If things become more automated how do you supply jobs? What are the consequences to the economy and social aspects?

This question was really a hot topic when I was young. I’m in my 40’s. Robotics were being implemented in many factories. I went to the Kohler factory last year, they make kitchen and bath fixtures, and it some of the more generic fixtures are made with robots. The robots turn out coating bathtubs in porcelain for instance at an incredibly fast rate compared to doing it by hand. By hand there is risk for the person of being scolded by extremely high temperatures, also the factory in general is extremely noisy, I would imagine all workers lose their hearing to some extent. The car industry, jewelry, fabric, carpets, even systems that track sales and automatically reorder good all in the past 20+ years have gone thriugh extreme changes and have meant less need for human beings to do those jobs. Hell, you can go back to the cotton gin and find smilar concerns.

New jobs come up, our technological industry replaced some of the manufacturing jobs. But, people with skills to work in a factory and then eventually find themselves without a job often do struggle. Sometimes there are programs to teach a new skill that is useful in the marketplace.

I guess life gets easier with more machines and more robotics. You would think we might have fewer working hours, more time to enjoy life. Less labor intensive jobs that wear on the body. All that is good to some extent, but also has its downside.

I am a CNC Machinist. Trust me, automation just means that people with a different skillset are required. Fifty years ago, a machinist could get by without knowing CAD or G-codes. Nowadays, those are mandatory knowledge for the field. Other fields are similar.

So go ahead, get your machine. See how fast it goes when nobody is there to set it up and program it, or it outpaces those upstream of it and sits idle, waiting for material.

What you will see disappear are the unskilled assembly jobs; either get skills or get unemployed. While some places (like my shop) will train you (within reason), not all will. Where I work, if you cannot do simple math in your head (addition, subtraction, and converting fractions to decimal) or have poor reading comprehension or visualization skills (looking at at a program and “seeing” what it will do) , you won’t last long before being shown the door… possibly on a stretcher, since a mistake may send pieces of metal flying. We may teach you a little metallurgy or programming, but we won’t teach you anything you should have known leaving high school.

Other places are similar; a certain level of knowledge beyond that of an eighth-grade dropout is required to get on the payroll. As we automate, fewer entry-level positions are needed, but there is a shortage of skilled people to fill the positions that are opening up.

@JLeslie Manufacturing still hires, just not the same sort of people as they used to.

@jerv They still hire, but much fewer people in some industries.

That is now history, at least in the West. Jobs have been automated or exported to the Far East for many years. Companies are always trying to reduce costs and people are expensive. If a job can be done by a machine at a low cost it will be. Artificial intelligence will soon begin replacing people in knowledge based work. There isn’t really any limit to how far this trend can go.

Remember the Luddites

What will happen is… exactly what has already been happening in the USA and around the world. The society as a whole becomes richer – far richer – with the wealth of lower-cost goods in greater and greater abundance. That leaves “the society” with more disposable income and more time in which to spend it, ergo, the travel, leisure, entertainment and sports industries take off, as they have.

It’s not for no reason at all that the first movies – and the entire television and movie industry – originated in the USA, and the first theme parks, and professional sports leagues to the degree that they have.

Jobs are created in whole new industries, that didn’t even exist before the automation process started. And there will always be places and needs for low-skill employees to start work, too, as long as the jobs they should have aren’t priced out of reach by sometimes well-meaning but totally harmful minimum wage laws.

When I was younger I always imagined a one person per robot scenario where each individual was responsible and salaried for the ongoing maintenance of one robot in a factory. As long as the machine was running well, you’d be paid accordingly.

I agree with @Jerv. I learned many years ago (~1980) that “Those with 3rd World skills will earn 3rd World wages.”

I agree with @jerv – people will need more skills if they want to live comfortably in the future. Actually, the truth is that they need more skills to live comfortably now, in the present. My father dropped out of school in 8th grade and eventually ended up with a union job in a factory where he made enough money to raise a family and buy a house, all with health care benefits. This wouldn’t be his fate in today’s world and that’s some of the reason for the conflict we see today. Americans who think they will still be able to do well with little or no education (and I mean without doing well in HS or attending community college – not just college) are dreaming. In the future this will be even more pronounced. We need to get real with our children and get them the skills they need to be competitive. HS isn’t enough and if your kid goes to college, they need to study something smart like engineering. People with smarty degrees are viewed as being able to do anything!

@Gabby101 Considering how many are graduating college with less academic knowledge than I had by the end of 4th grade (counting correct change, basic grammar and spelling…), I think that a lot of people are setting themselves up to be unemployable.

Yeah, we keep hearing: “I just want a job…” When we should be hearing: “What training do I need to do the jobs that are available?”

One thing for sure that will happen, is that the rich will get richer because of the stock market. As for the rest of society, who knows? Right now getting a college degree is being priced out of most young people’s reach. Maybe America (& the rest of the world) will see a return of the ‘Apprenticeship’ situation?

@Jerv makes excellent points and @CWOTUS covered many of the points I wanted to cover.

All one has to do to see an illustration is to look at the huge depopulated areas of Detroit where heavy industry and those who used to supply the mainly unskilled jobs once lived and raised their families. The wholesale exportation of old fashioned manufacturing jobs has made unemployment and underemployment of people from social classes who rarely have the financial means to learn today’s manufacturing skills doomed to poverty, lack of access to jobs with health care benefits and little hope to break out of their lower social status. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Capitalism run amok has doomed so many people to a life in which they are marginalized and where the movers and shaker in Washington feel safe to ignore their needs. The GOP and the Tea Party know these people as the lazy, the takers, the ones whose needs out upward pressure on their taxes. They are not seen as people abandoned for the sake of higher profits. How long will this class of Americans ste by before they demand a right to work and to benefit from the growing wealth among them from which they are permanently locked out? The extreme right decry all programs that could remedy these problems and Socialist wealth redistribution. America used to claim the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was for all prepared to work hard. That is clearly a myth. Wait until the secret is out of the bag!

When our U.S. politicians argue about creating jobs, they never mention the loss of jobs from automation. Some of us see it as a major problem. It’s true that this has been happening forever, over time; but it is accelerating due the latest scientific advances and applications. In Russia, they have made jobs by paying people to sit around and watch (security) in every open space in a museum or or other places where people congregate. I have no idea where we are going with producing more jobs and there have been few suggestions from the people who should know.

@ninjacolin That’s funny. I picture Ray Bradbury in heaven having a good laugh over that! Humans have jobs maintaining their robots to do the work, lol!

@jerv I work in a field that has evolved from being hands on, to knowledge worker. I work in the fashion industry. People used to have to know how to actually design and construct an actual garment. Now it has much more to do with sourcing factories, marketing, price structure, and trend forecasting. You have to know your customer and keep one step ahead of your competition. Knowing how to make something, the nuts and bolts of it, takes back seat to the non technical, “soft” skills of the job. The pace just keeps getting faster and faster. Bringing goods to market quickly and cheaply is crucial except in the luxury segment of the market. The same product presented in a simple, no nonsense way vs. an artistic, aesthetically pleasing way will live or die based on the judgement of a sometimes very inexperienced buyer. Sometimes it reminds me of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Being in a low tech field I need to be constantly aware of how my job might be outsourced more cheaply to “unskilled” labor. I need to stay one step ahead of the game and offer something intangible yet valuable that they cannot. A lot of it is the awareness of what the customer wants. It’s the thinking part of the job and the intuitive part of the job that cannot be automated.

On another note: I always laugh when I say “how are we supposed to become a service economy when everything is self-serve???”