Chinese workers, your days are numbered. Will robots will take your, mine and our jobs away?
Technology has advanced to the point where robots are cheap enough now to replace virtually any worker. And with GPS tie-ins, may soon replace you as a driver.
Lipoh probably can’t wait to replace his dullards with robots. What are people going to do when they are no longer needed for jobs? Something to think about. The future is here.
Rise Of The Droids: Will Robots Eventually Steal All Of Our Jobs?
By Michael, on February 4th, 2013
Will a robot take your job? We have entered a period in human history when technology is advancing at an exponential rate. In some ways, this has been a great blessing for humanity. For example, I am absolutely blown away by all of the things that my little iPod can do.
But on the other hand, all of this technology is eliminating millions upon millions of high paying jobs. In the past, I have written extensively about how millions of American jobs have been sent to the other side of the world, but now we may be moving into a time when workers all over the planet will be steadily losing jobs to super-efficient robots. For employers, robots provide a lot of advantages to human workers. Robots never complain, they never get tired, they never need vacation, they never show up late, they never waste time of Facebook, they don’t need any health benefits and there are a whole lot of rules, regulations and taxes that you must deal with when you hire a human worker.
In the past, robots were exceedingly expensive, and that limited their usefulness in the workplace, but as you will see later in this article that is rapidly changing. As robots continue to become even more advanced and even less expensive, will there eventually come a point where the “human worker” is virtually obsolete?
Of course I can hear the objections already. Many of you will insist that even though automation has always eliminated jobs in the past, it has also always created new jobs that were even better. For instance, once upon a time most of the U.S. population worked on farms, but thanks to automation now hardly any of us do.
But what happens when we get to the point where super-intelligent robots are more efficient at everything?
What will be left for “human workers” to do?
And if human workers are no longer needed for most tasks, what will their role in society be?
Personally, I still complain about self-service check-in kiosks at airports and self-checkout lanes at supermarkets, but most people seem to have accepted them. There are even many bank branches now that don’t have any humans in them at all. The number of jobs where a human worker is absolutely “required” is dwindling all the time.
And a lot of the jobs that are disappearing thanks to advances in technology are fairly high paying jobs. In fact, one recent study of employment data from 20 countries discovered that “almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000.”
As I mentioned earlier, in the past robots were simply far too expensive to perform most tasks. So human workers had an advantage.
But that advantage is disappearing right in front of our eyes. For example, one company has produced a new robot called “Baxter” that only costs $22,000. The following is from an article about Baxter in the MIT Technology Review…
Baxter was conceived by Rodney Brooks, the Australian roboticist and artificial-intelligence expert who left MIT to build a $22,000 humanoid robot that can easily be programmed to do simple jobs that have never been automated before.
Eventually, the goal is to produce versions of Baxter that will perform tasks even more cheaply than Chinese workers do…
Brooks’s company, Rethink Robotics, says the robot will spark a “renaissance” in American manufacturing by helping small companies compete against low-wage offshore labor. Baxter will do that by accelerating a trend of factory efficiency that’s eliminated more jobs in the U.S. than overseas competition has. Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.
The ultimate goal is for robots like Baxter to take over more complex tasks, such as fitting together parts on an electronics assembly line. “A couple more ticks of Moore’s Law and you’ve got automation that works more cheaply than Chinese labor does,” Andrew McAfee, an MIT researcher, predicted last year at a conference in Tucson, Arizona, where Baxter was discussed.
So it won’t just be American workers that will be displaced by robots – it will literally be workers all over the planet.
In the future, when you call someone for customer service you probably won’t be talking to someone in India. Instead, you will probably be talking to a robot. In fact, this transition is already starting to happen…
IPsoft is a young company started by Chetan Dube, a former mathematics professor at New York University. He reckons that artificial intelligence can take over most of the routine information-technology and business-process tasks currently performed by workers in offshore locations. “The last decade was about replacing labour with cheaper labour,” says Mr Dube. “The coming decade will be about replacing cheaper labour with autonomics.”
IPsoft’s Eliza, a “virtual service-desk employee” that learns on the job and can reply to e-mail, answer phone calls and hold conversations, is being tested by several multinationals. At one American media giant she is answering 62,000 calls a month from the firm’s information-technology staff. She is able to solve two out of three of the problems without human help. At IPsoft’s media-industry customer Eliza has replaced India’s Tata Consulting Services.
