Re:The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade...
by vijayr on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @07:24PM
(#10384138)
They went to robots in China.
One interesting thing to watch in the next few decades would be this - if more and more robots are going to be used, then countries like China will no longer have the advantage of cheap labor. A robot in the US is more or less going to cost the same as a robot in China, so there are not many reasons to send jobs elsewhere.
Re:The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade...
by rinze on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @09:01PM
(#10384457)
> A robot in the US is more or less going to cost the same as a robot in China
I have no data to back this up, but my intuition tells me that a robot made in the US (with American workers) will still cost more to make than the same robot made in China. As I say, just a hunch (I don't know how much proportion of robotic work is involved in building a robot, though I imagine more and more every day), so let's wait and see.
They went to robots in China. There was a very good video documentary on this in (I think) The New York Times not long ago, but I haven't been able to find it. This is close, anyway, and provides context: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...
> The city of Dongguan plans to finish 1,000 to 1,500 “Robot Replace Human” programs by 2016, which (if done on a similar scale to the example above) would vastly increase production and improve quality while putting nearly a million people out of work.