The robots are coming for jobs

[Teddy B 17,252]

i think yall are barking up the wrong tree. retraining? manufacturing jobs? in the us?

I've learned how to speak with an Indian accent and know how to work the slushee machine, I'm good.

[Teddy B 17,252]

Exactly. People cannot retrain as quickly as a manufacturing line can drop out a new robot and update its firmware. That's the problem. For a new bot-job some programmers will code it, then can release it to as many bots as they can build. For humans for a new job each single individual one needs to be slowly trained.

Like Umka pointed out earlier. How many real people jobs can companies replace with robots and put their paying customers out of work without shrinking their customer base and hurting their profits? My guess would be, not too many.

[lostinblue 1,989]

Sad, Technology is supposed to help humans live better but the only ones who benefit are the ones at the top of the food chain!

Seen a lot of 40 and 50 year old's being let go due to a robot taking their manufacturing job.

How is a 50 year old going to get retrained and get an equal paying job again in the working years they have left!

My mother was in a typing pool for a fortune 500 company years ago . One hundred women in a room just typing letters and such. .. Today a computer has that task and send said information around the world with the push of a button. Should we go back to that .. No. On todays farms fields are plotted to incorporate GPS . On better soils in a say 500 acre field more fertilizer can be applied where it is beneficial .. Less where soils are poorer . When the grain is combined yield per plot is monitored and that is incorporated into the following years decisions. In the end it was better for the environment and boosted yields per acre. . . In the end you feed more of the worlds population. One person today can do the work of 50 men in that area of commerce. ... Is that so bad .

This is the real problem .

Report: Nearly Half Of Detroiters Can’t Read

DETROIT (WWJ) – According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are “functionally illiterate.” The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday.

WWJ Newsradio 950 spoke with the Fund’s Director, Karen Tyler-Ruiz, who explained exactly what this means.

“Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job — those types of basic everyday (things). Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should take… just your basic everyday tasks,” she said.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2011/05/04/report-nearly-half-of-detroiters-cant-read/

These folks cannot function now ... Let alone program robots and what not.

Instead of 20 people working at Burger king today you will have 5 ... working at that $ 20/hr wages that liberals demand .

[ExPatty 502]

Like Umka pointed out earlier. How many real people jobs can companies replace with robots and put their paying customers out of work without shrinking their customer base and hurting their profits? My guess would be, not too many.

The question misses the point. It doesn't matter. A business looks out for itself. This is called the tragedy of the commons. Even if we accept--which isn't necessarily clear--that automation of everything and removal of all jobs would kill a customer base because now nobody has money--if a company or two automate everything and nobody else does, the economy doesn't change except for those companies, which are now kicking butt with lower cost. Thus, a company will do it, and they all will.

This isn't even a theoretical argument; it's already happening. It looks like this.

People need to realize that manufacturing in the US is not only healthy, it's growing. But it's growing through automation.

Edited February 24, 2016 by ExPatty

[Teddy B 17,252]

The question misses the point. It doesn't matter. A business looks out for itself. This is called the tragedy of the commons. Even if we accept--which isn't necessarily clear--that automation of everything and removal of all jobs would kill a customer base because now nobody has money--if a company or two automate everything and nobody else does, the economy doesn't change except for those companies, which are now kicking butt with lower cost. Thus, a company will do it, and they all will.

This isn't even a theoretical argument; it's already happening. It looks like this.

People need to realize that manufacturing in the US is not only healthy, it's growing. But it's growing through automation.

The cost of a product is not the be all and end all of a successful company. There are many companies that sell the same goods at higher prices than their competition yet still are very successful. Having one or two companies be fully automated to cut cost will not change that. And once those companies are labeled as being "anti human" (for lack of a better term), they will also lose sales to other companies that continue to hire a human workforce instead of going full automation. There are many people that will go out of their way to purchase a product that fits their own personal criteria like "Made in USA" or "no chemicals used". Their will be the same people who will also go out of their way to buy goods that keep people in jobs, or "made by a human", not take them away. It has been proven over time that people will spend more to make themselves feel good. And again we come back to if all companies go full automation, there won't be enough people with jobs to buy their product. There has to be a cap on it or it will be economical suicide.

