The robots are coming – but not fast enough
The claim that mechanisation is sweeping away jobs in a wave of innovation bears little relation to reality.
In August, Japan hopes to send Kirobo, a 34-cm tall, 1kg humanoid robot, to the International Space Station, to assist a Japanese astronaut. Robots are getting cleverer, more dextrous and safer; interest has turned to them performing services, working alongside human beings, and maybe eventually acting in ‘swarms’. But aren’t robots also destroying jobs?
Management consultants McKinsey say they are. McKinsey argues that, by 2025, robots may take 15 to 25 per cent of developed-world tasks in occupations such as manufacturing, packing, construction, maintenance and agriculture, and five to 15 per cent of developing-country tasks in manufacturing alone. It also forecasts a diffusion of robots in commercial services at about half that rate.
McKinsey expresses a growing consensus. In America, top Keynesian economist Paul Krugman declares ‘sympathy for the Luddites’, arguing that robots now hit educated workers of all descriptions. Krugman also believes that robots sway the distribution of national income further towards capital and away from labour. Others make similar points about automation in general.
Everywhere, the advancing capabilities and spread of IT are felt to increase inequality. McKinsey warns of ‘social and political resistance, particularly if robots are perceived as destroying more jobs than they create’, and favours extra education for those made redundant by robots. Krugman wants a state-welfare safety net for those whose jobs are robotised.
Is any of this a realistic account of events? For the penetration of world robots to meet its forecasts for 2025, McKinsey concedes that a lot of investment will be required: about $1 trillion to increase industrial robots from 10million to 25million, and a further $0.2-4 trillion to up commercial service robots to 2.5-2.8 million. That, McKinsey adds, would imply world robot sales growing by 25 to 30 per cent every year over the next 13 years – ‘significantly higher than the average growth rate over the past two decades, but lower than the growth rate in 2010 and 2011’.
Er, but what about the recession? The word doesn’t appear in McKinsey’s report. That’s odd. In the West, company cash hoards have swollen, while many research-and-development (R&D) budgets contract. Female, youthful and immigrant labour are cheap. So why, during an investment slump in the US and elsewhere, would employers rush to spend money on machines that demand radically new processes and expertise? Robots can cost $15,000 if you buy 1,000 of them, but organising a manufacturing cell around each one will add 10 times that to your bill.
Elite commentators would rather believe that robots accentuate income inequalities than check what’s actually happening. In 2012, sales of industrial robots in North America hit a record 22,598 machines. But suppose, generously, that each robot replaced 10 jobs: then the number of workers displaced over the whole of 2012 would nearly be compensated for by the number of new jobs sluggish America and more dynamic Canada currently create each month.
For all this, though, debates about whether robots can ever create as many jobs as they destroy are misplaced. By itself, even the most powerful innovation cannot make or nullify a single job: it is human beings, and the rhythms of capital accumulation, that do that. And right now both the temper of human beings and the tempo of capitalism do not favour robots.
Those unnerved by robots, after all, don’t just exaggerate their impact on employment. They also drum up the dangers mobile robots represent to safety. They fret about the ethics of using robots – especially in the home, and especially with older people. And they write about robot ‘smog’, describing it as a ‘spectacular zoo’ which might ‘imprison us’.
It’s true, in key sectors such as electricals/electronics and automotive, that the number of robots per industrial worker grew, 2008-11. However the pattern is spotty:
Internationally, there’s little or no consistent, durable or ‘exponential’ trend towards the rapid adoption of robots. Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group has 20,000 robots and plans nearly a million more; in Korea, surveillance and security robots made by Samsung Techwin stalk the North/South demilitarised zone. However, both in 2011 and 2012, just 160,000 industrial robots were sold worldwide, while average annual increases in global robot sales were nine per cent, 2002-12. That is an impressive rate of growth; yet it is just a third of what McKinsey imagines for 2013-25.
Robots have long gripped the human imagination. Today’s unprecedented anxiety about them doesn’t much reflect recent advances: though tangible, improvements in robot hardware and software remain limited. Nor does robophobia reflect a substantially faster diffusion of robots, or any genuine epidemic of mass, robot-induced unemployment.
In effect, robophobes fear that catastrophe is upon us, even though not much is happening. Worse, they credit capitalism with much more innovation than, right now, it can actually muster.
Details in this Sunday Times article are extraordinary but unsurprising: Seems the PUBLIC are seen as a problematic threat to be managed/manipulated. Surely CPS impartiality is compromised by this decision? Read on...
1.6GW total from wind and solar this morning, from a total of ~45GW installed capacity. We're keeping the lights on by burning trees and gas. Nukes and reliance upon interconnectors making up the difference. No chance we can hit Net Zero grid by 2030.
“Mother Nature is in charge, and so we must make sure we adjust”.
Ex-cop Democratic Party mayor, indicted on federal bribery and corruption charges, supported by Trump and critical of antisemitism, tells people to tighten their... throats.
What a mess! https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/02/new-york-water-shortage?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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