Even some of the largest companies in China are starting to make the transition from human workers to robots. The following is from a recent TechCrunch article…
Foxconn has been planning to buy 1 million robots to replace human workers and it looks like that change, albeit gradual, is about to start.
The company is allegedly paying $25,000 per robot – about three times a worker’s average salary – and they will replace humans in assembly tasks. The plans have been in place for a while – I spoke to Foxconn reps about this a year ago – and it makes perfect sense. Humans are messy, they want more money, and having a half-a-million of them in one factory is a recipe for unrest. But what happens after the halls are clear of careful young men and women and instead full of whirring robots?
So what will the world look like as robots begin to replace humans in just about every industry that you can imagine?
A recent Wired article described what this transition might look like…
First, machines will consolidate their gains in already-automated industries. After robots finish replacing assembly line workers, they will replace the workers in warehouses. Speedy bots able to lift 150 pounds all day long will retrieve boxes, sort them, and load them onto trucks. Fruit and vegetable picking will continue to be robotized until no humans pick outside of specialty farms. Pharmacies will feature a single pill-dispensing robot in the back while the pharmacists focus on patient consulting. Next, the more dexterous chores of cleaning in offices and schools will be taken over by late-night robots, starting with easy-to-do floors and windows and eventually getting to toilets. The highway legs of long-haul trucking routes will be driven by robots embedded in truck cabs.
All the while, robots will continue their migration into white-collar work. We already have artificial intelligence in many of our machines; we just don’t call it that. Witness one piece of software by Narrative Science (profiled in issue 20.05) that can write newspaper stories about sports games directly from the games’ stats or generate a synopsis of a company’s stock performance each day from bits of text around the web. Any job dealing with reams of paperwork will be taken over by bots, including much of medicine. Even those areas of medicine not defined by paperwork, such as surgery, are becoming increasingly robotic. The rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic.
I don’t know about you, but the phrase “robot takeover” is not exactly comforting.
In any event, as technology advances there will eventually be very few jobs that robots cannot perform. In fact, you might be surprised to learn some of the things that robots are already doing. The following is from a recent Yahoo News article…
Google and Toyota are rolling out cars that can drive themselves. The Pentagon deploys robots to find roadside explosives in Afghanistan and wages war from the air with drone aircraft. North Carolina State University this month introduced a high-tech library where robots — “bookBots” — retrieve books when students request them, instead of humans. The library’s 1.5 million books are no longer displayed on shelves; they’re kept in 18,000 metal bins that require one-ninth the space.
So what will the 3.1 million Americans that drive trucks do for a living once robots are driving all of our trucks?
What will the 573,000 Americans that drive buses do for a living once robots are driving all of our buses?
And eventually even our skies may be filled with robotic drones that are busy performing one task or another. Just check out what a recent Time Magazine article had to say about the emerging drone industry…
But the drone industry is ramping up for a big landgrab the moment the regulatory environment starts to relax. At last year’s Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) trade show in Las Vegas, more than 500 companies pitched drones for filming crowds and tornados and surveying agricultural fields, power lines, coalfields, construction sites, gas spills and archaeological digs. A Palo Alto, Calif., start-up called Matternet wants to establish a network of drones that will transport small, urgent packages, like those for medicine.
In other countries civilian drone populations are already booming. Aerial video is a major application. A U.K. company called Skypower makes the eight-rotored Cinipro drone, which can carry a cinema-quality movie camera. In Costa Rica they’re used to study volcanoes. In Japan drones dust crops and track schools of tuna; emergency workers used one to survey the damage at Fukushima. A nature preserve in Kenya ran a crowdsourced fundraising drive to buy drones to watch over the last few northern white rhinos. Ironically, while the U.S. has been the leader in sending drones overseas, it’s lagging behind when it comes to deploying them on its own turf.
Unfortunately, many people will not understand what I am really trying to get at in this article.
They will just say something like this: “Well, they are going to need someone to build all of those robots.”
Even if that is true, they won’t need hundreds of millions of us to build them.
