Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Ghostavo on August 08, 2011, 01:36:50 pm
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So I was reading a recent news article on Tom's Hardware regarding the plans of Foxconn to replace a sizable portion of their workforce with robots, AKA automation, and started seeing the comments section. Since this is mainly a site dedicated to technology/hardware I would wager most people reading this would be immensely supportive of this move.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that most posters are luddites.
The article:
One Million Robots to Take Over Jobs of Foxconn Workers (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Foxconn-Robots-Staff-Workers-One-Million-Terry-Gou,13156.html)
So is the average joe a luddite? :confused:
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guess they will need to do what everyone in the first world is doing, make everyone into salesmen so you can sell the things that come out the loading dock of the robotic factory. or maybe they can get jobs in the robotics industry. there are just jobs that robots do better. you will never have a robotic salesman for example, would take some sophisticated ai to pull that off. but a robotic welder can make a perfect weld where a human welder with decades of experience can still make mistakes. human welder can still go places robots cant and dont require as much setup time. a human welder can also make decisions where a robot can not. but for a manufacturing perspective the robot is the better worker and you always want the best worker for the job. and for every robot in use thats probably room for someone to be a technician, or perhaps get a job selling robots.
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The average joe still has trouble coping with setting the clock on their VCR/PVR/TV... the fact that those systems are largely automatic is almost beside the point :)
Some people I know own smart phones and have no idea how to use it. They even loudly proclaim that it's too complicated for them. Not sure why they own it although some of them are working at jobs where a Blackberry is part of the dress code. Most high technology is too complicated for people. Even the vaunted iPhone gets it's best use from the people who were always good at the technology.
That all said... I don't see any examples of luddites on the Tom's Hardware site link that you gave us. I see quite a bit of tongue in cheek British style humour.
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See the second and third page of comments.
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So is the average joe a luddite? :confused:
Average joe worries about the possibility he will be replaced by machinery.
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So is the average joe a luddite? :confused:
Average joe worries about the possibility he will be replaced by machinery.
Yeah, this. I think there's a big difference between being a Luddite and having a legitimate concern that automation might put you out of a job.
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weren't the Luddites professional weavers who destroyed industrial looms because they thought that automated looms would put them out of business?
aren't there decidedly not very many weavers left in the world today?
weren't the Luddites right to be worried?
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So is the average joe a luddite? :confused:
Average joe worries about the possibility he will be replaced by machinery.
Yeah, this. I think there's a big difference between being a Luddite and having a legitimate concern that automation might put you out of a job.
And this is ultimately one of the biggest problems with our society, with very few exceptions it never really adjusted to the Information Age. The Industrial Age is dead, and along with it notions like pensions and job security.
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Well, the problem is that the mentality of most large corporations still exists in the Industrial age, that productivity = income = stability, however, this is despite the fact that the information age has made it so that productivity can be increased by reducing the number of humans in your employ.
The luddites were right to be concerned, hand-weaving is now a cottage industry and is rapidly descending into a 'hobby'. So governments still expect people to earn a living whilst at the same time corporations are slowly removing the opportunity to do so, the whole things on a pretty shaky path.
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What's going to happen when we have really nice 3D printers?
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What's going to happen when we have really nice 3D printers?
we will all be $500 poorer. yes, there are fab machines that cheep, if you dont mind ordering from china. you can also get a laser cutter for less than what you would have payed for a computer back in '96.
anyway this kinda thing is nothing new. jobs go obsolete. for example if we went to electric cars, engine mechanics would find it hard to get jobs. sure there would be engines that need repair and maintenance. but the demand for that kind of service would diminish. jobs go obsolete all the time, just ask your neiborhood milkman, or the guy that brings you ice. oh wait, you cant :D
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Well, the problem is that the mentality of most large corporations still exists in the Industrial age, that productivity = income = stability, however, this is despite the fact that the information age has made it so that productivity can be increased by reducing the number of humans in your employ.
Not entirely true because while machines are well suited for monotonous repetitive tasks there are still plenty of things people can do better. People bemoan the loss of factory work probably because factory work is easy, you just do the exact same thing again and again and again through the whole day and it requires very little training or learning.
