Robots are owned, and this is key. They are productive assets, much like houses produce rent. If they become a problem, all we need to really do is tax them. This means robots will be working for the people, because that's what taxes are -- asset distribution facilitated by government.
Of course, two major problems here. First, the government, for obvious reasons, and second, the corporations that have a stronghold on the government. If the government did it's job, it would simply be re-funneling money where it needs to go; to pay for education, social services, safety, and so on. And if corporations didn't have their way, they wouldn't be able to twist laws and regulations in ways to maximize profit and avoid taxes, because that's precisely what taxes are designed to do -- cut profits.
But if history can teach us anything, it's that even when manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas and call center jobs were shipped and agricultural labor jobs were swept by undocumented immigrants, the government here didn't do much of anything, and the businesses got their way with increased profits. In turn, our labor force got displaced, but we survived because ultimately people find a way to make money.
Every non-government job is created by an entrepreneur, either directly, indirectly, or down the line. Entrepreneurship is really what has driven America. Many will take that over government and taxation (solving the two major problems outlined above), and this is the free market argument in a nutshell.
The takeaway is, if we tax robotic labor, they'd be working for us, the people. Just as anyone paying 15% in income tax is working 2 months out of the year for the USA. Or we could hustle it out and have everyone desperately seek work to save their lives. Our choice. One leads to greater inequality.
> Or we could hustle it out and have everyone desperately seek work to save their lives. Our choice. One leads to greater inequality.
This is a total non sequitur. Machines have been taking human jobs since the late 1800s and adding robots to take/process orders is no different. You discount the notion that new jobs will appear as "the free market argument," but new jobs will be created regardless of any tax on robot labor (negating the utility of such a tax) -- I suspect the driving factor here is the size of the unemployed workforce, not the need for money, ceteris paribus.
Moreover, the two problems you note (government and corporations influence on it) aren't policy or cultural problems (implementation details, if you will), they're problems with the fundamental nature of a powerful state and human society. Never has there existed a society where powerful institutions were not able to influence other, more powerful institutions (i.e. the state) with that said power, and as long as those institutions are run by men that cannot change. Individuals are generally corrupt (to some extent or another, if you give me $5 I'll shut up), and no amount of oversight or transparency will stop corruption so long as a critical amount of power supports that corruption. In simple terms, this is the tyranny of the majority, where "the majority" is measured in terms of power, not votes. This is the fundamental political dilemma, and limiting the scope of the state to only limiting the power of society's other powerful institutions is the only solution that solves this problem empirically, as opposed to the notion that corruption is ok as long as it promotes a certain set of ideals with which I agree.
The problem with these solutions is that production moves where it's cheaper. If you tax my robots, I'll just pack up and move them to another country where they are not taxed, or they are taxed less.
> but we survived because ultimately people find a way to make money.
Or more accurately, we just stopped caring about the people who can't.
And to treat our fears about inevitably joining them, the denigration starts. "well, they're just red state rednecks" "Poor folks should just learn more and work harder and pull those bootstraps" "if there's 5 jobs for 10 people, then the 10 people need to go back to school and get degrees, then they'll have 5 jobs for 10 people with degrees, which will be much better"
Robots are just machinery which can be taxed as property. We shouldn't create special tax categories for productivity tools or we'll start taxing shovels and perk scripts, too.
>They are productive assets, much like houses produce rent
The rent houses produce is very different from the money robots help you make. Rents (in the economic sense) are good to tax, can't be passed on to the tenant, and has no bad distortionary effects. If you tax robots, and don't do anything else, all that does is raise the prices of the goods produced by robots. It harms the consumer the most. If you tax robots enough, you can incentivize the owners to not use robots and hire humans instead. But then we're missing out on all the benefits of having a society where robots do the hard work, there's got to be a better way.
One solution would be to tax robots, and redistribute the taxed money back to the consumers. Everyone should benefit from the fruits of automation. This would probably work pretty well. The biggest issue here is that the government isn't known for being very good at redistributing tax revenue. So there are proposals like basic income to keep the process as simple as possible. There are probably even better options, like taxing the rents only, and taxing them very highly, and then paying that out as basic income. Theoretically this might target the people you want to be targeting, without harming the consumers. Obviously, theory only goes so far with this kind of thing. I think the point here is that taxation is tricky, and the burden of a tax is not necessarily on the person/company you're taking the money from. So "tax the robots" might not be the best thing, even though it has populist appeal.
