Robots crush career opportunities for low-skilled workers Robots are devaluing and derailing workers' careers in both manufacturing and other jobs tied to regional economics, according to a recent study. This decrease in career opportunities has boosted support for populist political candidates like Donald Trump. In a paper titled "Automation, Career Values, and Political …
I've been in some of the largest factories in the world over the last 5-10 years. And by that, I mean worked and walked almost ever square foot of them, and no, robutts are not takin yer jerbs.
The progress of automation is the same as it ever was: gradual and costly and not always the right fit.
As with bitcoin, AI, software and cloud, it's WAY oversold and very often misapplied.
The only thing crushing the hopes of low skilled workers is skinflint bosses and dipshit HRs departments who pay entry level wages for 5+ years of experience. In those years, I saw exactly ONE company that offered free in-house, literally large set-aside classrooms inside the factory, for anyone who wanted to learn new skills and make more money. One. And employees were absolutely using them.
ROFL.
I'd love to see you debate that with Elon Musk. His Robot force (making him even richer) will be used to replace all the millions of undocumented scum that he and Trump will deport starting on 21st Jan 2025.
All those menial jobs will be done with Robots. If you are a blue collar democrat... watch out he will be coming for you next. Only the party faithful (to Trump and/or Vance) will have jobs.
There will be millions of people in poverty thanks to Trumps Tariff policy. The queues for food last seen after the 1929 crash will be dwarfed by what is to come.
Batten down the hatches me hearties, there be a Storm coming. One that could last until 2040.
St Elmo got pushed out of Tesla management because his 100% robots policy was the primary cause of showstopping issues on the production line
There are lots of things that robots are good at and lots more that they're completely useless at. Anything involving routing/fixing ANY kind of flexible cable/hose is well beyond their capabilities
You CAN preprogram movements if you can 100% guarantee that your flexible item is 100% going to be in the right place every single time. A deviation of even 1mm in any direction usually results in failure. It's amusing to watch robots attempt to learn how to "thread needles" (5mm rope through a 9mm hole) and fail tens of thousands of times over each time the end of the rope or needle eye are shifted slightly
It's so well known it even has a name amongst roboticists: Moravec's paradox
"There are lots of things that robots are good at and lots more that they're completely useless at. Anything involving routing/fixing ANY kind of flexible cable/hose is well beyond their capabilities"
Other car makers have also found that having humans on the line catches problems automation won't see. Fitting dash assemblies is one of those jobs that doesn't have just one, but multiple wire bundles that need to be put into place and fastened down. It's too fiddly for automation to get right consistently. Fixing issues later can be difficult to impossible.
Before Ford bought Jaguar, Jag used to hand fit some parts that were notoriously delivered out-of-spec. Ford said "hell no", send that carp back to the vendor with a stern note and start looking for a new supplier that has better QC. The cost for all that hand work was seriously dragging down the bottom line. The same thing can happen if something goes out of whack with automation and it doesn't get caught until the end of the line. It's not like I've not woken up to PLA filament all over the place. Chances are that it went pear shaped 5 minutes after I turned out the lights and went to bed.
Menial jobs outside factories won't get replaced by robots.
Replacing 20 machinists with one $100K CNC mill or replacing 100 women with paintbrushes and a pot of Radium with a printer is quick cheap and easy.
Replacing a <minimum wage illegal immigrant babysitter with a $1M Tesla humanoid robot is not quite such an easy sell to 1000s of working families
"Replacing a <minimum wage illegal immigrant babysitter with a $1M Tesla humanoid robot is not quite such an easy sell to 1000s of working families"
The babysitter will also figure out much faster that a child is choking or has eaten something that means calling paramedics straight away. Getting a machine that can take over nappy duty is grand, but child-care has much more to it than that.
"Replacing 20 machinists with one $100K CNC mill "
Even doing that doesn't always mean more profit. If that one mill doesn't feel like coming to work one day, it might be 20x more of an impact to the bottom line than if a flu is going around and some of the machinists are out sick.
"[...]millions of undocumented scum that he and Trump will deport starting on 21st Jan 2025"
How?
I mean: what if the alleged country of origin says, when the plane is requesting permission to land, 'no'?
And what if the alleged country of origin says if an attempt is made to clear repatriation beforehand something like "I'm sorry we have no record of a Mr Alessandro Borges as being a resident, we therefore can't issue travel documents and cannot grant an entry visa"?
Just wondering.
Having talked to actual officials in the administration, I have been told that countries that don't take their "citizens" back will be sanctioned and put on visa watches and far too many dictators LIKE going to the USA to visit and get Banana Republic funding from! Plus, one high-up pundit I talked to, has a programme in place to set up internment camps on uninhabited US Territory South Sea islands originally used as air bases during World War 2 such as Midway Island where those pesky immigrants who can't go back will be interred onto within an open-air prison similar to Gaza but even smaller, with no buildings of ANY sort to use as shelter and even more isolating!
Those islands have 1500 km of shark infested waters in every direction around them and they don't even have coconut trees to cut down and make rafts from! It's quite the prison camp and YES the USA is VERY SERIOUS about doing that! They INTEND to drop the illegals onto Midway Island and you will be left to yourselves to figure out how to survive! The USA's political machinery has now gotten a sudden injection of SEVERE NASTINESS and pretty much Fascism in every way! Illegals not just deported but IMPRISONED FOR DECADES on far-away islands! Add in an industrial-scale Crime and Punishment-accelerated School-to-Prison-Pipeline for the Poors and petty thieves and some Soviet Gulag-level work camps for everyone else in jail. The Reprobates INTEND to make life a LOT HARDER for those whose spoons aren't Gold, Silver or at least Bronze!
