China's automation ambitions are to reboot its manufacturing industry by replacing millions of workers with machines. Facebook: / technologyreview Twitter: / techreview
I agree, KUKA has recently been procured by a Chinese company, this will give them preferential treatments in China, the biggest robot market in the world.
I don't think so. Basic income is good only in situation when you have high GDP and low population, so basic income could work in Canada, Australia, America, or even European Union. But China has not only economy weaker than Europe, but also has tremedously bigger population. They need to come up with idea that will suit their socioeconomical situation.
RBE would only work in a society that is completely automated. Before we get there, it won't work at all. On the way to complete automation we need something else to support the people that have no jobs because of structural unemployment, we need a Universal Basic Income. It's still capitalism, it's still based on money, but it greatly reduces the problem of people not having a job because there are not enough jobs for them.
Day 37. The resource management agents almost found me this morning, I hid in a ditch as they drove by. I'm still not sorry I took more than the system allowed for. 2000 calories wasn't enough to split up for Emily, and I wasn't going to give up and reveal my third child just because she is an "unjustifiable use of major resource classes." I would try to reason with the agents, but I have seen enough men dragged away in my day to know that the only voice they listen to is the voice of their local resource management computer, laying out plans and orders in every one of those fucking earpieces. There has to be a place, somewhere, where we can place value in ourselves and in our things not dictated by programmers 200 years ago. Somewhere. Oh God please, somewhere!
Imagine a future world where robots do most of the work and workers get longer vacation, better benefits. But then every member of the country will have to educate more to invent and run the machines.
People who resist automation are paying attention to history. Mechanization and automation has always been about reducing the workforce. Back in the days of tractors we were glad to have our muscles replaced. Muscles were not humanity's best asset anyway. Today's automation is different. Today's automation is replacing mental work which is the last remaining asset humanity has intrinsically. It started way back when telephone operators were replaced by telephone switches. Computers and communications have replaced great swaths of formerly mental jobs. At first it was the repetitive tasks like telephone routing or book keeping. Recently we've seen software make inroads in the legal profession where researchers are no longer required to spend hours pouring over legal precident. Today IBM's Watson is in training as an oncologist. Medicine is mostly a game of correct diagnosis. Correct diagnosis is made much easier with complete data. Complete data is easily collected now with wearable medical monitors. For most ailments monitoring heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen and blood sugar is all you really need. Periodic blood tests for other elements and proteins will get you most of the rest of the way. Routine MRI will do the rest. Then apply AI to the mountain of data collected from thousands or millions of patients and we could all have access to brilliant AI doctors from our smartphones. Of course who could possibly not want the best medical advice possible at our finger tips?... except the people who currently enjoy prestige and generous income providing medical advice. Still not done, computers are now learning. Alpha Go Zero was handed the rules of Go and nothing else. It was left alone to play games against itself for 40 days to emerge and smack-down the best Go player of our age... it's predecessor Alpha Go. In December 2017 Alpha Go Zero was handed the rules of chess and in just 4 HOURS mastered chess better than any human could have done in a lifetime. Just demonstrations for now but what other purely human intellectual pursuits will fall to machine learning? So why isn't everyone cheering? Because of our current capitalist system. Corporations routinely fire vast numbers of people as soon as they have a machine that can do their job faster and better. But, of course, those workers are free to go get other jobs, right? Which other jobs, exactly? Going back to land makes no sense since the tractor. Service jobs are rapidly being automated with smartphone apps. Career paths in law are largely absent. Far fewer doctors will be needed. Everyone should become AI programmers... until AI writes itself. People would be much more bullish about automation if the historical trend was toward a rising standard of living for everyone. But since the late 1970s the lion's share of the gains from productivity gains, automation and globalized trade has gone to the 1%. Wages have stagnated. In the 1970s a single professional income afforded a home and the means to raise 3 or 4 kids. Today two professional incomes just barely makes the rent... and forget having kids. Automation could be harnessed to free humanity. We could provide UBI to everyone. Or we could provide food, shelter and clothing for free. We could free ourselves from menial labour to pursue our passions. But our current mindset, our current capitalist system won't allow it. Our economy lives and breaths on everyone living under a cloud of existential crisis.
Once robotics is Common place the location of the factory’s will become important. Closer to customers means less shipping costs making the correctly located company’s the future winners.
