Chinese Plant replaces 90% of its workers with robots

It begins.


I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.

 

Factory jobs will be replaced with jobs repairing the broken robots. Americans just need to adapt, their will be jobs but they will require more schooling/intelligence.

 

At first I thought you meant "plant" in the other sense, and was even more worried...

 

John Connor did not have any issues with employment! just wanted to get that fact in here.

 

Well, a couple things.

It's obviously not just an American issue, even if that's all you care about, it at the very least means there might be more people wanting to come to America, Chinese immigrants are already climbing in the US, and with more factory jobs lost that means more will probably try and get to America as they lose their jobs.

Education, learning mechanics and programming, takes time and money. While in an ideal world everyone would learn the basics of what they need to survive in the job market (and personally, I'd really like to see even more basic things taught like basic farming, wiring, etc.), this already doesn't happen. When the bar is raised even further, making the "basic" jobs require a higher and higher requirement, this effect will increase, and at the very least the education loans and debt will go up.

The main reason to go with robots, is because you need to pay them and their maintenance crews (programmers and mechanics and power companies) collectively less than you need to pay humans and their maintenance crews (doctors and the like).

ESPECIALLY since the job requires education and skill, mechanics and programmers tend to get paid more than simple laborers. Which means the only way you're saving money is if you hire so few maintenance that you can cover those costs and still make a profit relative to hiring humans to do the labor in the first place.

And this is example is China. A nation known for it's low factory wages and feeling the need in some factories to include nets to prevent on-the-job suicides because of poor conditions relative to pay. I mean, I suppose the nets are one expense they can cut back on with robots but you get my point.

In theory, automation can allow for greater production per capita, which should result in lower prices as supply reaches/exceeds demand and would be a good thing. In reality, a lot of companies will simply do it to cut back on costs and try to expand their profit margin without increasing production itself. This means instead of employing 1000 people they might go for 100 people maintaining robots producing the same amount, instead of still employing 1000 people and producing 10x the previous amount of product.

It's much "safer" this way, and the initial infrastructure costs and ongoing materials costs are lower. I'm sure some will take the plunge, and very possibly reap the benefits of having more product to send to market... assuming that the other companies don't lay off so many people that the newly jobless can't afford to buy the product.


There is a lot of potential with automation to help resolve many issues... but there is also a lot of potential for it to go horribly wrong. "Just needing to adapt" is far too simplistic an approach to this, in my view. Unlike the advent of industrialization and factories in the first place, where farmers became factory workers, it's much more difficult to transfer factory work experience and knowledge to new jobs when those skill sets become obsolete via robots.

Even weavers and such could switch over to factory work relatively easily. In general, factories and machines actually lowered the bar in some cases, making it so that children or relatively weak people could do the jobs that required a much more burly and/or skilled person before. A sewing machine is a great equalizer for example.

That transition wasn't without it's issues either.

 

people will adapt and new markets will open up.

 

Widespread automation can easily displace more workers than can be accounted for by new robot support jobs or just adapting. Let's say 1 in 10 employees replaced by machines is employed in the robot support field, that's still 90% of the displaced workers that require jobs. People vary greatly in their ability to develop themselves and that often decreases with age, so you have a bunch of people who have been doing blue collar work for their entire lives suddenly trying to become tech wizards and compete with the bright young tech wizards fresh out of college. Even if you take the callous approach to them and say "Oh, those people will die off and the next generation will evolve," you still have a dramatically lower number of available jobs and an ever increasing number of people that need them.

I was able to just adapt, though it took having 3 blue-collar jobs disappear to finally go to college and get a more skilled and hopefully stable one. However, I was still relatively young and had a natural aptitude that I was under-utilizing.

My mom can't just adapt. She lost her factory job, has no marketable skills, can only find part-time work with no benefits, and panics every time something pops up unexpectedly on the computer.

P.S. Who is going to buy 250% more widgets if people can't find jobs?

 

What new markets do you envision will spring up?

 

If I told you I would have to compete with you. I am not an idiot.

 

Or we could work together and corner the US and EU markets. Or work on the same new market in different locations without crossing over into each others' territories. Or embrace the idea that competition would make us stronger by driving further innovation in that market.

 

Capitalism.

 

I hope that at one point we'll get rid of hard labour and people will study arts, sciences, history etc. and solely devote themselves to things that make us enlightened and congruent and happy.

 

but what about the factory workers? oh I see.... they will make the art.

 

I think computers will be able to write better novels and paint better pictures than us before they are able to completely automise factory work.

Science might take longer, but that won't matter because science will be 'fake' (illegal) under the global imperial dynasty of the Trump family.

 

I'm not sure I agree.

That said, it's worth noting that these are two different lines of technology. Writing a book or painting pictures that aren't simply copies, or procedural algorithms* generating something requires a sophistication of AI that is not at all required for factory work. It also (technically) doesn't require the moving parts that physical labor requires.

While a level of sophistication is required for humanoid robots or the ability to adapt to outside stimulus (see the thread I posted about Robots that got little to no discussion going for whatever reason).

However, it's also possible to design automation that is far more specialized for individual factories, which cuts back somewhat on the need of sophisticated programing...

*Take for example Minecraft. Minecraft is a game that procedurally creates a bunch of different worlds whenever you start a new game, based on an algorithm creating a random "seed" for another algorithm. Some mods, like the "Myst" mod add on to that, removing or adding new parameters for the creation of things.