Being witness to the insanity that is brewing here, it won't go well for any OTHER country either! From now on, it will be USA USA USA We're Number One! We're the ONLY ONE! The USA is going fully isolationist and all Bible-thumping let's-impose-some-Painful Earthly Punishment mode where YOU will be heartily imprisoned for decades OR end up fighting/fending for yourselves against Russia, China, NK and various 3rd world dictators!
It's actually WORSE than you think! A LOT WORSE than you can even imagine!
You simply and literally cannot comprehend the RABID FROTHING AT THE MOUTH faaaaaaaar-right-wing sentimentalities that are now manifesting themselves!
There is also an air of making a LOT MORE BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR over any 'Stan that DARES to intrude upon the sensibilities of the even more heavily-armed-to-the-teeth American Public that is now stocking up on Big Guns, Big Bibles, Big MREs and a whole lotta Nuke-em-All and Let God Sort Them Out ATTITUDE!
Good Luck!
V
From the article: "One additional robot per 1,000 workers decreased the average local market career value..."
That's not filling factories with robots. And what was surprising about this report is how little automation is needed to substantially depress wages. You wouldn't expect adding one extra human worker to have the effect they measured.
Productivity is the key metric. A worker needs to earn more for the business to get more wages. This means adopting technology that helps, and often that means fewer workers using new technology to improve the product or service by making it better or cheaper. I'm often reminded of the pain in the 80s, when thousands of dockers lost their jobs to new technology -- containerisation. But now that has created huge increases in the global economy. Rather than taking days using thousands of dockers to unload and then reload a ship, it can be done in hours with very few.
The effect is that it is unbelievably cheap to send stuff around the world, compared to when there were so many wages to be paid. At the same time the service has improved immensely, and breakages, accidental or deliberate, are hugely reduced. Now if you want to be a docker you have to have a different set of skills.
If you are unskilled, tough. There's lots of people out there like you, so the employers can pick and choose. The answer has always been to skill up -- education, education, education.
Just to be clear, even though Trump is president-elect, it won't ever go back to how it was. Would you be willing to pay 35 dollars/euros/pounds for a kettle, when you can buy one for a fiver? Thought not. If you think Trump is going to push up wages, you're deluded.
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Damm right.
I came across this old book ("In Pursuit of Excellence" by Tom Peters) that explained the #1 reason employers don't do this.
"If we train them they will leave."
This ignores the fact the "soft" (but still very important) fact that by investing in the worker they feel valued
TBH I've always suspected that nappy managers (the kind that are always hanging round your a**e and full of s**t) feel deeply threatened by the idea of someone with "special" knowledge or skills*
*Naturally they would rather die than pay the cost of two people with that ability for redundancy. "OMG they might both leave (thereby showing what a s**t manager they had)"
> The progress of automation is the same as it ever was: gradual and costly and not always the right fit.
Same could be said about mechanization. For either case, that progress may be slow, but is also persistent. Over the course of a decade or two, it can be significant. In a generation, it can be revolutionary.
Just go ask coal workers about it. Instead of tens of thousands of miners running through tunnels with hand-held tools, mining companies now have giant mechanized drills that can do the work of 50 men. Or they just come by and scrape entire mountains down with massive diggers and haul it all away for processing. How long until the trucks are driving themselves from the pit to the dump site?
the case of 'robots takin jer jobs' its a case of automation making your job redundant.
Take our robotic cells, well one of them.
In the good old days the self same widgets were made by 2 good ol fashoined capstan lathes plus 2 copy mills taking 2 skilled men plus 4 operators.
Move to today, our cell takes 1 skilled guy to setup, then load the blank carrier with 100 blanks and unload the finished carrier , the rest of the time hes off setting another cell.
Those jobs are not coming back, and if the operators are not capable of learning new skills (as some are) then they'll be thrown onto the trash heap while going "they tok our jobs"
Manufacturing has moved on, its not a low skill job anymore, folks like myself and our other skilled guys have to know howto design/program/manufacture tooling to do the job, then program the cells to do the part.
On a similar note, 3 shifts of 6 teams of burly glaswegian fitters were outpaced by ONE young yapang woman operating a bunch of semi-automated welding rigs for one shift a day
Glaswegian shipbuilding firms (And their staff) refused to keep up with the times. Guess what happened to them?
The interesting part is that blue collar workers usually WELCOME robots replacing them on dirty/dangerous/boring jobs and if someone figures out a way to get the 100 blanks shifted/loaded automatically they'll happily hand it off to a machine
As I posted elsewhere, the REAL risk is to white collar workers. Anything that's repetitive, machanistic and "on paper" is a target - which is MOST work done in places like law firms as one example
AI will write poems and do your accounts, so you can concentrate on washing your dishes and doing your laundry - not the other way around
There's been very rapid shifts in "developing economies" -- we might have grown up with notions of "happy natives living traditional lives in squalid conditions" but in many parts of the world people live in conditions that aren't much different from how they live in our societies. The big difference is that they live a lot cheaper. We tend to forget that 50 years ago people in the UK were renting small houses for a few pounds a week, cheap but still a good chunk of a weekly wage. All the costs now contribute to our relatively high cost of labor. (We were told when we started on this treadmill that it didn't matter because we'd all be earning more from our more sophisticated jobs -- but it overlooked the notion that 'the natives' can be just as smart as we can and are often a lot more motivated!)
Exactly. Everything that can be automated has been automated for those who can afford it. Every single step of the manufacturing process has long since been analyzed for ROI of automation and switched or left alone.
