why are people so against automation in factories if it makes things safer and produces more goods? is it just that people are losing jobs? but there are different jobs that open up.
In: Technology
There is only 1 job according to the BLS to have been completely replaced by automation . That is elevator attendant ; literally the job of pulling a level or pushing a button in an elevator . If you look back at census data from like to 1800s you will find plenty of jobs that don’t exist today. That being said nobody grew up wanting to be a software engineer in 1850. The problem is the jobs that automation tends to replace tend to be repetitive with very little critical thought needed to do the job , and the jobs that take its place require a new skillset.
If you are a 55 year old factory worker who has been bolting in the same 4 bolts for 35 years , you probably wont be able to re-skill to do something different before you retire. You also need less people . A Factory in the US needs far fewer people today to run than back 50 years ago. A factory may have supplied jobs to 5 towns full of people before, suddenly they only need 30% as many people.
In the developing world automation is also feared. Fully mechanizing farming in India is banned , because if they fully mechanized all farms there would be 20% unemployment . So many people are employed doing less efficient work because the alternative would cause many people to not have a job.
This has been happening since humans started creating tools.
The problem for the people complaining is that, yes, jobs will open somewhere else, but that doesn’t mean that the same people doing the old job can transition to the new one.
Think professional drivers. They’re a huge part of the workforce and they’re due for extinction. Yes, in that time most likely more tech jobs will open, but it’s kinda difficult for a truck driver to become a developer.
In the long run society overall benefits from productivity improvements (we no longer have 60% of people working in the fields, for example), but the people caught in the transition don’t.
Well automations been a problem for sometime, like even the automation of car manufacturing was a problem.
It eliminates the need for the blue collar workers, the working class, the % of the population that have nothing more than a high school certificate (if that) and I think you’ll find that’s quite a large % of the population.
No, there are not.
A human that is qualified to supervise or maintain one robot will always be in charge of many robots.
A robot that is good enough to replace one human will always replace many humans.
Think of it like a triangle: the base of the triangle is much wider. The base of our triangle are low level (in qualification) workers, and they are the majority of us, and they are the ones getting replaced by robots.
Even if automation creates new jobs in the middle of the triangle, it will never be close to the same number.
In my opinion a better solution is to move away from the notion of needing a job to live, because automation means we can be productive without working.
Often there are different jobs, but not the same amount.
Picture a factory with 10 workers. They replaces those 10 people with a machine. The new jobs that will open up will be machine maintenance, which is 1, maybe 2 roles?
Potentially the machine does so well that it’s started to increase the workload. So now the company might need an extra person when the goods come in and one when the goods go out.
So you created 4 roles, which still leaves 6 people out of work.
The problem is we are running out of jobs that someone can do with an average to below average iq that can support a family. Then drug dealing and other crimes start to become a lot more appealing. If enough people find themselves in that position then they might just flip the table so everyone falls on the floor.
Not an unsolvable problem but nobody has any faith in the people in charge to tackle it.
Latest Answers