In some cases, this can result in absolutely beautiful terrain (especially with graphical enhancement mods). However, I wouldn't say that it is the work of a robot... I'd say it is the work of the programmers (Mojang and modders in this case).

And that's a rather basic example. No Man's Sky is another more complex one (though sadly not as complex as people seem to have been led to believe).

Then there is Watson, probably the closest thing to what you're talking about and could be blurring the lines.


That all said, even if you're right about the ordering of these technological advancements we don't actually need full self-contained automation on a factory for it to put millions out of work. In the example Sok posted, you've got a factory going from 600 people to 65, with the plan to further go down to a mere 20 people later on.

So that's 580 people that need a new job from one relatively large factory, and there are most likely at least a couple hundred thousand more factories that would experience a similar shift.

And that's not including other automation taking over non-factory jobs, such as at some Fast Food places. While automation has been slowly increasing, it seems poised to become much more relevant in the coming years because it's becoming much easier to get that sophistication to allow robots to adapt to changing circumstances (not exactly AI, but sensing and changing tasks). This will further diminish the need for humans to be involved at various steps. Delivery of goods is an example of a step that could become unnecessary to have a human directly involved, whether it be by drone or autonomous automobile or whatever.

The rate at which robots can effectively replace humans in the labor force is rapidly growing. There are potentially huge benefits from this, but also potentially great problems that can arise (and that's not including an AI taking over the robots and waging war on humans, or getting a Mass Effect"woops, we created sapient life and have accidentally enslaved them all" situation or other fantastical concepts).

DARPA and the US Gov (and probably others) actually already openly suppresses what it calls "disruptive" technologies.

It's not clear to me if they want work-force automation to rapidly spread or if they simply lack the means to suppress the technology at this point (certainly they have no problem with employing robots in a military capacity, and have been for some time).

I mentioned it in another thread as a bit of a throw-away line, but this is a thing:



It wouldn't surprise me at all if someone pursued the idea of drones dropping drones (that drop drones?).

Right now that's still only at Toys level but automation of military action isn't that far off. Especially if combined with technologies like Watson's "cognitive" processing, it could be very possible for a relatively small group to fully control a much larger army. (Obviously, there would be some issues that many in the military and even DARPA would not be okay with in that regard... but I don't think that would necessarily stop some people from trying.)

 

nah man, armed drone swarm, use simple animal school rules for cohesion, have a person control the lead drone, if an individual drone loses cohesion or signal have it activate a timed explosive. make lead drone role transferible from drone to drone in case lead drone takes a hit, selection between make all drones target lead drones target ( as designated by the "driver") switching to a simple targeting system to fire volleys at the drones individually selected targets. send against a crowd of people. breaks a couple of international rules and agreements sure.

smaller swarms for scout/patrol duty.

basically these birds except explosive killer drones


*looks at starling swarms on youtube for 20 minutes before writing this line*

 

Drones dropping drones (that drop drones) is more of a payload delivery thing.

Get a herd of armed animal-style drones flown out by a vehicular drone, have the armed animal-style drones have insect-style scouting drones (and/or the explosive types you mentioned) linked into them.

Indeed., but it's still less complex than it seemed to be presented. The fact that people go over-board in their backlash doesn't change that. Lack of proper solar systems with their respective physics (unless they fixed that eventually) is an example of an additional amount of complexity (albeit still relatively basic) on this front that was stated or implied to be in the game but didn't manifest.

Personally I don't have much of an opinion on the game (it looks interesting?) since I haven't played it and didn't really see any of the hype and such outside of a few E3 trailers.

Possibly, but in terms of short-term it makes me inclined to think a fully automated factory is likely closer than an AI being able to create "better" art than any human.

I'd say at least for a long while that it's rather an altering of the medium of art. Up to and until we have actually sapient AI (in which case my general view would be that such is a "person" anyway, albeit not a human).

Take for example digital painting programs.

You can use those to effectively cut out the job of making a paint (at least within the digital realm, if you're going to print it or apply it outside of that medium you'll need someone to still make the colors). You can have a person use such a program directly, or create an algorithm to set up the paint according to those parameters. Simple ones being fractal programs (which often have very pretty output that humans generally would not be able to produce in a properly timely manner). The medium is less direct, but the need to create the initial program, as well as the need to create the initial input or parameters for that program to run (even if it's an artificial randomization program) is still based in human creation.

Any time you want to create a truly new work, you'll need to have either an AI capable of self-programing and sentience, or an external input.

Take Watson for example. If it got no new data, it will pretty much always give the same answer to the same question (technically, it's "answer" could feed it new data, I'm excluding that for this purpose). The way it changes its answer is when new input or new parameters are added.

Even if you take a system of multiple Watson's, you'd effectively create a pattern it couldn't break out of without another new input. Maybe we could find a way to use Nature as that input, as in spite of a persistence of patterns it doesn't really repeat itself exactly. But then would the computer be the "creator" or merely a medium for Nature? Or whatever interpretation of that Nature were coded into the programming?


In any event, the thing about art, especially with digital mediums, is that there is an incredibly vast amount of room for art. Even if you've got machines automating the process, humans can create far more art than any single human can take in. Generally, the main problems with art aren't merely quality, but over-saturation of creation relative to what people will be willing to support financially (a problem that could be sorted in the long term).

Plus, since art is subjective (and thus also subject to cultural and other factors), it is impossible to say that computers will eventually create "better" art than every human... even if it gets to the point it can cut humans out of it's process of creation which seems plausible in the long term. Especially since humans can use the same tools to help them in their creations as well (barring some other factor).