I always laugh at how easy it is to spot the commentator(tots) who have NEVER been in a modern factory.
The factories that haven't gone full automation by now can't afford to. Or they have a very unique process such as retrofits and refurbs that cannot be automated due to wide variances in the nature of the work itself.
"Move to today, our cell takes 1 skilled guy to setup, then load the blank carrier with 100 blanks and unload the finished carrier , the rest of the time hes off setting another cell."
For high volume production, jobs will be going away. There's still lots of opportunities for machinists elsewhere, but the people that get those jobs will have a broader skill set.
"I remember reading an SF stgory from the 60s, by either Fred Ohl or Cyril Kornbluth about a consumer society that did exactly this."
I can see a parallel with AI writing and ad creation. After a while it's been fed the output from other AI writers and it shifts from being stuff that people want/need/like to stuff that is only getting consumed by the next AI in the chain.
A great TFA into a well-developed 76-page report (with 93 refs) IMHO! It gives potential insights into how we might be somewhat unwittingly screwing ourselves into a downward spiral of increasing authoritarianism. Basically (if I read well), we (eg. techies), love automation, and automating stuff, but mass automation can have "unexpected" social consequences when it interacts with labor.
So, in Figure A.8: Page A6, the report shows how career values decrease with increasing automatability score (based on Frey and Osborne, 2017). The discussion on page 33 then nails the impacts of this (as in TFA) that lower career values lead to smaller "shares of people getting higher education", and also led to an increase "in Trump’s vote share in 2016".
Hopefully (in a strange twist) our collective dumbening might lead automation to break irreparably, from which career values, education, and freedom would eventually be restored, maybe ... or we might just remain screwed forever, flushed in the giant vacuum of automated obscurantism ...
"but mass automation can have "unexpected" social consequences when it interacts with labor."
That's less about the mass automation and more abut how it enabled power to be concentrated in the hands of an Evil Few
Henry Ford is a classsic example of this. There are good reasons why Hitler praised him to the heavens in Mein Kampf
We have vastly better labour protection laws here in Europe BECAUSE the exploitation and oppression was worse back in thr 17th-early 20th centuries
(One example of how bad things were: Families of band members on the Titanic were billed for the loss of their uniforms and charged standard cargo rates for the return of bodies to be buried)
Free Hint: Nazism is a slightly reskinned mash up of Southern Antebellumism/Crow, mixed with Eugenics, Manifest Destiny, Mission from God and "the enemy within" - this is why there were more Nazis in the USA(various parties) in 1939 than there were in Germany and why there are very close links between Nazis, the KKK, American corporatists.financiers and Evangelical Christians(*)
The problem is that for every Westinghouse, there are 2-5 Edisons and 20-100 Gettys
We are currently sitting on the greatest rich/poor divide in human history - far greater than the Gilded Age (1890-1913) and VASTLY wider than the gap which kicked off the French revolution
The significance of THAT observation is that the welfare state _wasn't_ created to give a safety net to the poor and stop them starving - it was to prevent the poor rising up and murdering the rich AGAIN. Many of those who drove it were social justice campaigners (including Queen Victoria and her husband Albert) but those who made it happen knew what had happened when poverty reached intolerable levels in the recent past and didn't want to be "the first up against the wall when the revolution came"
(*) See "How Corporate America created Christan America" and bear in mind that the common epithet at the time was hating on "The Jew Deal"
Thanks to this week's USA election results I think we're about to see a paradigm shift worldwide, not least because an increasing number of voices calling for using something OTHER than USD as an international settlement currency are no longer the looney fringe or "enemies of America"
A large part of the reason we're seeing so many problems coming out of the USA/infecting the rest of the world is that the USA was one of the ONLY western countries not to root out its nazis after WW2. Most prewar A|merican nazis simply switched to Dixie flags and/or rebranded as anticommunists, We're now paying the price for this
One other note: Changing/dumping the USA constitution requires a 2/3 majority of states to call a convention on the topic and 2/3 to vote in any changes. The Heritage Foundation was established to gain that majority and they've almost suceeded. Orange Menace is a distraction, not the problem
Right on! The extremely low career values in the Soviet Union (except for the nomenklatura) likely contributed to the perpetuation of that authoritarian system, along with Stalin's deal-making handshakes with Hitler Nazis, until intolerable levels of poverty and repression led to the breakup of the group. Breakaway republics definitely found better career values and prospects by joining the EU, that remains the way to go today, for prosperity and freedom (and NATO of course, to prevent a return to the Soviet economic gulag through invasions disguised as "special operations").
The whole challenge then is in how to balance automation with social realities to ensure the best living conditions for folks, such that they remain supportive of open governance (rather than the choking clampdown promoted by authoritarians).
> The significance of THAT observation is that the welfare state _wasn't_ created to give a safety net to the poor and stop them starving - it was to prevent the poor rising up and murdering the rich AGAIN.
Very much this. The modern welfare state wasn't a "socialist" or "communist" invention- quite the opposite, it was created by the capitalist establishment likes of Otto von Bismarck in order to fend off the threat from the former (and initially much opposed by them for that reason).
It also provides a bed of stability for workers that ultimately benefits capitalist society in the long term. This, of course, assumes that those in charge really care about that and aren't just interested in siphoning off money for themselves and their cronies, regardless of the damage that ultimately causes.
Perhaps they think that threat no longer exists and therefore there's no need to throw the great unwashed scraps from their table. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps not.
