Robots in demand in China as labour costs climb.
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Another link for those following this threadhttp://www.activistpost.com/2015/10/this-is-a-tipping-point-robots-cheaper-than-any-human-worker-means-the-end-of-jobs.html
Quote:South Korea is making a huge move to undercut China on labor costs by displacing humans once and for all in their production facilities, in a bid to edge up on their Asian rival. Samsung has vowed to create robots that do the work automatically, and without the need for breaks, meals, or days off that are literally “cheaper than any human worker.”More to digest on robotshttp://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/12/thinking-machines-skilled-job-robots-steal
Hawkins seems tothink it is capitalism and not robots we need to fear http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stephen-hawking-capitalism-robots_5616c20ce4b0dbb8000d9f15?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067
Good find. Actually, Hawking's reply probably deserves a thread of its own;
Quote:I'm rather late to the question-asking party, but I'll ask anyway and hope. Have you thought about the possibility of technological unemployment, where we develop automated processes that ultimately cause large unemployment by performing jobs faster and/or cheaper than people can perform them? Some compare this thought to the thoughts of the Luddites, whose revolt was caused in part by perceived technological unemployment over 100 years ago. In particular, do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated? Do you think people will always either find work or manufacture more work to be done? Thank you for your time and your contributions. I’ve found research to be a largely social endeavor, and you've been an inspiration to so many.Answer:If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.This is not going to happen of course unless society as a whole becomes the machine owners. Quite apart, that is, from cheaper labour power being an obstacle to complete automation coming about under capitalism, So the wages system would have to go too. But then common ownership and the abolition of the wages system are two sides of the same coin.
Via Stop Killer Robots:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/849666f6-cbf2-11e5-a8ef-ea66e967dd44.html?segid=0100320#axzz3zZzaRGdT
Quote:Last week Mr Carter talked about “swarming, autonomous vehicles” — an allusion to another idea that animates current defence thinking in Washington, the use of greater volumes of aircraft or ships in a conflict. The emphasis in American military technology in recent decades has been on developing weapons platforms that are deployed in fewer numbers but boast much greater capabilities, such as the F-35 fighter jet. However, backed by low-cost production techniques such as 3D printing, Pentagon planners are flirting with a different model that seeks to saturate an enemy with swarms of cheaper, more expendable drones.http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-02/09/c_135086319.htm
Quote:SYDNEY, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) — A French-made robot bus is set to be trialled in an Australian state as part of wider preparations into the use of autonomous vehicles on local roads.A French-made driverless electric shuttle bus will carry 15 passengers at speeds up to 45 km per hour in the Western Australia state capital Perth using three-dimensional sensing technology that allows the bus to avoid obstacles and detect and read road signs.It's only a trial, but if we're at the trial stage, how far off can implementation be?
This thread's title should be changed as the issues on it has widened tremondously.http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/13/artificial-intelligence-ai-unemployment-jobs-moshe-vardi
Quote:Machines could put more than half the world’s population out of a job in the next 30 years, according to a computer scientist Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): “We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?” Citing research from MIT, he noted that although Americans continue to drive GDP with increasing productivity, employment peaked around 1980 and average wages for families have gone down. “It’s automation,” Vardi said. Vardi said he wanted the gathering of scientists to consider: “Does the technology we are developing ultimately benefit mankind?Perhaps we could do a short pamphlet or special issue of the Standard on the topic to circulate to those scientists blinkered to continually framing their questions within the context of capitalism as their only existing world rather than putting forward a socialist alternative.
For those still interested in the topic of robots, automation and the futurehttp://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1094/robots-and-capitalism/
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/26/future-of-work-remote-controlled-vehicle-operators-in-demand-in-2035Another report to read
Quote:He said a recent CEDA report showed 5 million jobs (40% of the Australian workforce) face a high probability of being replaced by computers over the next 10 to 15 years.Yet another interesting article on automation and robotics and workers futureshttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/29/the-guardian-view-on-the-automated-future-fewer-shops-and-fewer-people
Quote:The rich get richer, and their lives get more enjoyable. Poor communities grow poorer and more hollowed out. It’s another example of the way that economic efficiency, narrowly measured, increases inequality. An optimist might say that this kind of change has been constant for the past 200 years. The jobs that automation has replaced have mostly been dirty, dangerous, or disagreeable. There have never been as many people employed in Britain as today, and certainly never as many women. Nonetheless, change has seldom been quicker and more vertiginous than today and we’ll need human intelligence to reach a better future. We can’t trust the computers to get us there on their own.https://theconversation.com/a-post-work-economy-of-robots-and-machines-is-a-bad-utopia-for-the-left-59134A good critique of Mason and robot-end-of-wor fully automated luxury communism.
Quote:Money governs the planet. We cannot live except through money, received in the form of a wage pitched at the level we need to survive as productive labour. But the roots of a wage crisis lie not in the amount of the money we have in our pockets, but because our access to the things we need to live is mediated by money in the first place. How, then, is a crisis of the wage solved by distributing more money? Printing money is easy. Living under the abstract form of domination it implies is not. The distribution of money by the state will only mean a different form of distribution of wealth for social reproduction but in no way can move us to a post-capitalist era.They find concrete utopias in 'commoning' access to things we need. If anything, though, they are focusing on the basic income meme, I'd think Masons ideas also rest around similar commonings: for instance, the threat to expropropriate the common of BBC recipes would have been met fairly quickly by a recipe wiki, thebig companies would not have been able to onetise that sort of resource for free…
The notion the above team critiques actually crops up as The Direction in Ken Macloed's latest novel the "Corporation Wars: dissonance". In this (apparent, it could be lies) future, all humans are equally the ultimate beneficiaries of AI corporations, so the corporations, with their robots, operate as capitalist firms, as if all firms were ultimately owned by one individual. This gets round worker owned capitalism and the like, because differential profit rates don't matter, each AI firm is trying to make a profit by its nature, and then the sumk of profits are paid out as a dividend to all. theoretically, this could work, the only problem being that it cannot remove the problem of capitalist crisis, which would mean that every few years, no-one would get (substantial – there's always some firms in profit, even during a big crash) dividends. Could it happen, yes, it could come from he UBI, and while humans continue to run the firms, what we would have is chief excutives and profiteers saying they are working for us, and inequality would continue. Until we replaced them with Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism.
Quote:it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging french fries,”But it is all about fear-mongering in the $15 campaign in the US so how accurate a threat, i am not sure
Quote:“All this nonsense with McDonald’s minimum wage, work rules, it’s all about union dues. It’s about organizing,” he said. “It’s a theater of protests to capture votes for the Democratic party. It’s absolute nonsense. It’s a sham and it’s destroying the middle class in this country.”It is not surprising that the comments were made on Fox TV
https://www.rt.com/sport/344410-adidas-robot-shoes-factory/
Quote:Adidas has confirmed it will produce shoes manufactured by robots in Germany from 2017.A second robotized factory is planned in the United States during the latter part of next year, while expanding production into Britain and France is also a possibility. Rising production costs in Asia, where Adidas employs around one million workers, and Nike's development of a robot-operated factory has forced the German company to act.
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