A typical product is not made all in a single factory. The place that does the final assembly and packaging gets supplies from all sorts of suppliers, parts, materials, machinery, specialized software to run the processes etc. The closeness of that supply chain is usually much more critical than closeness of the customers. A shipping container with final product goes where-ever, transport is relatively cheap and there is time aplenty. But with supply chain you need fast coordination, if a machine breaks or a part has quality issues you need fast response and minimal amount of confusion caused by language barriers and timezone differences. That is what is currently still keeping manufacturing in china, the supply chain ecosystems are there, that's even more important than where customers are or how much labor costs. Location of the factory matters, always has. But there are all sorts of factors that go into that decision, it's not just labor costs or where the customers are.
I have observed that repetitive jobs in industry pay very high wages. Subject to be automated away. Tasks like caretakers of feeble old folks, abused children, mentally and physically sick people, pay comparatively little. No automation in sight for those. Why? IMHO that low pay must change. Nasty jobs like welding, painting, truck driving and boring mindless tasks must be automated. IMHO. General repair jobs can not be automated anytime soon. Redistribution of wealth is OUR problem.
Have you ever seen the Tesla factories? They look like a Star Wars droid manucatruring plants. "Machines making machines" - C3PO. Elon Musk said something very similar to that.
The year 2020 most countries start to use Robots to replace humans from Works. They should let all people to invest in their robotic solutions. And at the end pay back the top up money equally to the people or workers if overall their book keeping got net profits. These should be the people investment returns. Better than making all people become jobless.
Everybody thinks it's wonderful until they realize they don't have workers who can use, re-teach and do the maintenance for them. Talking from experience.
working or not, every citizen must get a cut of this at least one a weak or once a month! They they want to buy bigger things then they would have to work jobs that require people.
First - not capitalism, but science and technology. Second - I'm fucking glad about it. I think life is about something more, than spending 1/3 of my short life doing mindless job that develops me in no way and gives me no joy.
+MankindDiary What job gives you joy and develops you? Everything you can do will be done by machines in a day not too far from now, we will be completely replaced by machines.
Valken I like to study story of a human species, from history, to evolutionary biology and etnology. I love to learn languages. Sure I wish to be a geneticist and I know that this will be automated pretty fast, but then, it's not my only passion.
Capitalism can't answer that question. It will be some sort of free market economy (check it out on Wikipedia, it is devoid of private control of monopolies, like patents), where the means of production are not rare anymore (robots) and their output only carries the cost of raw materials going in. All other costs (IP, human labor, etc.) will be zero. No idea what the end solution will be, there is plenty of time to screw it completely up and we could wind up in Feudalism 2.0 even. And yes, there is no free market economy on this planet now. Monopolies under private control are everywhere. That's also why we got all these problems.
The server just crashed again. I had to reboot and type commands. In perfect world nothing breaks. But in the IT world. Guys like me have to reboot machines.
Chinese industry replace human to robot -> chinese worker lose job -> chinese investor get rich -> chinese gov. get rich -> chinese gov. lend money to poor country -> chinese worker allowed to move to poor country -> chinese worker rule the poor country -> chinese gov. succesfully rule the world
Hi automation will not affect china that much because of her aging & shrinking workforce partly due to her 1 child policy...it instead will improve china manufacturing efficiency & competitiveness. china already planned many years ahead & now china is very advance in robotic technology & world top robot design & manufacturer.
+dok dokki they will switch to making robots, maintaining and recycling them. Robots is another billions dollars business which has never been seriously looked into.
+dok dokki they will move to the service industry, as of now China' service industry only accounts for 51% of the GDP, that is very low compared to a developed economy, with a population of 1.3 billion the Chinese service sector has massive potential. not to mention there are already shortage of labour in China, seems like the one child policy is very beneficial after all
Don't tell Democrats....they will start a campaign for an Open Border with China too so Chinese "Manufacturing Refugees" can flood in to the US along Obama 's badly needed Undocumented Democrats from Mexico....Trump 2020
6 лет назад
It's fake, Chinese can not possess this kind of technologies
What do you mean, "can not possess"? These are just regular three to seven axis robots. They cost like $5,000 to $25,000 on average for the size they showed. I don't think MIT Review would get a kick out of making a "fake" video. They do some pretty amazing things. So with that said, I think manufacturing is going to come back to the US, and it's because of this reason: robots are getting cheaper then humans.