It certainly provokes thought and they may be lifting only the corner of the curtain. Investing in automation can be very expensive - perhaps worth it if you're an established business with an order book and cash flow, but a substantial up-front cost for a new business. That's likely to lead to significant consolidation and a loss of local influence and control.
Another consequence, of course, that a reduction in local career values has a knock-on effect on national tax revenue. People are fairly easy to tax, as long as they're earning. The profits from the labour of robots is liable to turn up on a balance sheet in the Cayman Islands.
It may seem inexplicable that people are reaching out to the mega-rich, the people who have least interest in helping them, but I think there's am instinctive sense that a drastic change of direction is required and only one side is offering one - however unlikely it is to achieve its promised goals.
It may seem inexplicable that people are reaching out to the mega-rich, the people who have least interest in helping them
Turkeys voting for Xmas is quite common. The problem comes from both a lack of understanding of the complexity of the problem, and the desperation to believe liars promising a solution who are obviously going to line their own pockets once in power.
"The profits from the labour of robots is liable to turn up on a balance sheet in the Cayman Islands."
Thanks to Pandora and Panama papers along with the USA detcting $11TRILLION in tax evasion money being shifted around each year. most of these "tax shelter" countries have been getting out of the business
Being fuel-blockaded by Uncle Sam is not in the interests of Island dwellers
It's arguable that Brexit was an attempt to preserve Britaina's status as the money laundering capital of the world by using 60 million people as human shields against economic retaliation but actions of the Tory government pretty much burmed that up instantly - particularly when Patel/Mogg/Johnson uttered threats against Irish food security - making an instant enemy out of the USA(*) and galvanising the EU into ensuring Britain couldn't affect Irish connections to the rest of the Continent (new gas, electrical and power links, new ferry links establiushed where they'd all previously shut down due to being uneconomic with britain inside the EU and a "land bridge" existing to Dover)
(*) The subsequent declaration against Britain is the ONLY unanimous, bipartisan, house+senate statement to have EVER passed in American History. Even the declaration of War on Japan had abstentions. British press attempted to brush off the speaker's warning as "Democrat party drivel" which infuriated the irish diaspora in Washington even more than they'd already been. Trump may think he's God but he cannot override congress and they have spoken repeatedly on this issue (He admitted as much on a live LBC interview with Farage. Nigel looked like he'd just eaten a bowl of wasps as he realised what was being said)
Hmm. What does Starmer do now? If he pushes for a trade deal with the US he will have to sacrifice our agriculture sector, so we can be swamped with hormone-infected beef and chickens washed in chlorine. If he decides getting nearer to the EU is the way to go the biggest thing he can offer to get them to take notice is to ease on migration, thus risking the wrath of the racist pensioners, and thus affecting his re-election chances. If he does bugger all we'll get squeezed by Trumps tariffs and the EU's indifference: no growth and inflation.
Difficult.
""When robotization technologies start to take over some jobs in manufacturing," she observed, "[the] negative effects are actually felt beyond those industries … We didn't expect to find these other industries to be affected negatively – almost equally negatively to manufacturing industries.""
How dumb are they that they could not see this coming?
To the extent they actually do that will create a lot of openings for people who install and maintain robots. Because it isn't going to get any cheaper to employ people in the US, especially not if you kick out all the non-citizens.
Maybe he'll seek to deport the robots next. Elon wouldn't like that very much, he's going to have robots next year for the next decade or two like how Teslas have been fully self driving next year every year since 2016.
First they came for the non-citizens, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a non-citizen. Then they came for the robots, and again I kept silent because I wasn't a robot. Then they came for the LLMs, and I own a lot of Nvidia stock...
To put it more succintly:
The factory in Detroit employing 12,000 people and producing N examples of one type of car per shift
became a factory in Sonora employing 1500 people and producing 3N cars per shift - of completely different models, let alone individual specifications
If forced to return to the USA, it don't go to Detroit, it will probably be a factory in Kansas employing 200 highly skilled robot tenders and another 50 people to act as office front/groundakeepers and produce twice as many casrs as the Sonora factory
Manufacturing might "some back" but the JOBS NEVER WILL
You can see this in thing like the _billions_ of dollars plowed by states into things like LCD manufacturing plants on promises of "hundreds of jobs" which eventually turn out to employ 20-40 people at most - anmd the real kicker is that the process is so vastly inefficient due to widespread external logistical failings that these "new factories" are invariably being shut down within a decade (or whenever the sweetheart deals expire) due to being uneconomic
Import Tariffs don't hurt foreign countries/manufacturers - they simply pivot to other markets. Tariffs DO hurt your own citizens by forcing them to pay more - both for the importaed product and for local product that's frequently of lower quality as a direct result of lack of competition. As a multiplier it also hurts your LOCAL manufacturers by making them uncompetitive on global markets
The classic example of this is the combination of the Chicken Tax (25% import on tucks and light trucks) coupled with non-tariff trade barriers such as USA/Canada-unique vehicle lighting and sdafety standards (DOT vs UN(LHD))
- this makes most foregn manufacturers not bother with the USA market as it's too expensive to enter for sales volumes expected - which was the intention
- However it also acts as an export barrier as USA makers who have a fully captive domestic market find they can't compete in export ones (too expensive, poor quality, high fuel consumption) and scream looudly about the self-imposed technical barrier (the standard cry is "illegal restraint on trade")
USA makers then lobby the USA government to try and pressure other countries to accept USA DOT-standard vehicles whilst simultaneously refusing to allow recognition of UN(LHD) as a standard homologation. That's called having your cake and eating it too (eating ALL your cake and then demanding everyone else's cake too)
This shit won't fly anymore. The USA economy has roughly doubled in size since the end of the Cold War, but without US/USSR militarism holding everyone else back, the USA has gone from being 60% of the global economy to 13%, with 4 other markets being about the same size (China. EU, India, ASEAN)
The 900 pound gorilla is griping that there are now 5 neighbours whilst totally ignoring that each of them has twice the space that the original one had
(FWIW; the GFC of 2011 demonstrated that the world no longer catches penumonia when the USA sneezes - Nobody's giving that power back to Uncle Sam and the USA market is now such a small part of the global whole that if they decide to stomp off with their ball, nobody's going to miss them much - the actual effect will simply be to diminish USA power/influence even faster than it's already waning)
He's also suffering from fairly severe dementia, and appears to have multiple physical issues as well.