We actually didn't hear too much of this during the great stock market runs of the 90's and 00's, when people could easily increase their worth dumping money (their own or borrowed) into bubble related assets (tech stocks, finance stocks and real estate mainly), but most of these people never really learned even basic things like how to protect their investments, what things not to invest in, etc, and as a result when the market went down they lost almost everything. Should we blame mechanization for this too? How could more factory jobs have prevented this? The answer is no to both. It's a case of intellectual laziness at its finest.
The luddites were right to be concerned, hand-weaving is now a cottage industry and is rapidly descending into a 'hobby'. So governments still expect people to earn a living whilst at the same time corporations are slowly removing the opportunity to do so, the whole things on a pretty shaky path.
And yet haven't we all benefited from the luddites failure? Simple factory work is not the only kind of work there is.
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I'm not saying the Luddites weren't doomed to failure, or that this wasn't a positive thing from the point of view of civilisation as a whole, just as Caxton putting scribes out of work wasn't a 'bad' thing in the large picture, but the problem is still that our work ethic is from the 1800's and our work technic is far more modern, and the two are becoming less and less compatible.
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One problem is, what if there's no more work for people to do? We're gonna have to find new avenues for people to work in, else more and more people are dependent on government to survive. Unless all the automated systems and robots will offer services free to the public, combined with using renewable cheap energy, you're causing quite an economic crisis for everyone.
Nonetheless it's expected that almost all new aircrafts will be fully automated or operated by people like the Predator drones far away. Has it's advantages but you may be losing ethics as barriers previously there are gone.
Nonetheless, I wouldnt mind to have or even make an automated process to back up my customer service job but unless I move to another part of the company I might become obsolete. ;)
And I doubt you can convince robots to be free with rules (I've helped perhaps a hundred customers where we didn't have to help them).
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And yet haven't we all benefited from the luddites failure? Simple factory work is not the only kind of work there is.
But it is very good at absorbing large numbers of people in a way other kinds of work simply aren't. It takes decades for the market for creative work to expand enough to take up the losses from automation usually, absent an unnatural requirement to expend manpower like a war.
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And yet haven't we all benefited from the luddites failure? Simple factory work is not the only kind of work there is.
But it is very good at absorbing large numbers of people in a way other kinds of work simply aren't. It takes decades for the market for creative work to expand enough to take up the losses from automation usually, absent an unnatural requirement to expend manpower like a war.
case in point large swathes ok the UK still qualify for European Union grants to assist them develop new employment opportunities after the collapse of mining and heavy industry in the country
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in a perfect world businesses would be made to work together to re-distribute their discarded workforces. instead its like "were laying you off because yove been replaced by a robot, heres your paycheck and your letter of recommendation now get the **** out of here". should be something like "were modernizing and we dont need as many workers, but this upstart company needs line workers and theyre willing to take you on at your current pay rate". it always seemed kinda negligent for businesses with huge pools of resources sending unneeded workers into an uncertain job market with little more than a severance package and a letter of recommendation always seems kind of archaic to me.
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I don't know why they're worried. Give it a few months and after the first spate of robot suicides Foxconn will realise that humans were cheaper. :p
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in a perfect world businesses would be made to work together to re-distribute their discarded workforces. instead its like "were laying you off because yove been replaced by a robot, heres your paycheck and your letter of recommendation now get the **** out of here". should be something like "were modernizing and we dont need as many workers, but this upstart company needs line workers and theyre willing to take you on at your current pay rate". it always seemed kinda negligent for businesses with huge pools of resources sending unneeded workers into an uncertain job market with little more than a severance package and a letter of recommendation always seems kind of archaic to me.
Hey Jim! We're replacing you with a machine. We've already worked a way to slide you straight into a competing company's infrastructure, so you can use your festering hate to help them destroy us. Have fun!
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in a perfect world businesses would be made to work together to re-distribute their discarded workforces. instead its like "were laying you off because yove been replaced by a robot, heres your paycheck and your letter of recommendation now get the **** out of here". should be something like "were modernizing and we dont need as many workers, but this upstart company needs line workers and theyre willing to take you on at your current pay rate". it always seemed kinda negligent for businesses with huge pools of resources sending unneeded workers into an uncertain job market with little more than a severance package and a letter of recommendation always seems kind of archaic to me.
Hey Jim! We're replacing you with a machine. We've already worked a way to slide you straight into a competing company's infrastructure, so you can use your festering hate to help them destroy us. Have fun!
