We all know why our factories are moving to China: cheap human labor, far cheaper than we could ever sink to ($1.36 per hour). Well, there's a new twist to that story: FOXCONN, the troubled Chinese factory that manufactures goods for a certain (very popular) US electronics firm is buying ONE MILLION factory robots. You heard that right. One Million. And they will certainly be laying off many of their employees when the robots start churning out products.
I missed this report when it first came out but Forbes took a look at that story and thought: this will be good for American Jobs!!!
8/15/2011 @ 6:45PM |2,490 views
What Happens When Robots Replace Cheap Labor?
Even with this kind of wage pressure, pay is still very low. A Department of Labor study estimated that manufacturing workers in China earned $1.36 an hour in 2008 — about 4 percent of what an American worker made and less than wages in Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines and even India.
It's hard to believe that hundreds of millions of Chinese can move quickly up the economy's "value chain" to become tomorrow's nurses and engineers. In the meantime, as robots take over more work, the millions trapped in the countryside will have even fewer opportunities.
I'd argue that this loss of opportunity would extend to urban areas in China, as well. Not only are opportunities for rural workers going to go missing, but urban workers are going to lose jobs and opportunities as well. This will be especially true if, as I've suggested, cheap robot labor makes Western countries more attractive to locate factories to, because there are more educated workers and a better infrastructure for high tech. If that turns out to be the case, then that would impact higher skilled jobs, as well.
In the West, we've had over a century to adjust to automation and outsourcing in manufacturing, and one way we've coped with that is to divert to a more service-based economy. Developing nations won't have that chance. As Frank Tobe and Manoj Sahi note, FoxConn's move towards more robots will more than double the number of industrial robots in the world — in less than five years. That's a tough adjustment for even a robust, advanced economy."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/08/15/what-happens-when-robots-replace-cheap-labor/Slate took the wrong message from this headline.
I say: let the robots do the hardest and most dangerous work. Humans should be free to get an education and get to work solving the innumerable problems that improper or ignorant use of old technologies has brought us.
Marshall Brain has taken the same view:
"The arrival of robots should be an amazing time in human history. With robots doing all the work, we should in theory be able to enter an era of incredible human freedom and creativity. Instead of turmoil and massive unemployment, robots could theoretically release us from work. A significant portion of the population should be able to go on perpetual vacation and achieve true freedom for the first time in human history. This freedom would enable a period of creativity unlike anything that we have seen in the past. Is there a way to design the economy so that this level of creativity is possible?
Think about the era we are about to enter. Within 50 years in the likely case, and without question within 100 years, robots will perform every task essential to human survival. Robots will grow, package, transport and sell all of the food we eat. Robots will build all of the housing we live in. Robots will make, transport and sell all of the clothes we wear. Robots will manufacture all consumer products, put them on the shelves and take the money that we pay for them. And so on. Robots will displace the tens of millions of employees who are doing all of this work now.
In our current economic system, all of these displaced workers will become unemployed. If they are not able to find new employment quickly, they will burn off their savings and they will become homeless. "If you don't work, you don't eat" is a core philosophy of today's economy, and this rule could make a rapid robotic takeover extremely uncomfortable for our society. See Robotic Nation for details.
The question to ask here is simple but profound. Does the economy have to work that way in a robotic nation? Is there a way to eliminate this dependence on a job? With the robots doing all of the work, can we actually eliminate our economy's requirement of employment? Can human beings, in other words, actually achieve true freedom as the robots make this freedom a possibility?"
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htmEmbrace the robot: HE WILL SET YOU FREE!!!
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