You claim that manufacturing is up in the US but that is a bad thing because a lot of it is being done by automation? Do these companies not need still hire a certain amount of humans to run the facilities and maintain the equipment? Those are jobs that without the automation would probably be shipped overseas. I don't see how any rise in manufacturing could be a bad thing, no matter who is doing it.

Edited February 24, 2016 by Teddy B

[smilesammich 10,727]

The question misses the point. It doesn't matter. A business looks out for itself. This is called the tragedy of the commons. Even if we accept--which isn't necessarily clear--that automation of everything and removal of all jobs would kill a customer base because now nobody has money--if a company or two automate everything and nobody else does, the economy doesn't change except for those companies, which are now kicking butt with lower cost. Thus, a company will do it, and they all will.

This isn't even a theoretical argument; it's already happening. It looks like this.

People need to realize that manufacturing in the US is not only healthy, it's growing. But it's growing through automation.

is there an article to go with that jpg?

[crazyworld 54]

Technology hasn't helped make your life better at all?

Where are these 40 & 50 year old's being let go? Examples?

50 year old's can be retrained, my wife retrains me all the time.

Hi Teddy,

Been working in the compressed air business for over thirty years servicing hundreds of customers.

Larger companies like Ford and Alcoa are big enough to move the person to a different job and retrain them but the smaller ones, around 200 employees and only one or two locations are the ones I'm talking about.

We have set up the air systems to the robots or CCAS (computer controlled automation system) at some of the smaller manufacturing companies. One system had 9 people (3 per shift) heading to the unemployment line. With the new CNC machines I have seen a whole second shift go from about 44 down to 6 people and they were just making sure the feeders were full to the new machines that do not need a person to operate them anymore. The owner spends 10 million dollars on new machines and is saving around a million dollars a year in salaries and insurance. The smaller companies don't have the unions to help out the worker to keep their job, or to retrain them, or the availability of jobs like the bigger companies do.

[smilesammich 10,727]

question. do robots build the robots?

[Teddy B 17,252]

Hi Teddy,

Been working in the compressed air business for over thirty years servicing hundreds of customers.

Larger companies like Ford and Alcoa are big enough to move the person to a different job and retrain them but the smaller ones, around 200 employees and only one or two locations are the ones I'm talking about.

We have set up the air systems to the robots or CCAS (computer controlled automation system) at some of the smaller manufacturing companies. One system had 9 people (3 per shift) heading to the unemployment line. With the new CNC machines I have seen a whole second shift go from about 44 down to 6 people and they were just making sure the feeders were full to the new machines that do not need a person to operate them anymore. The owner spends 10 million dollars on new machines and is saving around a million dollars a year in salaries and insurance. The smaller companies don't have the unions to help out the worker to keep their job, or to retrain them, or the availability of jobs like the bigger companies do.

Hi Crazyworld,

This type of "downsizing" has been going on forever, it's not really anything new, nor is it mainly because of a rise in automation. For these smaller companies, it's a matter of survival. I never like to see anyone lose their job, but sometimes it's a necessity for a company to be able to compete with their much bigger rivals. When you take into account the large size of the American workforce of over 150 million people, 40 or 50 or even 1000 people really isn't much. When new automation is introduced into the workforce and jobs are lost, It may take a few years or so for the people affected to adjust and find other employment, but they eventually do. There are very few people that want to work who are forced to remain unemployed for an extended period of time. I changed careers (on my own) about 23 years ago. It took me about 4 years to become acclimated with my new field and into a job where I was comfortable and making a decent wage. I have been with the same company for those 23 years and have excelled here. Just like the small business that needs to cut human workers as a matter of survival, those human workers find other means of employment for their survival.

[ExPatty 502]

he cost of a product is not the be all and end all of a successful company. There are many companies that sell the same goods at higher prices than their competition yet still are very successful. Having one or two companies be fully automated to cut cost will not change that. And once those companies are labeled as being "anti human" (for lack of a better term), they will also lose sales to other companies that continue to hire a human workforce instead of going full automation.

