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I don't think it will take nearly as long as you think.
That's the real question - the length and nature of the transitional phase. We're already in some kind of labor force transition phase in which fewer workers are required to sustain an increasing level of "output." We can see that simply because output is as high as ever, but labor force participation peaked back in the late 90's and has been in decline ever since:
To me this is more of job transference than job elimination. A successful venture would require an R&D team, robot manufacturers, robot salespersons and robot repairpersons. All more highly skilled jobs and susequently higher paying jobds than that the of flippers.
...is not going to work, since the number of jobs eliminated is far greater than those which are created. For one thing, it's not as though the development/manufacture of these robots even creates many new jobs - industrial robots tend to replace other (often bigger/more labor-intensive) industrial products and devices, and not just humans. A unitary fry cook robot would eliminate jobs currently involved with manufacturing/maintaining traditional fry station equipment, and so on. People tend to forget that.
And it also indicates why:
Quote:
eliminating min. wage
would not even help that much. Even the "iron law of wages" only proposes that pay for labor - in the absence of government or other interventions - tends to drift toward the bare minimum required to sustain the life of the worker. But robots need less input than that to reach the same levels of production. Besides, if trashing the minimum wage were a jobs panacea, Haiti would have zero unemployment. In real life, when wages for the masses dip too low, their buying power is eviscerated, and the economy disintegrates.
One of the main problems is that this transitional phase might take a long time - decades - due to all sorts of factors. Technology might not be adopted right away, or universally. We might have a long period of a musical chairs kind of job market where family/friends will increasingly find ways to hire each other, which is a trait of a lot of third-world economies.
So - paradoxically - we might see portions of our economy looking more feudal and "old school" even as technology advances.
Yes, I've said it before. A capitalist society depends on people with money in their pockets. If they can't get a job who pays the guy to build the robot?
Hmmm, "Capitalist"?
Capitalism = private ownership of the means of production.
As to buying goods and services with money, that's a whole different subject.
The current practice to legally acquire money tokens is by labor, by usury, and by gift (charity).
Only money mad societies entrapped by usury have that problem.
Honestly I don't know why people are always freaking out about productivity growth and mechanization in the aggregate. This has been going on for over a couple hundred years now and we keep finding new stuff for people to do.
Granted, on the individual level people who have a high-skill job that gets automated or otherwise technologically obsoleted or de-skilled can certainly lose out, but on the whole as a society it hasn't been a problem; quite the contrary.
The workforce needs to be flexible, which means not subsidizing unemployment, eliminating min. wage and getting the government out of education and technology where they create false demand and prop up industries with no value.
Henry Fords assembly line created new jobs while eliminating old.
Shouldn't regulations be equally flexible? Without min wage, shouldn't landlords be allowed to profitably provide housing that a $2/hr worker can afford?
We haven't been finding big new sources of paid employment, though - that's what the decline in the labor force participation rate since 1999 seems to show.
S. Korea, Finland, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong have demonstrated the ability to change their culture. It's not so much that the U.S. is declining as much as it is other nations are doing better.
One could not find more different educational systems than South Korea and Finland and yet they are consistently the top performers.
Lower wages will keep more employed, Ken. One aspect of my job is approving capital requests, btw. Its a simple calculation when it is robotics or automation w/o new market share. Most corps have a maximum payback period allowed to approve it, usually very short, 1-2 years max. So if Mr. Robot costs $90k, to meet a 2 year payback they need to cut $45k annually in labor/benes to meet 2 year max. If the employee is making $10 gross, and gets Health Care, Employer FICA, SUI, Workers comp, vacation, etc..that will take them to the mid-30s per year. Cut out 2-save 70k/year -you get a robot. Cut out 1, and its a no go.Now the employees pay goes to $15 per hour, benes take him to $45k. Cut one employee with the robot, you hit the 2 year max, you got your robot.
Robots do not become inevitable until the math of the payback (aka ROI) works.
ATMs quickly replaced the masses of bank tellers, support, internal auditing staffs and management necessary to because the ROI made sense. The diminished need for costly real estate was the icing on the cake.
It's substantially more challenging when the staff is primarily part time due to peak hours and minimum wage.
We haven't been finding big new sources of paid employment, though - that's what the decline in the labor force participation rate since 1999 seems to show.
It's a global thing. If the millions of young men in Egypt had jobs, they would not be out in the streets protesting.
Yes, I've said it before. A capitalist society depends on people with money in their pockets. If they can't get a job who pays the guy to build the robot? When these robots can do every imaginable job there is including designing, building and fixing other robots what then? I really don't think that time is too far off in the future.
Watson, walking robots....
But its always been the dream to have robot take over the manual jobs.Use humans for high skilled jobs .
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