Robots are capital. Real estate is mostly land. Capital produces interest. Land produces rent. These are different things.
However, if robots ever became fully autonomous and sentient, then owning them could be equivalent to slaveownership, and fundamentally immoral.
Slaveowners can be said to collect rent, because just like with owners of land titles, their profit comes not from production but from the government giving them privileges.
This is what I've been thinking for quite a while but what allot of people seem to ignore - the "AI revolution" can very well "only" hit developing nations while skipping the developed ones.
Better, smarter robots are a threat to Chinese workers, not so much to say Dutch or Canadian workers.
The west can afford and is willing to pay more even for less, just look at how many people are willing to pay 10 times the price for "Organic Fare Traded Tomatoes" or any other "artisan" goods.
The west is also not as much dependent on manufacturing and the manufacturing it does do is usually high tech, low(er) volume and highly specialized one where it both might not make sense to automate everything and where people are more than willing to pay the extra to know that something was "hand crafted".
But overall we've developed a consumer culture especially in the past decade that is pretty much focused on retro/old school craftsmanship, small scale production and "artisan" touches, it almost makes one wonder if the whole "hipster revolution" wasn't hand crafted by some cabal of shadowy figures that foresaw the "rise of the machines", because our willingness to pay 250$ for a hand crafted hemp bag on etsy is just might be the thing that would protect us from AI automation.
Robotics and AI have improved significantly and will continue to improve into the future. How much have humans improved over the last 30 years? People simply cannot compete, and this is a trend that cannot be reversed, or shouldn't be reversed.
Just as mass industrialization necessitated huge social change in response. The emergence of a middle class, the growth of cities, organized labor and work hours, etc.
As automation and AI continue to replace jobs and more and more people find it difficult to compete at any price. I predict you will see similar societal changes in response. I don't know what those will be, and they probably will not come easy. We could see a utopian future similar to Star Trek, or a dystopian one instead.
Some might ask; well if this is the case, can we move production (back) to the US? The answer (imo) is no. The Chinese have done an amazing job building the supply chain. Need a part, go right down the street and meet the vendors, need packaging, its just down the other street. The infrastructure built to bring products to market is their real advantage here. Try sourcing a new chip in the states and then try over there. This is true not just for electronics, but also with textile production.
This is the angle I thought first world countries would take to get manufacturing back in-house. It still makes sense to do it if the recurring infrastructure costs (like power) are similar. However a plant may no longer bring in 100-200 workers so not much for the politicians to preach about. It is going to be a few high skilled personnel, a handful of physical workers (to replace and maintain robots), and a temporary building supervisor (required while humans inhabit the plant). Eventually second generation plants will reduce that even further with only a supervisor coming around for extreme cases.
The people there are really starting to feel the encroaching mass-automation of low wage jobs then :/
I hope that the spokesperson was speaking the truth when they said that the increased automation would not lead to long-term loss of employment.
But I can't imagine reeducating that much (previously) low(?) skilled employees, rather than hiring a new graduate (of which there are reportedly many) for R&D.
Not only are jobs being lost through robotics on factory floors, they will also be lost through self driving vehicles. Massive swathes of people are at the risk of facing unemployment, and I think it's going to catch a lot of people off-guard.
Increasingly to me a universal income guaranteed by the government seems like sensible policy to ease in sooner than later. I see no other option, lobbying to allow lower minimum wages or eradication of minimum wage to keep humans competitive against mass produced robotics and AI is quite frankly idiotic.
I'm always confused at how people pity those that work in menial, repetitive, uncreative manufacturing jobs (to give an example, see the flack that Amazon receives for the drudgery of its warehouse jobs) and at the same time worry about job loss from automation. These uncreative, "inhumane" jobs we have are precisely the low hanging fruit ripe for the picking by robots.
Of course, there is always friction in the redistribution process of the labor, but in the long run, I can't help but be optimistic about the increased human potential that can result from moving people away from menial tasks. Unless of course, you believe that some people are better off with tasks that require low creativity and human initiative.
If I'm a company making $1000 gadgets and then adopt some technology (like robotics) to reduce the cost of my gadget to $500, have I just reduced my country's GDP?