Okay, skip the full automation. Have a few employees for a $60M business, the rest robots. Every company on the planet now has some level of automation anyway, and more all the time. This is why manufacturing productivity in the US continues to increase per person. The people aren't better, their machines are.

People won't buy "made by a human" because it is impossible. Can you solder together a chip? Neither can I, because a machine must do it. My hand isn't precise enough to move a few microns at a time. Anything complex is already put together by machines. Moreover, most people aren't willing to pay much more for USA made, as evidenced by the fact so much of what we buy is from China, with USA-options often not even possible. You hold a great faith in the consumer. This is the same consumer who buys phones made by a foreign company that has such poor worker conditions they put a net around the building to limit the number of suicides. Yet you think this consumer will make a stand when a robot makes a great product on the cheap? No chance.

I don't think manufacturing up in the US is a bad thing. It's just a thing: it's up despite a decrease in employment. If that doesn't convince people that automation will kill jobs, nothing will.

[Teddy B 17,252]

Okay, skip the full automation. Have a few employees for a $60M business, the rest robots. Every company on the planet now has some level of automation anyway, and more all the time. This is why manufacturing productivity in the US continues to increase per person. The people aren't better, their machines are.

People won't buy "made by a human" because it is impossible. Can you solder together a chip? Neither can I, because a machine must do it. My hand isn't precise enough to move a few microns at a time. Anything complex is already put together by machines. Moreover, most people aren't willing to pay much more for USA made, as evidenced by the fact so much of what we buy is from China, with USA-options often not even possible. You hold a great faith in the consumer. This is the same consumer who buys phones made by a foreign company that has such poor worker conditions they put a net around the building to limit the number of suicides. Yet you think this consumer will make a stand when a robot makes a great product on the cheap? No chance.

I don't think manufacturing up in the US is a bad thing. It's just a thing: it's up despite a decrease in employment. If that doesn't convince people that automation will kill jobs, nothing will.

We will have to agree to disagree on this issue. I simply do not see how an automated world that will make more goods faster than ever before without human interaction will support itself with the number of people that you claim will be displaced from their jobs and unable to purchase these products due to automation. It would be economic suicide for companies to operate this way.

Anyhow, I found this article and think it's a good read. It explains how robots and people will be working together in the future to manufacture goods and why automation only works to a certain extent.

Automation Making the future How robots and people team up to manufacture things in new ways Apr 21st 2012 | From the print edition

BACK IN THE 1980s, when America's carmakers feared they might be overwhelmed by Japanese competitors, many in Detroit had a vision of beating their rivals with “lights-out” manufacturing. The idea was that factories would become so highly automated that the lights could be turned off and the robots left to build cars on their own. It never happened. Japan's advantage, it turned out, lay not in automation but in lean-production techniques, which are mostly people-based.

Many of the new production methods in this next revolution will require fewer people working on the factory floor. Thanks to smarter and more dexterous robots, some lights-out manufacturing is now possible. FANUC, a big Japanese producer of industrial robots, has automated some of its production lines to the point where they can run unsupervised for several weeks. Many other factories use processes such as laser cutting and injection moulding that operate without any human intervention. And additive manufacturing machines can be left alone to print day and night.

Yet manufacturing will still need people, if not so many in the factory itself. All these automated machines require someone to service them and tell them what to do. Some machine operators will become machine minders, which often calls for a broader range of skills. And certain tasks, such as assembling components, remain too fiddly for robots to do well, which is why assembly is often subcontracted to low-wage countries.

Industrial robots are getting better at assembly, but they are expensive and need human experts to set them up (who can cost more than the robot). They have a long way to go before they can replace people in many areas of manufacturing. Investing in robots can be worthwhile for mass manufacturers like carmakers, who remain the biggest users of such machines, but even in highly automated car factories people still do most of the final assembly. And for small and medium-sized businesses robots are generally too costly and too inflexible.