No, the truth is that when human workers become “obsolete”, those that dominate society with technology will look at the rest of us as “useless eaters” that are not contributing anything to society at all.
Already, there are many economists that are warning that advancements in technology are steadily reducing “the natural employment rate”.
And we are already seeing this happen in the United States. As I wrote about the other day, the percentage of the labor force that is employed has declined every single year since 2006…
2006: 63.1
2007: 63.0
2008: 62.2
2009: 59.3
2010: 58.5
2011: 58.4
In January, only 57.9 percent of the civilian labor force was employed.
Of course there are certainly a lot of factors involved in why those numbers are declining, but without a doubt technology is playing a role.
So what do we do with all of the workers that are being displaced?
Are we just going to put everybody on food stamps?
Will the gap between the rich and the poor grow even larger than it is today?
Will most people eventually become dependent on the government in order to survive?
We are moving into uncharted territory, and nobody is quite sure what comes next.
As time goes by, robots will even start to look more like us. In fact, this is already starting to happen. Just check out the following description of a “bionic man” that has been created from a recent article in the Guardian…
He cuts a dashing figure, this gentleman: nearly seven feet tall, and possessed of a pair of striking brown eyes. With a fondness for Ralph Lauren, middle-class rap and sharing a drink with friends, Rex is, in many ways, an unexceptional chap.
Except that he is, in fact, a real-world bionic man. Housed within a frame of state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs is a functional heart-lung system, complete with artificial blood pumping through a network of pulsating modified-polymer arteries. He has a bionic spleen to clean the blood, and an artificial pancreas to keep his blood sugar on the level. Behind the deep brown irises are a pair of retinal implants, giving him a vista of the crowds of curious humans who meet his gaze.
He even has a degree of artificial intelligence: talk to him, and he’ll listen (through his cochlear implants), before using a speech generator to respond.
As robots become more like us, will we eventually become more like them?
Will we be told that we must “merge with the machines” in order to keep up and be useful in society?
As we rapidly approach the “technological singularity” that futurist Ray Kurzweil and others have talked about, will humans increasingly seek to “enhance” themselves with technology in an attempt to “get an edge”?
What will happen to those of us that refuse to “merge with the machines” and that refuse to “enhance ourselves” with technology?
Will we be outcasts?
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/rise-of-the-droids-will-robots-eventually-steal-all-of-our-jobs-2
KaD says:
Outcast is fine with me. I am not merging with machines. Ever.
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6th February 2013 at 2:26 pm
majormocambo says:
Not sure who or what caused this recent thought train that the technology exists today to have robots take all our jobs away. I’ve been working with process automation and machine intelligence my whole career and call bullshit. If a job is repetitive and can be automated, it will be. This has been happening since the 1980′s. I used to go into a sawmill and in one weekend make a forty man operation into a six man operation. I was young and didn’t think about all the lives I was screwing up. But my point is that automation has already happened in most cases where it made sense. I think what got people excited was seeing Amazon’s new automated facility. The whole notion of what they were doing was executed using people first, but once they got the process down, they figured out how to automate it. That’s not our whole economy.
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6th February 2013 at 2:33 pm
JIMSKI says:
Based on the history of science fiction the odds are not in our favor…….
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6th February 2013 at 2:37 pm
Eddie says:
The end of mankind will happen when…i
Instead of iPhones, we can all get really good looking robots…
Instead of having to go through the shame and inconvenience of the whole dating thing…
Just think, a gorgeous willing partner who also waits on you hand and foot…programmed to tell you how attractive and intelligent you are. And since you can’t reproduce with a robot,no more pesky kids to raise.
What’s not to love.
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6th February 2013 at 2:46 pm
card802 says:
I’ve also worked in many facilities that have been slowly automating for decades.
A company just down the road makes a conveyor system complete with part racks that can reach 60 feet in height, there is a robot lift truck that runs up to 30 mph on rails. This thing grabs the skid and places it in the correct loading sequence on the conveyor which runs to the loading dock, and off it goes.
This system is being implemented all over the world.
The people working on the system don’t really understand how many lift truck drivers they will idle. But, that is the future.