Great question. The answer is no. This is one of those many cases where thinking in money terms confuses the issue.
If the country had 100 people making gadgets, and now it only requires 50 to make the same number of gadgets, the country can now double the amount of gadgets it makes, or the 50 people can go make something else.
Therefore, a doubling in productivity will not decrease GDP (total production of an economy), but increase it.
If it costs $900 to make a gadget you sell for $1000 and you replace the staff with robots which cost $500 per gadget then there is no effect on GDP as it only tracks value produced.
The only way to reduce GDP is by lowering the price of your goods (assuming demand stays constant), or implicitly by letting your excess profits sit as cash instead of consuming or reinvesting (which both create and increase value).
Possibly, assuming people don't just buy $500 worth of other random things instead, and that you haven't expanded the market for the gadget to include people who can't or won't pay $1000 but can and will pay $500, and the resources you no longer consume don't go into producing something else, and any number of other factors.
But even if those don't happen and you have lowered GDP, a lower GDP is not a bad thing; it's perfectly acceptable, and desirable, for people to spend a smaller fraction of their income.
As for your company, if you can reduce costs such that instead of making $50 on each $1000 gadget, you make $100 on each $500 gadget, both you and the consumer of your product win. Arguably, GDP seems broken as a metric for not taking that into account.
A lot depends on the definition of "my country" are you talking the exporter or importer? You seem to be implying the exporter country. In that case GDP will drop.
Competition means the price you charge the importer has to drop by "something" otherwise your competitors (assuming you haven't used the .gov to outlaw competition) will undercut you. Unless you use .gov or "something" to prevent competitors from installing the same, or even newer better robots.
Surely as per efficient market hypothesis the employees working there were already at their best possible job over a long term average over a large group of people, like an entire factory. So an external force eliminating those jobs mean in an efficient market they'll by definition be working less well matched to their abilities jobs. This ripples thru the economy see anecdotes about aerospace engineers driving taxi and so on. Whoops taxi driving jobs are going away too. So society as a whole will be less productive, have less revenue, have an inferior match of their abilities to their jobs. This will further depress the GDP.
Traditional income inequality models indicate the marginal use of a dollar / yuan is much lower for small higher income brackets. Not just the wealthy CEO but say, engineers. So the impact on the greater economy of taking away 1000 line jobs is much higher than taking away 1000 line jobs equivalent out of the CEO's bonus. This is not seen as overly controversial, obviously the velocity of any given yuan is much faster for a poor dude than a rich dude.
Finally there's the multiplier effect where productive jobs that generated 1 yuan or whatever also generated as a side effect service transactions of 1.5 or 3 or 10 yuan per productively generated yuan. Obviously the real estate agent won't be selling homes to the now unemployed people which has downstream effects like the commissioned mortgage broker and commissioned bank reps all the way down to title registration won't get those service dollars, er, yuans.
There seems to be no reason to expect the GDP to increase or stay the same. There is a tragedy of the commons aspect where every individual benefits individually, but society suffers. Its much like dumping industrial waste into parks, for example.
At least in theory no, because GDP growth calculation is inflation-adjusted. If lots of gadgets get a lower price because of lower costs, but with the same features/performance, then this should be accounted for in the GDP deflator [1] and be neutral to GDP growth accounting. Of course, correctly estimating the GDP deflator in practice is very difficult.
Well, for one, supply & demand says you would sell more of the gadget if it was priced lower. If not, you'd keep it the same price and enjoy wider margins.
GDP is a weak proxy for wealth. We are much more interested in adding up the consumer surplus and the producer surplus, but getting accurate numbers is usually impossible.
If we are comparing economies that are, in a suitable sense, "the same shape" then more GDP is better. But adopting new technologies in the way that your question imagines, changes the shape in a way that breaks the proxy. GDP goes down and that is a good thing. No surprises or paradoxes here; GDP is well known to be a poor proxy for wealth.
That alone isn't enough. Don't forget that you will sell more of them at $500 per gadget, so the total revenue from gadgets may go up.
