All well replacing mundane jobs with robots, but what will those displaced workers do. Also come 2030, the population will of increased, which will be mostly in the demographics who lost their jobs to robots in the first place.<p>But then the whole cost effective argument is from a company perspective, what it costs them on the balance sheets.<p>The fallout and full cost of loosing workers is very much ringfenced for companies, but the social impacts can be far far deeper and far more costly to a community than any saving made on a balance sheet.<p>So I get the whole workers rights perspective, equally, I'm mindful that some jobs really are not fit for humans, just because they can do them, don't mean we can't technology them away. But a balance is needed, so if they had a robot tax as many have raised and mooted in the past, then perhaps that could be used to find education, free recreational activities. Otherwise we will just fuel an endless supply of humans in production line style that feel useless in society and become statisticaly abandoned or worse.<p>Certainly won't need 20M robot maintenance jobs, let alone the skill set from picking fruit and moving onto robot maintenance for many will be a transition out of their reach.<p>So all yay for robots replacing menial jobs, but let's make sure such displaced menial workers are afforded some education and opportunity into better jobs. Otherwise it will not end well socially.
Globally. The title is somewhat misleading. That's roughly 0.4% of global jobs in 2019 being lost over a decade; So, something like 0.04% per year. I think society will survive.<p>If anything, those numbers are underwhelming. Having worked with industrial robots it's not surprising that they won't be taking over the world any time soon.<p>Robots are a large up front investment in a company's immediate processes. This investment is only good if the processes remain mostly static for a very long time. Even then, there is a major cost when processes finally change. It's stupidly similar to software development in so many ways.<p>Mass automation already happened, at least in my country (USA). The data shown in the article seems to indicate most of the increased use will be in countries like China. Rising wages are likely the dominant factor driving increased adoption in that situation, not new technology.<p>Everyone I know who actually buys robots views them as a trade off, not a panacea. As robots' capabilities slowly improve, their use will increase a bit, but operator guided machinery (ie CNCs, injection molding, task specific machines for things like packaging) glued together with flexible human workers isn't going anywhere until we hit something resembling AGI.<p>Can't speak to the use of robots outside of manufacturing, but that's not what the article is about.
I can imagine at least two hugely positive outcomes from the rise of robots and automation:<p>1) Human labor will no longer dominate COGS--global shipping and logistics will. There will therefore be a massive onshoring of manufacturing back to the developed world. As a result, we will stop subsidizing human rights abuses and substandard living conditions around the globe.<p>2) In developed countries, this massive onshoring of automated production will make it clear that low-skill, high-paying factory jobs are forever a thing of the past. Simultaneously, xenophobia--"they took our jobs"--may cease to be an effective political tool. Perhaps this will trigger an honest discussion around UBI and revamped social safety nets.
This is okay on countries with a graying population like East Asia, North America and Europe.<p>This is bad news for most of the Southern Hemisphere with young populations which will continue to grow till the end of this century.<p>Unless something changes economically or in pop growth, there are going to be massive economic problems.
The job loss and displacement due to improvements and automation are quite scary to me. I often find myself thinking about what people will be left to do after automation displaces most workforce and the leftover jobs get so efficient that 1 person will do the job of 10.<p>Look at where web development was not that long ago. It used to take a few people and many moving pieces to put together a website. You needed a designer to design it. A developer to code it. A hosting company to host it. A maintenance person to keep updating and make changes. Now, anyone can fire up a webflow site in under a day. No coding needed, no hosting, do your own maintenance.<p>Now this is only efficiency we are talking about. What happens when we get to a place where you just pick some parameters and any website imaginable is spot out on your screen for you? Imagine how many websites exist already, what’s to stop that data from flowing into a large dataset where design is no longer needed, code is unnecessary, updates are done through a cms. Algorithms already draw art, ok, let’s modify them to make illustrations, logos, anything creative. We just displaced 2 professions. Why stop there? Feed the machines every imaginable font and let it create new fonts for us. Font designer gone.<p>This is only the industry I’m aware of. I can imagine others are no less prone to automation and complete efficiency disruption.<p>What will people do when to get a basic job requires 20 years of education? Are we to believe all humans will have advanced degrees to do those jobs? What about those who simply can’t or won’t like doing that job?
Not sure how in advanced economies this can be anything more than marginal... Visited the volkswagon factory at their headquarters in Germany last year. One of the biggest manufacturing plants in the world. You get in a little buggy and get driven around for kilometers of factory floor and it’s nearly all robots. Barely any people to be seen.
I hope all those displaced people are given a path forward, every person deserves to make a living and have a good life.<p>What happened to displaced workers during the industrial revolution?
I think the people that presume their intelligence will inform how automation plays out will be sorely disappointed when the future is nothing like they expected. To be honest, I don’t want to make any predictions about automation but I’m highly skeptical of the pessimism that dominates the discussion and fatalism around things like UBI.
If anyone is looking for the report that this article is referring to:<p><a href="http://resources.oxfordeconomics.com/how-robots-change-the-world" rel="nofollow">http://resources.oxfordeconomics.com/how-robots-change-the-w...</a>
America already took the hit when most manufacturing moved overseas. This is going to be a bigger impact on those developing countries which manufacture everything.
Okay, so socialism it is then.<p>Or more palatable for HN: Universal Basic Income.<p>Not that it matters if Earth is a flaming hellscape by 2050 thanks to the ongoing pollution that will likely only be made worse by this automation.
>But this report presents a more nuanced view, stressing that the productivity benefits from automation should boost growth, meaning as many jobs are created as lost.<p>Way to bury the lede, Rory.
Guess they’ve started removing the “possibility“ from headlines. People have stopped clicking with the words “may” or “could” in the title?<p>“Up to 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world could be replaced by robots by 2030, according to analysis firm Oxford Economics.”