- For an unvarnished view of how some American leaders talk about automation in private, you have to listen to their counterparts in Asia, who often make no attempt to hide their aims. Terry Gou, the chairman of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, has said the company plans to replace 80 percent of its workers with robots in the next five to 10 years. Richard Liu, the founder of the Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, said at a business conference last year that “I hope my company would be 100 percent automation someday.”
They're automating my facility at work. It occurred to me today, while I was getting paid to loaf around because the automated system ate shit yet again: I don't recall seeing much investigation of bad automation will affect society. Some of it will be poorly done. That's just life. Even when our system is ostensibly working, I'm suddenly getting paid to walk 5-6 miles a day trying to find places that the system has been able to deliver work at a worthwhile rate. Union walking pace. On a 5 hour shift. Labor controlling, that ain't. I'd wager that looking back on this period, we'll see that automation initiatives won't be anywhere near parity between companies within a single industry. And that further consolidation of employers will result.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/27/us/denver-airport-saw-the-future-it-didnt-work.html Sharp corners, for example, were too much for the system to deal with. The whirring baggage carts, programmed to pick up and drop off bags in a perfectly coordinated ballet, often just tipped over and dumped their loads. Then there was the lizard tongue, formally known as a telescoping belt loader, which was designed to shoot out from the track system's maw directly to an airplane's luggage doors. It, too, was a flop. BAE Automated Systems of Carrollton, Tex., which designed the system, has since been liquidated, and no one associated with the effort could be reached for comment. I cannot, to the best of my abilities, find video of the "lizard tongue." Apparently we've figured out "telescoping belt conveyors" in the past 20 years though."The main culprit was hubris," he said.
I work with few guys who worked at BAE systems who still defend that system a bit. They weren't even part of the design, just hired on when they were in the 'work out the bugs and optimize the system' phase of the debacle. ------------------------ in heavy russian accent I think they are currently re-automating it, but with the most conventional sort of baggage handling equipment.It was a wonderful system. Much more advanced than the systems built today. Very fast. They shut it down and did everything manual because the cost to keep it running was too high. It's still there if you are ever underneath the terminal. Look up and there are the carts - probably still full of lost baggage.
One of the reasons I'm moving into jewelry and watches is that there's a value-add from hand-made craftsmanship, while there's also a big efficiency bump from automation. I, as a dude with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of machine tools, can produce the same output as a workshop of 10-20 workers just a couple decades ago. For most product, however, things are so commoditized that any human involvement is met with curiosity or novelty. "You mean a person inspected my Snickers wrapper? How retro!" I think as a nation the United States likes to imagine their Chinese products as the result of an endless line of robots, rather than people folding boxes 10 hours a day. The talking heads have been pitching this whole "information" economy whereby it isn't about making stuff, it's about knowing stuff and I have no doubts that as AI becomes more predominant, a lot of those existing jobs are going to go away. And from the looks of it, Darwinism will sort out the new social order.“They always say it’s more than the stock price,” he said. “But in the end, if you screw up, you get fired.”
Three loosely connected thoughts. Bloomberg recently posted an opinion piece titled "Too Many Americans Will Never Be Able To Retire" that discussed our aging population and workforce, our having less kids, and funding social safety nets. I felt that the piece was incomplete, as automation and how it will affect our future workforce and economy was a glaring omission. This piece seems to be the flip side of a recent Voice of America article . . . I got a thought in my head recently, don't remember if it came from an article or a headline of a comment on the internet, I do know it's not mine though. Automation isn't a threat to our jobs. The threat to our jobs are employers choosing to not employ us. Its overly blunt and lacks nuance, but there's a little something there.
The WSJ has a whole series of articles under the "Unprepared" tag that are pretty horrific. But it's not like they're being alarmist. The situation hasn't changed since the Luddites: technological change destroys jobs. It also makes them. A report during LBJ's presidential term pointed out that technology doesn't impact work, it impacts jobs and that the faster you can get people retrained, the better the whole economy will fare. It also lamented the poor lost souls mining coal in the foothills and what will we do with their poor broke unemployable asses. In 1964. The future belongs to the people who see the change in the weather. For most people, though, "I'm going to go find myself a new career" is a hard goddamn thing to do when your current one is going well and entirely too late when your career is “undergoing digital transformation.”