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6th February 2013 at 2:54 pm
AWD says:
I’m with Eddie,
They got the outside pretty well done, now to get them to finish up the rest of the package
http://www.realdoll.com/cgi-bin/snav.rd?action=viewgalleryimage&gallery=jenny&image=jenny_set1_1.jpg
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6th February 2013 at 3:02 pm
Administrator says:
AWD
With your luck, your hot blond real doll would run off with a miner real doll and sue you for baby real doll child support.
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6th February 2013 at 3:06 pm
Eddie says:
Of course, for those women who were previously married, you could always get a male robot programmed to be physically and emotionally abusive.
For divorced men there would be a model who was always bitchy and programmed to max out your credit cards.
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6th February 2013 at 3:10 pm
Kill Bill says:
AWDs luck his real hot blond doll would get a computer virus and screw him to death.
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6th February 2013 at 3:17 pm
Chicago999444 says:
How on Earth, in such a context, can anybody with any humanity or common sense, think that it’s a good thing to start a family?
I had my tubes tied, as a young, unmarried, white woman back in 1981, because I didn’t want the burden of kids and wanted, frankly, to have sex with no worries about pregnancies. I was 28 years old, and made myself look like a psychiatric case to persuade the doctor, another young white woman who BADLY wanted kids, to do the job. She didn’t want to do it, but, hell, $600 is $600, and I signed all the requisite waivers and other crap, and she did it. My family and friends told me I was making a big mistake that I would regret.
I never regretted it for a minute, but never in my life have I ever been so glad, glad, glad, that I elected to remain childless.
I mean, let’s just face it. There are not enough resources or jobs for the people we have, and we are now on the downslope of the arc of depletion for just about everything. And now, with robotics, we won’t have the jobs that the kids people like me never had, would need to support us in our own age.
Permanent contraction is a bitch, isn’t it? We don’t have enough young workers to support people in my baby boom age cohort in our old age. But if we boomers had had enough kids to do that, they wouldn’t be able to support us because there wouldn’t be enough jobs or resources to go around.
At the end of the day, poor is poor and depleted is depleted. Adding more bodies to feed and house, on the assumption that they will support the bodies already here, won’t solve the problem.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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6th February 2013 at 3:22 pm
ThePessimisticChemist says:
“There are not enough resources or jobs for the people we have, and we are now on the downslope of the arc of depletion for just about everything”
I was told that I owed it to the human race to reproduce.
I think she just wanted in my pants.
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6th February 2013 at 3:26 pm
Kill Bill says:
You know why they can not automate a politician?
Because grab assing destroys the robots ability to function.
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6th February 2013 at 3:28 pm
JIMSKI says:
Thinks he knows who bought the dildo now…….
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6th February 2013 at 3:41 pm
ThePessimisticChemist says:
On topic: We will eventually be faced with the reality that humans need to curb their incessant breeding, or else we’ll be locked in an endless war over ever dwindling resources (sound familiar?)
I’m not too terrified of robots at this juncture, we way oversell their capabilities and way undersell what a human is capable of. One cannot deny that they will decrease the need for “easy” jobs, which forces our species to admit that the last thing we need is more mouths to feed.
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6th February 2013 at 4:03 pm
AWD says:
Funny,
With my luck she’d get a lawyer and sue me being human (and win). Fucking lawyers.
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6th February 2013 at 4:23 pm
Llpoh says:
Awd – it is the below average that are really in trouble in the long run. Right now developed countries are taking from the makers and giving to the takers. This cannot continue. When it stops, the shit will hit the fan. When the dust settles, the low skilled are in shit city.
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6th February 2013 at 4:43 pm
ThePessimisticChemist says:
@llpoh – Maybe natural selection will kick in then, and the fat stupid and lazy will be phased out rather than encouraged to breed further.
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6th February 2013 at 5:06 pm
Llpoh says:
TPC – We can hope.
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6th February 2013 at 5:09 pm
elby says:
Chicago999444 really is obsolete. An evolutionary dead end. I had 6 kids. Wish I had more. The most evolutionarily fit people I know of are the Duggers. And they don’t even believe in evolution.
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6th February 2013 at 6:06 pm
Chicago999444 says:
I’m not interested in being “evolutionarily fit” nearly so much as I’m interested being personally prepared and FINANCIALLY fit. I always figured that I personally stood to benefit much more from being productive and earning money than I did from passing on my precious DNA.