But it is possible, and does happen, that technological change messes up GDP measurement. It was definitely a metric formulated without changes in the production process or even consumption process in mind.
depends on what those people who previously made your gadgets start doing. Provided they end up doing productive work elsewhere, you haven't reduced your country's GDP
Foxconn has finally been able to achieve the tolerances they need with their robots. They've been trying to do this for a few years now, but the positioning precision wasn't good enough.[1][2]
Their FoxBot robots are conventional robot arms on fixed bases. There are four standard models, differing in size and precision. Foxconn is making them in-house, for about $20,000 to $25,000. Not clear what sensing they have; the ones they've shown in public just had simple suction end effectors.
There's nothing exotic here except the scale on which Foxconn is operating.
Welcome to the automated future. As a world we are going to have to adjust to the changes brought about by automation. We need to start talking about how society will be structured with 50% unemployment.
This reminds me a scene of the wonderful AniMatrix clips. Here is what I recalled (may not be exactly accurate): Escaped robots established their own country in remote area and started to export products for natural resources. Since robots never need a salary and can keep producing goods 24/7, human beings cannot compete and all countries ran into deficits and their societies collapsed. In the end, all countries blockaded the Robot country and the war started, then the rest is history.
There seems to be a lot of discussion in this thread hinting at the detriment of economic slowdown. Can we all agree that ever-increasing industrial GDP, inflation notwithstanding, will ultimately be problematic?
It must be driven by either population or productivity per capita increase, period.
Industrial economies cannot continue to grow in this unregulated way forever, due to it increasing both the environmental impacts and wealth disparity. That said, information economies can grow much more aggressively without the negative impacts- but we don't have a system for adequately valuing information GDP, i.e. rewarding people for creating content.
If our society is becoming entertainment-centric (which is great, and inevitable) then we need to figure out how every person can ascertain a quality-of-life standard through providing entertainment.
Eventually natural resources and industrial production will be completely automated. Obviously the trickle-down economic theory does not hold up in that situation.
People buy iPhones. Robots don't. At some point, replacing your workers with robots becomes replacing your customers with robots, and the economy goes to hell. Are we there yet?
Automated at the bottom and outsourced at the top, going to be an interesting squeeze and I am more worried about all the screams for protectionism in trade which pretty much shut down the world the last time it was tried
I believe what makes the current iteration of technology making jobs redundant unique is the speed/frequency with which this is happening. In the past the process was slow enough for the next generation to train for the next set of skills that were required in the economy. It is very hard for a mature professional to change job tracks and certainly almost impossible for a whole society to do so several times in the typical lifespan of a person. This is what is happening with the pace of change/redundancy today and the effect that I foresee is revolt like conditions in many societies.
We are already witnessing this revolt/discontent in the US in this presidential cycle in my view. People are very angry and I fear it will only become worse in the coming years/decades as promised solutions by the new crop of leaders elected by angry people don't work out as expected.
Light bulbs did not kill candle makers job. Light bulb made it possible for humans to work at night speeding up humanity's progress by several factors in more ways than we can imagine.
The dominant left narrative is to see automation as "job loss" but in reality automation is bring manufacturing back to USA. Helping Americans live in a more safer and better workplaces and rapidly increasing technological progress.
Also, people whose jobs are replaced don't just go and jump into river. They simply find some other jobs possible at lower wages thus helping other businesses get even more competitive.
Stories like this make me think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Charlie's father was a factory worker who struggled to make ends meet, the irony being that his job was to screw toothpaste caps on toothpaste tubes.
After the events of the book, Charlie's father went back to the factory but as an engineer to work on the machines that do his old job. Not everyone at the factory could have received that kind of promotion. I wonder what happened to them?
The OP doesn't mention, but could it be that hedging against bad PR and government incentives for capex purchases are accelerating this.
For example, if this trend continues Apple will no longer get bad PR for supporting sweatshops. In the US there were also years (might still be true) where a company fully could write off capex purchases in the first year and not a multi-year depreciation schedule. Perhaps China is doing something similar.
[+] [-] unabst|9 years ago|reply
Of course, two major problems here. First, the government, for obvious reasons, and second, the corporations that have a stronghold on the government. If the government did it's job, it would simply be re-funneling money where it needs to go; to pay for education, social services, safety, and so on. And if corporations didn't have their way, they wouldn't be able to twist laws and regulations in ways to maximize profit and avoid taxes, because that's precisely what taxes are designed to do -- cut profits.
