, but the key is, NOT IN THE US. Those who justifiably fear losing their jobs often blame automation when the real problem has been something else, like offshoring of manufacture from the US to Asia.

There ARE cases where automation reduced jobs, like the printing industry that Pops is familiar with. However, those people most often found other jobs, and continued to buy comparatively cheaper printed products, and more of them. As witness, check your mailbox for junk mail. Yes, skillsets pertaining to a given older technology get outmoded and superceded by new ones. In many cases, I was the one who trained our existing workers to utilize the new technologies, who were then more productive and soon were making MORE MONEY, and buying cheaper goods that resulted from that greater productivity. Bottom line--their standard of living went UP, and so did employment.

I don't mean to minimalize the impact on individual lives where changing technologies destroyed the usefulness of their skills. There is a painfully wrenching period of adaptation involved before those individuals can retrain and benefit from the changes. Too many times, they refuse to retrain or learn a new job, instead falling down the economic ladder while others embrace the new ways and become a part of it. Many times, a given factory is outmoded and closed, causing a blight in a given area. Other areas, however, benefit in the LONG term. The benefitted area may be in India or China, but that does not make it the fault of automation. Instead, globalization by international companies is the culprit.

Even more often, when a job is "dumbed down" by automation, it becomes something that unskilled labor in 3rd world countries could do. The jobs went there, aided and abetted by govt. policies to benefit big corporations that were heavy campaign contributors. Like GE, who has been in the news lately for this sort of thing, paying little or no taxes in their parent country.

The reasons for the improved standard of living over the past century is automation in mass production that utilizes ever greater amounts of----wait for it---FOSSIL ENERGY, instead of the sweatshop routine. We need to be concerned more about how we maintain a standard of living better than circa 1850 when the cost of fossil fuels precludes their use in such massive amounts for manufacturing, and particularly, food production.

I have only touched on a very few of the many factors involved in why people lost jobs in the US. Rest assured, automation was NOT a prime mover in that. Look instead to govt. policies, corrupt officials, major bank interests/speculators, currency fluctuations, and other sins of TPTB.

One example of the above, involving currency valuations:

In the mid-1980's, I ordered some threading taps for a sample production run at a factory. I was used to paying about a buck-fifty for them. I found a discount supplier who sold me two dozen taps for about $15 = about half price, AND he threw in a FREE 1" micrometer that had been costing us about $50. These turned out to be top quality tools made in POLAND, who has some of the finest toolmakers on the planet. But at that time, Poland was going through a horrible time trying to get out from under the USSR, and the currency of Poland was trashed. Their currency was worth zilch compared to the US dollar at that time.

Soon after that, very high quality, highly automated US tool company (Regal-Beloit) closed a plant near where we live, because they could not compete with imported tools. I doubt seriously if those directly responsible for the low value of the Polish Zlotny (?) currency ever shed a single tear about the losses to Regal-Beloit.

This is FAR too complex a topic to say that automation destroys jobs. If that were the case, why don't we still have the employment levels of the 19th century? I call BS.

[patience]

That post was getting pretty long.

A prime example of the LACK of automation costing US jobs is the steel industry. After WWII,, the US steel industry had the world by the short and curlies, the rest of the world's productive capacity being blown to bits in the war. US manufacturers had no competition and could sell whatever they made at whatever price they put on it. They quickly got the idea that they were geniuses and could do no wrong. This resulted in CEO's treating steel companies like a cash cow and let their fixed assets run into the ground from lack of maintenance and lack of investment in improved technologies.

The rest of the world pulled themselves up by their collective bootstraps and guess what? When the US faced some REAL competition, they fell far short and the business went to Canada, Germany, Japan, and Brazil where a lot of it resides today. Yes, there is more to this story, too (again, currency differences and lower wages rates enter in), and I have oversimplified, but nowhere near to the degree in the OP article that wants us to think that automation will kill us all. Bah! Humbug!

[patience]

I said in the first post:
"What happens most often is that more goods are produced at a lower cost, sold at a lower price. The factories then grow, and employ even more people."

That is what has happened, many times, but it depends on that "eternal growth model" so much despised around this site. In fact, automation WILL reduce job levels in a post-peak world, when eternal growth fails to come about. But that has not been the case to date, and it will be a long time coming, IMHO. We still have a lot of energy to squander before that happens.

Automation is very simply a means to use cheap energy to our benefit. What is going to kick our collective butts is the loss of that cheap energy slave, not automation.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('patience', 'T')his is FAR too complex a topic to say that automation destroys jobs. If that were the case, why don't we still have the employment levels of the 19th century? I call BS.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') spent over 30 years as an engineer designing and implementing factory automation, and in all that time it ALWAYS resulted in MORE people being hired! That really flies in the face of what is proposed in this thread, but it is true.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('patience', 'W')hat is going to kick our collective butts is the loss of that cheap energy slave, not automation.

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', '
')Productivity is constantly increasing, yet real wages are flat. Why? Because increased productivity (technology) makes capital's bargaining position stronger and labors position weaker.

[Carlhole]

Robotic Labor Taking Over the World? You Bet – Here Are the Details

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'L')et’s not be silly here, robots don’t want to kill all humans…they just want to take all their jobs. The accelerating rise in robot labor of the past decade, and its expansion into all areas of production, have led many to worry about the future of human workers. Yet how extensive is the robotic take over of labor? Our friends at Mezzmer Eyeglasses did some impressive research and created an even more impressive infographic explaining the present and future of robots in the workplace. Check out the Singularity Hub exclusive image below. With 9 million robots working in the world, and 4 million+ more scheduled to arrive next year, we’re clearly entering into a new age of automation. But will it bring a new era of unemployment with it?

[MD]

Automation reduces the cost of output. Simply put: more stuff available for more people at lower cost.

Like patience, who posted at length up thread, I spent the last thirty years automating manufacturing processes throughout the US. in fact I integrated my first "robot" back in 1986 or so.

Most of us in the automation game bought into the mantra that we were saving the world through our efforts, and in fact it was automation that made possible the productivity gains of the 90's that in turn kept many manufacturing companies here in the US.

Automation is of course very much a two-edged sword. Proponents point to a utopian future where humanity finally becomes balanced around our robotic servants.

Detractors point to a borg-like planet eating machine that will land us in Terminator future.

What's clear to me is that either future is entirely dependent on what we do. Automation is just another tool in our bag of tricks.

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MD', 'A')utomation is of course very much a two-edged sword.

[nobodypanic]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('patience', ' ')

This is FAR too complex a topic to say that automation destroys jobs. If that were the case, why don't we still have the employment levels of the 19th century? I call BS.

[Serial_Worrier]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/ ... 6B20110801

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')oxconn to rely more on robots; could use 1 million in 3 years

[Schadenfreude]

CNN: "Are Jobs Obsolete

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')ew technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.

And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs -- as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there's something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.

[Kristen]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')here are going to be a lot of useless souls floating around who just don't possess any skills worth paying for.

[Lore]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kristen', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')here are going to be a lot of useless souls floating around who just don't possess any skills worth paying for.