I have never understood why it should matter to me if my DNA gets passed on to the next generation. I always thought it was more important to make sure you could give the next generation a chance at a decent life. I wouldn’t want to look my child in the face and admit that I knew that she’d have half the chance of living above the poverty level that I had of attaining affluence, thanks to overpopulation, resource depletion, and implacable economic contraction.
Sorry, but I’m not favorably impressed by incontinent breeders like the Duggers, who have so many kids that they have to practice extreme frugality to fit within an income that would be more than ample for a normal size family of four or five people. The Duggers very fortunately are able to earn an income far above the average. Kudos to them for earning ability and good personal money management, but Mrs. Dugger once admitted that it was really tough to manage within their means, which means that they would be no way able to meet with a real emergency, and their kids aren’t any better off than the kids from far less affluent families with fewer mouths to feed. A study done in the early 80s found that children from affluent families with 5 or more children were no more advantaged than children from poor households with only one child to support.
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6th February 2013 at 6:48 pm
elby says:
The Duggers have managed to raise all their children completely debt free. Something most Americans with far fewer children could manage. In the future, everyone will be related to JimBob and Michelle Dugger.
As for overpopulation, fertility rates have been declining for decades. Very few areas of the world have above replacement fertility, and those areas that do are seeing their fertility rates plummet. The population is rising because people live longer, not because of too many babies.
I am sorry you have such a negative view of the future. If everyone shared that view, there would be no future.
I didn’t have much money when I was raising my children, and as a result my children have learned the value of hard work, sharing and frugality. Precisely the values needed in this doomed economy. They will also take care of me in my old age, so long as I promise not to hit them with my cane too often.
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6th February 2013 at 7:40 pm
DaveL says:
I don’t have a lot of time left. I hope they come up with a robotic digital prostate exam, I’m tired of having to kiss my doctor when he’s done.
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6th February 2013 at 7:55 pm
Leobeer says:
DaveL,
Did you hear about the doctor that uses 2 fingers ?
He wanted to get a second opinion.
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6th February 2013 at 7:59 pm
KaD says:
All it takes to make a robot obsolete is a sledgehammer.
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6th February 2013 at 11:40 pm
Makati1 says:
Another techie wet dream that will disappear when they wake up to reality.
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6th February 2013 at 11:47 pm
flash says:
If robots replace stupid Americans , what a sad and unfilled existence shall loopy suffer without those stupid American employee to kick around and fire by the thousands.
It’ll be just him and his former superior intellect and blue blood by affiliation, overshadowed by the rise of programmed superiority, possessing no a indulgence for class status derived from college attendance.
O’ woe is loopy upon the rise of the robot employee…
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6th February 2013 at 8:56 am
Eddie says:
Chicago999444
When I was young I also felt that it was an iffy thing, bringing children into this world. In the late 1970′s one could see where we were headed, and I wasn’t that anxious to have a family. As it turned out, I relented and ended up being a daddy.
But young people now are increasingly going the route you took, which I do understand, but regret, because if you don’t have kids of your own, you never quite know what you’ve missed in that regard, imho. One of the very best parts of this life…and I never would have seen it that way if I had made the choice of not having kids.
It’s a reasonable choice…perhaps the most reasonable choice. But somehow it angers me that it has come this point, where no good future looks possible, and the best people choose to not have kids…and the worst have them in droves and don’t take care of them.
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6th February 2013 at 9:34 am
Chicago999444 says:
Whenever I feel like I “missed something” by not having kids, I sit around and listen to the war stories of parents I know, those who are dealing with teens in particular.
The mothers, especially, wish like hell they’d never had kids. One black woman I know, a hardworking woman fighting to keep her teens on a constructive path, told me vehemently: “You didn’t miss out on NOTHIN’!!!!! when I told her I often wondered if I’d passed on a fulfilling experience. After watching one woman, a nice Eastern European lady, being smacked around by her 6’2″ tall spoiled lout of a son while his dad looked on impassively, and watching dozens of other people driven to the wall dealing with their teens.
There are many other things I feel I did miss out on, such a truly interesting career (made a bad choice there), and foreign travel, but raising kids isn’t one of them.
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6th February 2013 at 8:30 pm