But if history can teach us anything, it's that even when manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas and call center jobs were shipped and agricultural labor jobs were swept by undocumented immigrants, the government here didn't do much of anything, and the businesses got their way with increased profits. In turn, our labor force got displaced, but we survived because ultimately people find a way to make money.
Every non-government job is created by an entrepreneur, either directly, indirectly, or down the line. Entrepreneurship is really what has driven America. Many will take that over government and taxation (solving the two major problems outlined above), and this is the free market argument in a nutshell.
The takeaway is, if we tax robotic labor, they'd be working for us, the people. Just as anyone paying 15% in income tax is working 2 months out of the year for the USA. Or we could hustle it out and have everyone desperately seek work to save their lives. Our choice. One leads to greater inequality.
[+] [-] cderwin|9 years ago|reply
This is a total non sequitur. Machines have been taking human jobs since the late 1800s and adding robots to take/process orders is no different. You discount the notion that new jobs will appear as "the free market argument," but new jobs will be created regardless of any tax on robot labor (negating the utility of such a tax) -- I suspect the driving factor here is the size of the unemployed workforce, not the need for money, ceteris paribus.
Moreover, the two problems you note (government and corporations influence on it) aren't policy or cultural problems (implementation details, if you will), they're problems with the fundamental nature of a powerful state and human society. Never has there existed a society where powerful institutions were not able to influence other, more powerful institutions (i.e. the state) with that said power, and as long as those institutions are run by men that cannot change. Individuals are generally corrupt (to some extent or another, if you give me $5 I'll shut up), and no amount of oversight or transparency will stop corruption so long as a critical amount of power supports that corruption. In simple terms, this is the tyranny of the majority, where "the majority" is measured in terms of power, not votes. This is the fundamental political dilemma, and limiting the scope of the state to only limiting the power of society's other powerful institutions is the only solution that solves this problem empirically, as opposed to the notion that corruption is ok as long as it promotes a certain set of ideals with which I agree.
[+] [-] Udik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|9 years ago|reply
Or more accurately, we just stopped caring about the people who can't.
And to treat our fears about inevitably joining them, the denigration starts. "well, they're just red state rednecks" "Poor folks should just learn more and work harder and pull those bootstraps" "if there's 5 jobs for 10 people, then the 10 people need to go back to school and get degrees, then they'll have 5 jobs for 10 people with degrees, which will be much better"
[+] [-] ansy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psc|9 years ago|reply
The rent houses produce is very different from the money robots help you make. Rents (in the economic sense) are good to tax, can't be passed on to the tenant, and has no bad distortionary effects. If you tax robots, and don't do anything else, all that does is raise the prices of the goods produced by robots. It harms the consumer the most. If you tax robots enough, you can incentivize the owners to not use robots and hire humans instead. But then we're missing out on all the benefits of having a society where robots do the hard work, there's got to be a better way.
One solution would be to tax robots, and redistribute the taxed money back to the consumers. Everyone should benefit from the fruits of automation. This would probably work pretty well. The biggest issue here is that the government isn't known for being very good at redistributing tax revenue. So there are proposals like basic income to keep the process as simple as possible. There are probably even better options, like taxing the rents only, and taxing them very highly, and then paying that out as basic income. Theoretically this might target the people you want to be targeting, without harming the consumers. Obviously, theory only goes so far with this kind of thing. I think the point here is that taxation is tricky, and the burden of a tax is not necessarily on the person/company you're taking the money from. So "tax the robots" might not be the best thing, even though it has populist appeal.
[+] [-] niels_olson|9 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-lift...
[+] [-] kspaans|9 years ago|reply
Though that may get messy as traditional human labour costs change. Maybe a straight-up imputed rent on the rental value of the machines?
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputed_rent
[+] [-] nwah1|9 years ago|reply
However, if robots ever became fully autonomous and sentient, then owning them could be equivalent to slaveownership, and fundamentally immoral.
Slaveowners can be said to collect rent, because just like with owners of land titles, their profit comes not from production but from the government giving them privileges.
[+] [-] SixSigma|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|9 years ago|reply
Better, smarter robots are a threat to Chinese workers, not so much to say Dutch or Canadian workers.
The west can afford and is willing to pay more even for less, just look at how many people are willing to pay 10 times the price for "Organic Fare Traded Tomatoes" or any other "artisan" goods.