You are aware they wouldn't need to transfer you to their competitors, aren't you? ;)
Many companies have smaller sister companies or companies they bought up that would require their highly trained and skilled layed-off employees. The current state is just destroying people and the economy alike, which is why a transfer from human workers to robots should only be partial and the rest of the workforce redistributed accordingly, as Nuke mentioned.
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in a perfect world businesses would be made to work together to re-distribute their discarded workforces. instead its like "were laying you off because yove been replaced by a robot, heres your paycheck and your letter of recommendation now get the **** out of here". should be something like "were modernizing and we dont need as many workers, but this upstart company needs line workers and theyre willing to take you on at your current pay rate". it always seemed kinda negligent for businesses with huge pools of resources sending unneeded workers into an uncertain job market with little more than a severance package and a letter of recommendation always seems kind of archaic to me.
Hey Jim! We're replacing you with a machine. We've already worked a way to slide you straight into a competing company's infrastructure, so you can use your festering hate to help them destroy us. Have fun!
You are aware they wouldn't need to transfer you to their competitors, aren't you? ;)
Many companies have smaller sister companies or companies they bought up that would require their highly trained and skilled layed-off employees. The current state is just destroying people and the economy alike, which is why a transfer from human workers to robots should only be partial and the rest of the workforce redistributed accordingly, as Nuke mentioned.
First of all; the people who are replaced by machines are rarely highly-trained, and only sometimes highly-skilled. Assembly-line work isn't easy to do, but I've never heard anyone say it's very hard to learn. In this case sending them off to another (non-competing) business may be reasonable, but is not worth the company's time.
Second; sister companies and acquisitions are bad choices as well. Sister companies already have a workforce, and acquisitions have a workforce that may or may not be sticking around. Both of these entities will also be just as susceptible to the automation that has occurred with the parent company; how's that for job security?
Lastly, if these people actually are highly-trained and skilled workers, they are likely heavily specialized. Specialized workers are only valuable in their field. If you are automating your infrastructure, and Jim still needs a job, the only way you could send him off with anywhere near equal pay would be to send him to a competitor who existed in the same industry as you do. A competitor would be the only other entity in need of his specialized skills. It's also worth mentioning that if automation was worth your time, it would likely be worth a competitors time too.
Automation doesn't just hit single businesses, it encompasses entire industries. As soon as automation is more efficient than a human's hands, that's it, the deal is done. Short of government intervention, crazy union tactics, or luddism, every business in that sector will be itching to migrate to automation.
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Seeing how many people got laid off and lost their jobs the past years due to the economic crisis that we officially entered in 2008 I believe more layoffs would indeed start cutting in the flesh of the more skilled and integral personnel of factories and companies.
Robots would be sufficient for the most important basic tasks but at some parts of the assembly line you'll need people to keep track of the quality of the goods. The problem there is that factories tend to hire less skilled people and paying them, as you'd expect, much lower wages than a more skilled employee would, causing unnecessary problems in the manufacturing process.
I think there's also ways to make the repetitive job at the assembly line become much more diversified, by letting the robots do the aforementioned tasks but have sufficient mechanics and people on hand to keep track of things and switch attention to improve the quality of the products. We still live in a human society, so human interaction tend to be more positive and human friendly than that of a calculated computer.
Maybe central to the problem of switching to robots is the desire to compete with slave labor, which is folly. Instead of going for the lowest manufacturing costs by cutting quality there's a market for more expensive luxurious versions of the items and keep industry in the first world instead of moving off-shore. This move to robots and the move to China and India in general is something that should've never started in the first place if they weren't encouraged - and funded, to move off-shore.
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Could the issues with machinery replacing human workers also be put partly upon those replaced? As technology changes, why has society still remained stuck in old ways of thinking about labor and the responsibility of private entities to the general whole?
As JCDNWarrior suggested, the issue with robotic manufacturing is that it's competing against slave labor.
So could the workers be at fault for not banding together and aggressively pushing a more socialist corporate model? Perhaps where for every worker replaced by a robot, that worker receives a stipend that amounts to the difference between paying him/her and getting a robot?
My logic being that all of these advances are ostensibly to advance the greater good of humanity; a worker who has to work less and still get paid a decent wage is a better way of growing both quality of life and a country's economy than the standard "rush to the bottom" pricing model most companies work off of.
In addition this would give people more disposable income (as I imagine they're not going to be able to support themselves on such a stipend alone and thus will still probably have to find a second job), which they can use on said "luxury" items that JCDNWarrior refers to.