He's really unlikely to complete his term without being removed for incapacity - or being found collapsed on his golden throne.
TBH he may not even make it to inauguration - and I've no idea what would happen then.
Before you get too enthused about Trump's possible demise/incapacitation, you might want to take a good look at the Vice-President elect. In 2016, Trump selected a VP who turned out to have principles. Doesn't look like he made the same mistake this time around.
But if Vance becomes president why does he have to listen to Thiel any longer? He's always been the bottom in that relationship, but he becomes the top as president. He can do what he wants, not what Thiel or Musk want. What hold does Thiel have on him after he takes that oath?
Were his views ("Trump is America's Hitler") in 2016 representative of his real views, or are his current views his real views? Or are his real views something else entirely? I don't think we can assume the Vance that campaigned the last few months is the Vance we'd get as president. He could be that, or he could be better or he could be worse. Anyone who that easily changes himself in wholesale fashion is obviously able to hide his "true" self.
At any rate I'd take my chances with him over increasingly senile Trump, if for no other reason than he's such a dislikeable person that he would be unlikely to be re-elected no matter who he turned out to be as president.
Or can AI one and have it on a billion people's TikToks and Twitter feeds in seconds
He can also pay the secret service more than their government salary and will have had years to make sure that trusted soldiers are in the bodyguard.
You know tech-bros are so obsessed by the Roman Empire? He might want to look at some of the regime changes
Well that's unfortunately a possibility, but I don't think having a majority in the senate or Supreme Court translates into a majority that will sit by while you completely dismantle democracy. Abuse it and poke holes in it, sure.
Half the country went for Trump, but that doesn't mean that half the country would be happy with some false claims of national emergency and cancelling the election. You'd need a truly corrupt Supreme Court to keep Trump in office past his term because the start AND END of a presidential term is clearly specified in the constitution. If there was no election in 2028 and thus no president elect then the speaker of the house becomes president at noon on "inauguration day" in January 2029.
Now there's a loophole there in that the house can elect anyone they want as speaker, he doesn't have to be a member of the house, so I guess they could elect Trump speaker and then he'd become president after the term he's been elected to starting in January ends. But I'm not convinced you could get majority of the current MAGA congress to go along with that, the margin is so thin you only need a few holdouts to stop that. That assumes republicans even control the house next year which isn't known for sure yet, and they'd have to cancel the election in 2026 also because if Trump follows through with his tariffs and mass deportations the economy will be way worse than it is now and democrats will easily take it back.
I don't believe they could get away with simply canceling elections, or somehow corrupting the process so that only republicans get elected. If they do I'll be one of the first to leave the country behind - and quit paying taxes to the US as well. There will be a LOT of countries that will no longer honor extradition treaties with the US if we go full dictatorship, so I'll have to plenty of places to live!
That assumes republicans even control the house next year which isn't known for sure yet, and they'd have to cancel the election in 2026 also because if Trump follows through with his tariffs and mass deportations the economy will be way worse than it is now and democrats will easily take it back.
I am doing some "economic prepping" selling some less-fungible assets and accumulating cash, because I believe 2026 will bring both an economic downturn that will make 2008 look like losing a twenty down the sewer, (taking a chunk of the world econ with it - sorry guys, I didn't vote for him) and the suspension or elimination or the rendering moot of law in the USA.
TBH he may not even make it to inauguration - and I've no idea what would happen then.
The Constitution says we get J.D.Vance, younger and cagier than T****, and the real president becomes Steven Miller and that ghastly hag hired as Chief of Staff. Sort of like the de facto president for most of Reagan's second term (when he was visibly gaga) was Dick Cheney, who went on to reprise the role in George the Second's reign.
Can we come stay with you guys in Britain? We promise to be good.
"became a factory in Sonora employing 1500 people and producing 3N cars per shift - of completely different models, let alone individual specifications"
That factory in Sonora was brand new and there was no union prohibiting the most modern automation, material handling and digital information processing as there was in Detroit.
One of the reasons owners of a business that is being sold are required to sign non-compete agreements. It's in case they've realized that they need a bunch of capital to implement all of the upgrades it would take to make widgets more efficiently. The new company owners don't want to find themselves holding hot potato when the big one comes.
There's a lot of interesting history here, especially around the Luddites - a group that is very widely misunderstood, who as I understand it were protesting against exactly this. It wasn't about the introduction of new, more efficient technology, as such, but more about that introduction being badly thought out, giving no opportunity for daily-paid workers to go along with the changes and stay in employment.
If you take away someone's livelihood, they will protest, especially in a country like the USA with a poor safety net for the unemployed. And in the modern era, the easiest way to protest is to vote for a extremist politician who promises you that all of your life problems are due to Other People, who they will Deal With.
It's supremely ironic that in this case, the sleaze-bag they just elected is so very much part of their problem, not part of the solution. Still, nobody's perfect, right?