But the next generation of robots will be different. Not only will they be cheaper and easier to set up, they will work with people rather than replacing them. They will fetch and carry parts, hold things, pick up tools, sort items, clean up and make themselves useful in myriad other ways.

Various efforts are under way to produce such robots, especially for smaller companies. Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, for instance, is involved in a European initiative to develop robots that are safe enough to operate alongside workers (at present, most industrial robots still have to be caged in case they accidentally hit someone) and capable of understanding simple instructions, including voice commands.

The present generation of factory robots is akin to early mainframe computers in offices, reckons Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot, an American firm whose products include the Roomba, a robotic vacuum-cleaner, as well as military robots. Those big computers were run by experts, a long way away from most users, until personal computers arrived. “But the PC didn't get rid of office workers, it changed the tasks they did,” says Mr Brooks. Often that meant doing more sophisticated work. In 2008 he founded Heartland Robotics to produce a range of machines that would serve as the equivalent of the PC in robotics.

Mr Brooks's lips are sealed about what these machines will be like, although his views about the future of robotics provides a clue. As Toyota discovered with lean manufacturing, production-line workers, given the chance, can come up with plenty of good ideas to improve productivity. If people on the factory floor or in workshops are provided with easy-to-use robots they can become more productive, says Mr Brooks. Bring together these new robots with innovative manufacturing technologies, and you could get a manufacturing renaissance.

Millions of small and medium-sized firms will benefit from new materials, cheaper robots, smarter software, an abundance of online services and 3D printers

That would make things easier for start-ups, but scaling up is notoriously difficult because the capital costs of equipping a factory are often too high for investors to stomach, or the payback period is too long. In some businesses advanced production technologies could bring down those costs, reckons Martin Schmidt, an electrical-engineering expert at MIT. Mr Schmidt has started a number of companies that make tiny devices such as miniature sensors. He thinks that the production equipment for such devices might be shrunk too, even to tabletop size, cutting capital costs. In industries where that happens, says Mr Schmidt, “I think we will see some disruption.”

Mass-produced goods will continue to be made in factories using traditional subtractive methods for a long time yet, although with increasing automation and flexibility, as practised by the mass-market carmakers. There will also be some super-high-tech factories, like those of GE and Rolls-Royce, that make smaller quantities of highly specialised products such as jet engines. There will be millions of small and medium-sized firms that will benefit from new materials, cheaper robots, smarter software, an abundance of online services and 3D printers that can economically produce things in small numbers. And there will be countless entrepreneurs in little workshops, homes and, no doubt, garages who will be able to do things they could never have done before.

Getting there

Manufacturing revolutions never happen overnight, but this one is already well under way. There is enough transformative research going on in the biological sciences and in nanotechnology to spawn entirely new industries, like making batteries from viruses. And if the use of carbon-fibre composites were to spread from sports cars to more workaday models, the huge steel-stamping presses and robot welding lines would vanish from car factories.

Additive manufacturing, like anything else digital, is already becoming both cheaper and more effective. The big breakthrough would be in workflow. At present 3D printers make things one at a time or in small batches. But if they could work in a continuous process—like the pill-making machine in the Novartis-MIT laboratory—they could be used on a moving production line. The aim would be to build things faster and more flexibly rather than to achieve economies of scale. Such a line could be used to build products that are too big to fit into existing 3D printers and, because the machine is digitally controlled, a different item could be built on each platform, making mass customisation possible. That would allow the technology to take off.

Can it be done? Back to the EuroMold exhibition, where TNO, an independent research group based in the Netherlands, showed a novel machine with 100 platforms travelling around a carousel in a continuous loop. A variety of 3D-printing heads would deposit plastics, metals or ceramics onto each platform as they pass to make complete products, layer by layer. Scale up the idea, straighten out the carousel and you have a production line with multiple printing heads.

The “Hammering Man” outside the Frankfurt Messe is still bashing away at his piece of metal. But in a decade or two visitors to future industrial fairs may wonder what he is doing.

http://www.economist.com/node/21552897

Edited February 24, 2016 by Teddy B

[Merrytooth 5,748]

Amazon warehouse robots!