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Machines will replace more and more people. In a perfect world, that'd mean everyone would instead follow a study and specialise in something which cannot be efficiently performed by machines: working with your hands is obsolete, so you'd have to work with your brains. In the real world however, many countries do not 100% cover studies, thus when lacking finances and not being lucky enough to get a scholarship you're stuck fighting for a labour-involved job in a sector where machines take over labour. Not to mention many countries are so poor that about only >1% of it's population goes to any kind of school at all: where they could previously do export labour making things for foreign western and the richer eastern countries, they too are eventually replaced by cheaper machines.
I've spoken to some people before who had mixed union/luddite approach to things. They often spoke they'd prefer everyone'd work on only what's nescesary to breathe, eat and live, making rediculous claims that 'life is comfortable' and that 'we need no fancier technologies, you can live fine'. I find their opinions extremely selfish, with a point of view they want to see firmly forced upon others. I don't want to die aged 100 with the same TV and radio I had when I were 25. I like to see how NASA takes a step further each decade, how we will eventually kick AIDS and cancers ass with radically new medicines and how a teenager who lost his hands in a cycle accident can someday work a brush again with advantaged prosthesises. Their lack of interest and perhaps simple contentment with working hard and going to bed early isn't for everyone. Heck, I've heared plenty of other crazy suggestions by unions and (neo)luddites which are all aimed short-term, causing depletion of reserve resources or further damage on a long term scale.
20-30 years ago those of my parents' generation were told to 'just work with your hands' if going to school wasn't exactly their forte. Yes, it's sad that we're in an era where machines take over a lot of labour. Perhaps it's humane to artificially halt that a little bit and make sure the young generations all go to school and study so that when the working generation retires, machines can take over almost full-time. But there'll be business owners anyway who want the cheapest labour force possible and they'll employ machines regardless.
I guess the best answer is we all try and find solutions to make sure younger generations are pushed into specialising rather than labour and those of the working generation who are still eager try to follow additional studies to specialise in some area to have a better chance at the job market. But the harsh reality is that the economy and social system, on a global scale, needs time to grow along with such change and in the meanwhile a lot of people are in trouble. Still, that doesn't approve luddism which in my opinion is just plain silly, completely regressive and as harsh as it sounds, often a philosophy for those who aren't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.
A dutch saying goes 'niet verder zien dan je neus lang is', which translates to not seeing further than your nose is long. It roughly means being shortsighted and making ill decisions which only stall the inevitable and often make it worse. I guess the whole movement behind the 'work with your hands if you can't learn' attitude had a bad case of short noses too, but the luddites must have hit their nose one time too many, they're just plain flat. If we stall technology now in favour of human labour, we'll burn up all resource reserves we have left, eventually leaving none to ever allow machines or technology to boom. Maybe allowing machines and technology to grow further will at some point allow for a perpetual motion in economy and resources, meaning a future generation will have a brighter future. Right now we'll have to deal with the shrinking labour jobmarket as best as we can.
/rant over
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I agree, ideally robots would allow people to spend their time and life in pursuit of knowledge and happiness as the economy and factories in general will continue to function even if people collectively fail to develop. Sadly that's not the case as money and income has to come from somewhere. It seems it will require quite a framework to allow people to be able to live and survive in a robotized economy, though how would such a framework encourage very large groups of people to innovate as individuals using freedom of information (Sort of like what happens here)?
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factory work isnt the only option these people have. there is still construction jobs which are a lot harder to replace with robots (at least for now), and for the most part can be had by someone right out of high school.
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factory work isnt the only option these people have. there is still construction jobs which are a lot harder to replace with robots (at least for now), and for the most part can be had by someone right out of high school.
Vocational professions won't go away any time soon.
Everyone needs a plumber, electrician, and carpenter at some point. Using machines to repair machines doesn't seem to work out all that well yet either.
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Yeah, there's a significant difference between the sort of factory labor that could easily be replaced by robots and vocational professions. Jobs like electricians and auto mechanics are very much in-demand, and they can make you some serious bank too.
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If you add everything up though, we're with too many people on this world.
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If you add everything up though, we're with too many people on this world.
thats what nukes are for.
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If you add everything up though, we're with too many people on this world.
thats what nukes are for.
:yes:
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If you add everything up though, we're with too many people on this world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63-REaU80tM
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two words:
legalize meth
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Well this thread took a turn for the fatalist.