The west is also not as much dependent on manufacturing and the manufacturing it does do is usually high tech, low(er) volume and highly specialized one where it both might not make sense to automate everything and where people are more than willing to pay the extra to know that something was "hand crafted".
But overall we've developed a consumer culture especially in the past decade that is pretty much focused on retro/old school craftsmanship, small scale production and "artisan" touches, it almost makes one wonder if the whole "hipster revolution" wasn't hand crafted by some cabal of shadowy figures that foresaw the "rise of the machines", because our willingness to pay 250$ for a hand crafted hemp bag on etsy is just might be the thing that would protect us from AI automation.
[+] [-] mgolawala|9 years ago|reply
Just as mass industrialization necessitated huge social change in response. The emergence of a middle class, the growth of cities, organized labor and work hours, etc.
As automation and AI continue to replace jobs and more and more people find it difficult to compete at any price. I predict you will see similar societal changes in response. I don't know what those will be, and they probably will not come easy. We could see a utopian future similar to Star Trek, or a dystopian one instead.
We live in interesting times. :)
[+] [-] ChrisBland|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huphtur|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] studentrob|9 years ago|reply
Interesting.
[+] [-] deskamess|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SCHiM|9 years ago|reply
I hope that the spokesperson was speaking the truth when they said that the increased automation would not lead to long-term loss of employment.
But I can't imagine reeducating that much (previously) low(?) skilled employees, rather than hiring a new graduate (of which there are reportedly many) for R&D.
[+] [-] Scirra_Tom|9 years ago|reply
Increasingly to me a universal income guaranteed by the government seems like sensible policy to ease in sooner than later. I see no other option, lobbying to allow lower minimum wages or eradication of minimum wage to keep humans competitive against mass produced robotics and AI is quite frankly idiotic.
[+] [-] altonzheng|9 years ago|reply
Of course, there is always friction in the redistribution process of the labor, but in the long run, I can't help but be optimistic about the increased human potential that can result from moving people away from menial tasks. Unless of course, you believe that some people are better off with tasks that require low creativity and human initiative.
[+] [-] criddell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuna-piano|9 years ago|reply
If the country had 100 people making gadgets, and now it only requires 50 to make the same number of gadgets, the country can now double the amount of gadgets it makes, or the 50 people can go make something else.
Therefore, a doubling in productivity will not decrease GDP (total production of an economy), but increase it.
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|9 years ago|reply
The only way to reduce GDP is by lowering the price of your goods (assuming demand stays constant), or implicitly by letting your excess profits sit as cash instead of consuming or reinvesting (which both create and increase value).
[+] [-] willvarfar|9 years ago|reply
However, if people are laid off and they don't get other jobs then yes that will indirectly lower GDP too.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|9 years ago|reply
But even if those don't happen and you have lowered GDP, a lower GDP is not a bad thing; it's perfectly acceptable, and desirable, for people to spend a smaller fraction of their income.
As for your company, if you can reduce costs such that instead of making $50 on each $1000 gadget, you make $100 on each $500 gadget, both you and the consumer of your product win. Arguably, GDP seems broken as a metric for not taking that into account.
[+] [-] Scirra_Tom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|9 years ago|reply
Competition means the price you charge the importer has to drop by "something" otherwise your competitors (assuming you haven't used the .gov to outlaw competition) will undercut you. Unless you use .gov or "something" to prevent competitors from installing the same, or even newer better robots.
Surely as per efficient market hypothesis the employees working there were already at their best possible job over a long term average over a large group of people, like an entire factory. So an external force eliminating those jobs mean in an efficient market they'll by definition be working less well matched to their abilities jobs. This ripples thru the economy see anecdotes about aerospace engineers driving taxi and so on. Whoops taxi driving jobs are going away too. So society as a whole will be less productive, have less revenue, have an inferior match of their abilities to their jobs. This will further depress the GDP.
Traditional income inequality models indicate the marginal use of a dollar / yuan is much lower for small higher income brackets. Not just the wealthy CEO but say, engineers. So the impact on the greater economy of taking away 1000 line jobs is much higher than taking away 1000 line jobs equivalent out of the CEO's bonus. This is not seen as overly controversial, obviously the velocity of any given yuan is much faster for a poor dude than a rich dude.