This is going to end badly. It's lazy and very, very easy to say it's going to end 1939-badly, but there's a lot of parallels here. WW2 was mostly caused by the whole western world economically beating up on Germany after WW1, leaving the field wide open for a lunatic far-right candidate to get voted into power, then change the rules of the game so that he couldn't be voted out again. Mmmmm....
GJC
easy to say it's going to end 1939-badly
Arguably, WW2 was a territorial war. Although reparations and the resulting economic chaos were a factor, it was the loss of territory post WW1 that particularly rankled with Hitler and led to the notion that territorial expansion was the way to restore national pride.
Apart from the Opium Wars, I can't offhand think of many conflicts that have not had at their root the desire to occupy and control territory (though that may have been a proxy for economic advantage).
Trump's potential war seems to be a civil war: he wants to build a wall around the USA and reorder its internal structures in splendid isolation. In the short term that's going to cause a fair bit of global economic pain but it's probably containable - but it's not clear how you win an economic war that you're largely fighting with yourself. The big question is what happens when it doesn't deliver what was promised. An economic war with the rest of the world seems infeasible and the only alternative is a proxy war over territory.
"Arguably, WW2 was a territorial war."
It was the American western expansion "Manifest Destiny" rewritten for Germany (Don't take my word for it, it's all in Mein Kampf if you can stomach reading it)
Naziism and the Confederacy are hard to tell apart, which isn't surprising at all if you read Mein Kampf - Hitler based almost everything on the old South with a bit of unimaginatibe reskinning
Japan read the same philosophy texts expanding into Asia
In all three cases the fact that there were already people and ciivilisations in the areas beinfg "expanded into" was immaterial
The same thing is playing out inbetween Lebanon and Egypt right now - the complexion of the besieged Ghetto inhabitants has changed, but the invaders' extermination policy is the same
ALL wars in history have "profit" (ie: loot, territory, power) at their base.
These days its energy(oil). In past time it was resources (metals and farmlands) for the most part
The SINGLE biggest threat that CHina poses to the USA has nothing to do witht he rise of its military and everything to do with their work on Molten Salt Nuclear Power (TMSR-LF1) as this will expand Chinese influence to over 5 billion people once fully developed, whilst simultaneeously severing the USA's control over world energy supplies (oil) - something they've leveraged since the 1870s
The supreme irony of that is that the USA developed the tech the Chinese are now perfecting, but made it ILLEGAL to use/test/develop on USA soil - because they realised it not only put their global oil hegemony at risk (The Kissenger Middle East OPEC agreements were announced less than 3 months after Nixon made MSR technology illegal), but because the designs would break the critical dependency of civil nuclear power on the waste products of weaponsmaking(*) and therefore make uranium "enrichment" facilities (and mining activities) a purely military activity, therefore subject to limitation treaties
Pay attention to the legs behind the curtain, not the Smoke and Mirrors of the Mighty Oz
(*) The reason the Nautilus design used enriched uranium was simple: There was hundreds of tons of it available as unwanted waste from uranium refinement plants(**) whilst thorium wasn't available at all. It's vastly easier to use an imperfect fuel that IS available than a more perfect one that's NOT available. That's changed with the need for rare earths for electronics purposes and the average rare earth mine produces about 5000 tons pf thorium per year - which is why they're uneconomic (they have to sequester it somehow) - and why Chinese rare earth mines ARE economic (the Chinese government has been buying/stockpiling thorium for a couple of decades) , which in turn has allowed them to corner the world rare earth markets by having the only working rare earth mines due to all the others going out of bussiness trying to deal with their thorium production
(**) Nobody makes "enriched uranium" bombs. They cost tens-to-hundreds of bllions of dollars apiece. Uranium enrichment plants produce DEPLETED uranium(***) which is converted into weapons plutonium for bomb cores and used "as is" in the casings to triple the yield of fusion bombs
(***) 9kg of "depleted uranium" for every 1kg of "reactor grade" enriched uranium. That's why the civil nuclear program has been a nice cover story for the USA /French/British military over the last 70 years (Russia and China never used civil plants as an excuse to cover bomb making)
A modern analogue to the Luddites was the coal miners
Labour closed MORE uneconomic mines in the 1970s than The Conservatives did in the 1980s - but they did so on decade-long planned shutdowns and offered retraining/incentives for miners to obtain other jobs in order to keep areas alive
Thatcher just closed them on virtually zero notice and tossed everyone in th vicinity under a bus. It took EU "rebuild" funding to force Westminster to send any money to those areas
And yet, those are the areas which voted most strongly for Brexit. Slugs voting for Salt
(Not overly surprising, they're also the areas and demographics where Oswald Monseley's mobsters had the greatest membership)
[ Insert obligatory cartoon of Rupert Murdoch saying "Careful mate- that foreigner wants your cookie!" ]
"Labour closed MORE uneconomic mines in the 1970s than The Conservatives did in the 1980s - but they did so on decade-long planned shutdowns and offered retraining/incentives for miners to obtain other jobs in order to keep areas alive"
I've often said that change isn't the problem, it's rate of change. Even with that, if government is banning coal power plants effective within a short period of time, there's little that can be done to ease into reductions in coal mining. The chain isn't closely coupled either. If a given coal power plant will be required to shut in 5 years, but it needs to go through a heavy maintenance cycles next year, it might be decided to not to that maintenance since there won't be any economic return if the plant can only remain open for a couple of years after it's complete. The plant is scheduled for closure in 1 year vs the 5 that the politicians thought. Purchase orders for coal are only for the next year with no renewal. That may also make any upgrades at the coal mine uneconomic. They certainly won't be taking on any apprentices.