[Teddy B 17,252]

Amazon warehouse robots!

Those bots are pretty neat. Even with the robots, as of 2013 Amazon employed nearly 110,000 people and they continue to add employees annually. In 2015 they have a grand total of over 230,000 full and part time employees.

Amazon soars to nearly 110,000 employees, surpasses Microsoft for first time

Amazon’s growth shows no sign of slowing down.

The company’s quarterly earnings report today shows Amazon blowing past the 100,000-employee mark with 109,800 full-time and part-time employees on its books worldwide as of Sept. 30. That’s an increase of more than 12,000 employees from the second quarter.

In fact, Amazon now has a larger direct workforce than the region’s other tech giant, Microsoft — whose employee count also moved into six figures for the first time in the recent quarter, with 100,518 employees worldwide.

It’s not a perfect comparison. Amazon’s employment number includes not just those developing and supporting its products, but also employees fulfilling orders in its warehouses, which makes its workforce different than many traditional tech companies.

Neither Microsoft nor Amazon includes temporary or contract workers in its public employee count.

Amazon has more than tripled in size over the past three years, and rising headcount costs are one of the reasons that the company is operating in the red. Earlier today Amazon reported its second straight quarterly loss.

Its meteoric rise in employees is driven in part by expansions in its warehouse network, which has been growing around the country. The company has been opening new warehouses left and right, including one in Tracy, Calif., which may be the site of the expansion of its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service in the San Francisco Bay Area, and plans to open more domestic warehouses this year.

Amazon has also been working hard to expand fulfillment overseas, including its rapidly-expanding marketplace in India. One of the company’s strengths is its ability to rapidly deliver goods that customers order, so it’s no surprise that Amazon is looking to build on its employee base in that way.

Apart from its warehouses, Amazon is expanding its presence in its hometown of Seattle, with a new campus in the works on the northern edge of downtown. Amazon doesn’t disclose the number of people it employs in the Seattle region. Microsoft has just under 43,000 people in the region.

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-reports-109800-employees-passing-microsoft/

Number of Amazon.com employees from 2007 to 2015

This statistic represents the combined number of full- and part-time employees of Amazon.com between 2007 and 2015. In 2015, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 230,800 full- and part-time employees. Amazon is the leading e-commerce retailer in the United States with around 89 billion U.S. dollars in 2014 net revenues. A non-exhaustive list of products and services that are sold on Amazon include a variety of electronics, books, cloud infrastructure, apparel, furniture, food, toys, jewelry and more. Around 60 percent of global revenue came from electronics and other products, approximately 22 percent came from media and the remaining revenue came from other activities in 2014. Revenue growth remains steady and to meet the company’s ever increasing success, the company maintains an ever increasing number of employees. In 2014, the company had a total of 154,100 employees. Globally, Amazon has far more employees than Google and its e-commerce competitor eBay. As the holidays approach, online e-commerce retailers must find a way to meet the ever increasing sales volumes. In December of 2014, Amazon was the most visited retail site with 1.27 billion visits with more being expected every year. Typically, Amazon meets this holiday demand by adding new employees. During the 2015, holiday season, Amazon plans to hire an additional 100,000 people for the holidays, mostly working in backrooms to help receive and stock deliveries according to the Associated Press.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-employees/

Edited February 24, 2016 by Teddy B

[Sousuke 1,214]

Why? Are there significant examples of the workforce not adapting to technology throughout the years?

I think the proliferation of lower paid jobs and the loss of manufacturing along with some banking / accounting jobs is a result of technology changes.

Only a few years ago every economic page declared there was a major skills / labor gap.

Edited February 24, 2016 by Sousuke

[Sousuke 1,214]

Like Umka pointed out earlier. How many real people jobs can companies replace with robots and put their paying customers out of work without shrinking their customer base and hurting their profits? My guess would be, not too many.

If I've learned anything since 2009 its that companies actually can make profits by catering to the 1% without a productive middle class.