Finally there's the multiplier effect where productive jobs that generated 1 yuan or whatever also generated as a side effect service transactions of 1.5 or 3 or 10 yuan per productively generated yuan. Obviously the real estate agent won't be selling homes to the now unemployed people which has downstream effects like the commissioned mortgage broker and commissioned bank reps all the way down to title registration won't get those service dollars, er, yuans.
There seems to be no reason to expect the GDP to increase or stay the same. There is a tragedy of the commons aspect where every individual benefits individually, but society suffers. Its much like dumping industrial waste into parks, for example.
[+] [-] danmaz74|9 years ago|reply
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDP_deflator
[+] [-] dnadler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neoeldex|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alan-crowe|9 years ago|reply
If we are comparing economies that are, in a suitable sense, "the same shape" then more GDP is better. But adopting new technologies in the way that your question imagines, changes the shape in a way that breaks the proxy. GDP goes down and that is a good thing. No surprises or paradoxes here; GDP is well known to be a poor proxy for wealth.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jmm/true_numbers_and_fake_numbers/ai... works through the details, but the other way round - the robot breaks down, prices go up, GDP goes up and that is a bad thing.
[+] [-] savanaly|9 years ago|reply
But it is possible, and does happen, that technological change messes up GDP measurement. It was definitely a metric formulated without changes in the production process or even consumption process in mind.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|9 years ago|reply
Basically, $ used to cost 0.001 gadgets, but now it costs 0.002 gadgets. But your country's Product, measured in gadgets, does not change.
[+] [-] maelito|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dharma1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzy4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
Their FoxBot robots are conventional robot arms on fixed bases. There are four standard models, differing in size and precision. Foxconn is making them in-house, for about $20,000 to $25,000. Not clear what sensing they have; the ones they've shown in public just had simple suction end effectors.
There's nothing exotic here except the scale on which Foxconn is operating.
[1] http://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/1829834/foxconns... [2] http://www.4erevolution.com/en/foxconn-foxbot-apple/
[+] [-] BatFastard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flatM|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biggio|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skoocda|9 years ago|reply
It must be driven by either population or productivity per capita increase, period.
Industrial economies cannot continue to grow in this unregulated way forever, due to it increasing both the environmental impacts and wealth disparity. That said, information economies can grow much more aggressively without the negative impacts- but we don't have a system for adequately valuing information GDP, i.e. rewarding people for creating content.
If our society is becoming entertainment-centric (which is great, and inevitable) then we need to figure out how every person can ascertain a quality-of-life standard through providing entertainment.
Eventually natural resources and industrial production will be completely automated. Obviously the trickle-down economic theory does not hold up in that situation.
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|9 years ago|reply
Adidas comes back to Germany but with a heavily automated factory http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/25/adidas-to-sell-... and ex McDonalds executive pointing out robots are cheaper than 15 bucks an hour employees http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/05/mcdonalds-ex-ceo-15h...
Automated at the bottom and outsourced at the top, going to be an interesting squeeze and I am more worried about all the screams for protectionism in trade which pretty much shut down the world the last time it was tried
[+] [-] adrianlmm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbrk2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techlover14159|9 years ago|reply
We are already witnessing this revolt/discontent in the US in this presidential cycle in my view. People are very angry and I fear it will only become worse in the coming years/decades as promised solutions by the new crop of leaders elected by angry people don't work out as expected.
[+] [-] tn13|9 years ago|reply
The dominant left narrative is to see automation as "job loss" but in reality automation is bring manufacturing back to USA. Helping Americans live in a more safer and better workplaces and rapidly increasing technological progress.
Also, people whose jobs are replaced don't just go and jump into river. They simply find some other jobs possible at lower wages thus helping other businesses get even more competitive.
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|9 years ago|reply
Charlie's father was a factory worker who struggled to make ends meet, the irony being that his job was to screw toothpaste caps on toothpaste tubes.
After the events of the book, Charlie's father went back to the factory but as an engineer to work on the machines that do his old job. Not everyone at the factory could have received that kind of promotion. I wonder what happened to them?
[+] [-] louprado|9 years ago|reply
For example, if this trend continues Apple will no longer get bad PR for supporting sweatshops. In the US there were also years (might still be true) where a company fully could write off capex purchases in the first year and not a multi-year depreciation schedule. Perhaps China is doing something similar.