"leaving the field wide open for a lunatic far-right candidate to get voted into power, then change the rules of the game so that he couldn't be voted out again. Mmmmm...."
Point of order.
Hitler was never elected into power.
He never achieved a majority under democratic rules EVEN AFTER getting most of his oppoents jailed or otherwise declared illegal and at best only ever got 30% of the vote/seats even with his brownshirted bully boys stationed outside polling stations preventing people from voting
Hitler effectively SEIZED POWER after being temporarily appointed to the role of chancellor by the German president after the Reichstag fire
The USA wholeheartedly embraced naziism in the 1930s and never let go of it(*). Things like "summer camps" started out as american copies of Hitler Youth indoctrination camps(**) and there were at least half a dozen nazi organisations operating nationwide in 1939 (not just the German American Bund)
Fred Trump, Joe Kennedy and Prescott Bush were all involved in prewar nazi organisations, as was Senator Joseph Macarthy.
(*) That's because German Naziism was firmly based on Confederacy philosophy/imagery, simply reskinned for a German market
(**) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/nazi-town-usa-scenes-summer-camp-nazi-town-us/
https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2014/07/31/nazi-summer-camp-american-style/
"There's a lot of interesting history here, especially around the Luddites - a group that is very widely misunderstood, who as I understand it were protesting against exactly this. It wasn't about the introduction of new, more efficient technology, as such, but more about that introduction being badly thought out, giving no opportunity for daily-paid workers to go along with the changes and stay in employment."
Meanwhile, I see the Luddites being widely misunderstood in a different direction. They weren't arguing in generalities, for a new policy towards the working class. They were arguing very personally and against much of the working class. New machines would increase employment, allowing lots of people much poorer than they were to get a job where they would be paid better (in the 1800s, so not well, but it was still an increase for those new workers). The only problem was that the people who had learned a specialized skill that was no longer necessary were going to lose their comparatively well-paid position. The Luddites were, in fact, relatively rich laborers who really hated that some stupid poor people were going to make the money instead of them.
Unfortunately, this is a tendency that still happens today. I can understand someone who dislikes automation altogether, even though I disagree with them. We can discuss our differences and attempt to convince one another of its benefits and drawbacks. Someone who has an idea for how we can have automation but protect those whose labor is no longer needed is very welcome, though many of the ideas I've seen aren't very thorough and are difficult to implement. However, there are many who cheerfully accept automation whenever it lets them have something for cheaper, but when technology improves the thing they do, they begin to protest that the technology should be banned so nothing related to their job has to change. This attitude is unhelpful to laborers because only small subsets get automated at once, and it doesn't make general policy about the situation because the people espousing it don't care to help others going through the same situation. The Luddites didn't do what we need in an era of automation and they're the wrong people to emulate now.
> but all these have always been minor details time/equipmentwise and laying all the bits in between take just as long as they always did
I'd like to have seen robots tackle the job of ripping out my old bathroom and fitting the new one, having to think past "that won't work" was just as much as the graft of doing the job
"They may spend less time making end connections but all these have always been minor details time/equipmentwise and laying all the bits in between take just as long as they always did"
There may be more problems with those cheesy push-fit ends than the more solid fittings they are replacing. I know as I have issues, I upgrade the heck out of the parts used for the repair. My goal is to be dead and gone long before that thing would ever need to be serviced again.
"When was the last time you saw a room full of ledger clerks scratching away at accounting books?"
I can't remember the last time I heard of "Pitman shorthand". That got phased out when executives started using recorders to dictate letters that secretaries would type later. While there's speech to text now, most secretaries, ummm, "executive assistants" likely know more about what's going on than their boss so they can type the letters without input to go out over the bosses (digital) signature. There may be some like J. Harshaw that prefer to use an assistant and dictate rather than record or capture to watch for reactions, but I expect that's rare.
We also don't see an ocean of draftsman and have to put up with the smells coming from the blueprint machine in an engineering environment. It so rare that I am asked to provide prints other than to government agencies that don't need them, but "they've always done it that way". They also squawk if they aren't folded in the correct manner. I just turn them in rolled and they can bite me.
I haven't read the entire paper, but from reading the article I get the impression that this is yet another study that does not attempt to propose any solution.
The reason being, it's an uncomfortable truth that those jobs cannot be saved as they are. If you restrict the use of automation and/or force companies not to fire redundant workers, then the companies will be outcompeted by wherever automation is unrestricted, and eventually go bust, at which point the jobs will be lost anyway.
Ultimately, the big-picture problem isn't so much automation eliminating jobs; it's that the increased profits from improved productivity don't get efficiently reinvested in the economy, but instead become increasingly concentrated in a small number of actors. Part of this is direct, e.g. lay off people and pocket the profits, an even bigger part is a consequence of how the financial sector operates, e.g. when you can reliably get much better returns from the stock market than from setting up a new production line, that is insane.
If you fix that problem, you'll find that new jobs get created, and you'll have enough spare money to set up retraining programs and unemployment benefits so that displaced workers can switch to those jobs without trauma. The only ones to lose will be the ultra-rich (not even the rich, or very rich).
I don't quite agree that those jobs cannot be saved but the uncomfortable truth really is that they cannot be saved while offering a wage/living standard compatible with the rest of the US anymore because companies can simply find a cheaper sucker elsewhere who can do the job manually OR the job becomes cheaper to do automated.
