Re:Don’t Fear the Robots: Why Automation Doesn’t Mean the En...
by jjoonathan on Thursday June 14, 2018 @07:26PM
(#17316260)
> Right on the money with the 'not globalization'.
You sure? Globalization vs robots is entirely incidental to the fact that jobs regularly disappear en masse and we deal very poorly with that as a society, but I disagree that it was obviously robots and not globalization:
https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
Re:Don’t Fear the Robots: Why Automation Doesn’t Mean the En...
by JoeAltmaier on Friday June 15, 2018 @08:35AM
(#17319279)
Globalization is a step in the direction of automation. Robots are expensive; the scale of the operation has to be large to mitigate that. So globalization is a step in the direction of automation - labor is cheaper in India or China.
Witness: factories come back to America, but only once scale increases (or automation gets cheaper) to the point robots are even cheaper than India or China. The returned factories have no labor jobs - its all robots.
So ok, its all the same effect - nobody is going to pay a living wage for labor any more.
But the part about conjuring up new jobs out of thin air - that's probably never gonna happen.
With advancing automation, there will never again be as much demand for 'labor' as historically. We've been in a bubble where industrialization still had a need for somebody at the switch. But that's ending, and for good.
In the easily-forseen future, there will be diminishing use for labor. All those with only labor to bring to the marketplace (i.e. most of us without access to capital or goods), there will be no place in our capitalist system as it stands.