That's the whole thing people don't realize about automation. Automation is expensive. There is a threshold where implementing it becomes feasible. If unit cost including labour is below this, no manufacturer is going to bother, if unit cost rises a little above this, there is a certain momentum that will keep the job being manual for a while because a company doesn't want to lay out the massive up front expense, but once the threshold is reached, either the job is moved wholesale to "low cost countries" or it is automated. With the up front cost of automation becoming cheaper and cheaper as the components for automation become more and more a mass product by themselves (prices of things like servo motors, motor controllers, PLCs, pneumatics, etc have dropped precipitously).
This means that for "simple" jobs, in countries like the US or western Europe, either the pay is going to be shit or they're going to get automated and there will be no "simple" jobs.
"With the up front cost of automation becoming cheaper and cheaper as the components for automation become more and more a mass product by themselves"
There's also the cost of figuring out how to automate a process. Once that's done and you can just buy it in a kit ready to go with three-ring binders for everything, that's when it's really a no-brainer.
The sh*t is about to hit the fan, all those robots and AI enhanced robots have allready been made, under Biden, but kept in storehouses as rolling them out in mass would cause social upheaval a Democratic admin will take steps to allievate,
Now with a stongman who is extremely anti-labor and his loyalists set to controll all three branches of government, the roll out of robots and AI knowledge workers will become a flood, and any social unrest will be redirected towards the chosen strawman of minorities, immiggrants, and anyone who publicly does not agree with the party line.
The only problem with automation is our inability to imagine a post-scarcity economy where everyone has plenty. (The derisive snort+eye roll with which you just dismissed my pitiful naiveté proves my point more easily than any argument I can make.)
Begin by acknowledging that your "job" consists primarily of increasing the wealth and power of the egregiously wealthy and powerful. That's it. That's our purposeour raison d'être. Most of us spend most of our brief lives in support of people we never meet, none of whom deserve our respect, admiration, or support. Admit it. We're pawns in a game our Gods play with database entries.
Now imagine about a world where "work" is whatever pursuit you regard as worthwhile, and "job" is something no human being need stoop to. Think about how we might rid ourselves of the ruling predator parasite psychopaths who will happily kill billions rather than abandon their presumed godhead.
Imagine is all we can do because history says the oligarchs always get their way, until it blows up their faces, and then the process starts all over again.
And from what I can tell, it's been this way since the written word was invented. Hell, when the first scratch tallies were invented!
I can easily imagine a post-scarcity world. I want something, so I merely step to my omnimaker and press one of the preset buttons. Minutes later, what I wanted has come into existence.
What's much harder for me to imagine is how we're going to get there. I mean I do have this omnimaker in my closet; it's been a hobby of mine for a while, but I don't think anyone else has one yet and when I set up the preset button that causes my omnimaker to make more omnimakers, time travelers came by and told me I must never push that button again. In the real world, there is a finite limit of everything. That limit has increased dramatically over recent history, but nothing is unlimited. Acting like it is tends to break things quickly.
Another thing that's hard to imagine is how we would prevent things from breaking if we got there. We already have costs from being able to consume a lot more than we once did. Because it's cheap to buy things, we have e-waste problems, regular waste problems, toxic waste problems, pollution problems, climate problems, health problems, and several more problems. A few of those can be blamed, convincingly or just because it's convenient, on some of the "egregiously wealthy and powerful" you are unhappy with. Others are much more down to us. For example, some e-waste is generated because people can't repair it, and I'm willing to accept that it was probably a wealthy person who made the decision to make it hard to repair. However, quite a bit more of the e-waste is because it wasn't hard to repair but the user couldn't be bothered or even the thing wasn't broken but the user decided to get another one anyway. That's on the user, and sometimes, that user is me. Even if we could get to a post-scarcity world (if you have an idea of how, I'm interested), we would still have lots of problems to solve.
" For example, some e-waste is generated because people can't repair it, and I'm willing to accept that it was probably a wealthy person who made the decision to make it hard to repair."
I've got working mobes that are sitting in a box due to being obsoleted by the carriers. The phones would be fine if there was a network they could connect to. I keep them around as they can be handy for projects where I need a small computer with a display, wireless comms and a touch screen. I wish I was better with software and operating systems so I could get in, excise google and put in an OS that's less slanted at making it easy to text rather than doing something useful.
Absolutely true. The trash truck that get my refuse does not have swampper but an arm that reaches out, grabs and lifts the container, dumps into the hopper, finally slams the container into the ground. That a lost position. Or how about all the clerk-typists positions that were gone after the advent of the dry copy process. Then the poor crofter making cloth on the loom by dim candle light those positions went to the big city where power looms produced cloth not by the yard buy by hundreds of yards enabling the ready made clothes industry. The ready made industry will be going automated soon also.
Having accepted the philosophy of Heraclitus about change I see the answer is to be quick about the feet and nimble about the mind. The other is to look toward a caste system. Employment is just like dad and his dad and his dad's dad and so on. But if you're one of nimble and quick you have dad's position someday. I have read little that looked at a society of plenty (Edward Bellamy and Dallas Mc Cord are at the top) but the subject is ripe for the politcos to use. Use but not plan. Maybe it will be if you don't want to learn and adapt, a room-sized TV and a never ending supply of Colombia's best organic or China's fine industrial relaxant is called to be in the works with the commune kitchen providing a scientifically balanced meal suitable for your caste.
It didn't kick me right off the bat, but the title uses "career" and "low skill" in the same sentence. Odd that. Low skill positions are "jobs" in my book. A career is something that would be worthwhile pursuing for a few decades with room for advancement and growth. Ditch digging or being a short order cook doesn't often have much upward mobility.
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