The Robots Are Going To Take All Our Jobs: Isn't It Wonderful?
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There’s an interesting piece at Quartz about how robots are just about to take all our jobs from us. And as we know there has been a number of people shouting that this is a complete disaster for us all. Civilisation will be ruined when no one has to stand on an assembly line anymore. I rather differ from that view: I think it’s going to be absolutely fabulous.
There are two points to make here. One is about the whole offshoring thing. It can only go so far for there’s a limited number of poor people in the world to exploit:
Already, China is losing jobs to countries with even lower wages. But eventually, “you run out of places to chase the [cheap] labor,”
Some might say that’s terrible: what are we going to do when there’s no more cheap labour? I look at it the other way around. When there’s no more cheap labour then there’re no more poor people, are there? For by definition people who are getting good wages just aren’t poor. So once we’ve run out of places where we can chase that cheap labour then we’ve actually solved one of humanity’s longest running problems. How in heck do we cure poverty? And we’ll have done it by the only logically sound method known: making everyone rich. Hurrah!
But the major point about the article is that robots is now getting so cheap that soon enough just about all assembly and factory jobs are going to be done by such robots.
In factories, managers typically will not invest in any automation that requires more than two years to pay for itself, when compared to some other solution, like paying a human to do it. But thanks to some very clever engineering, Baxter only costs $22,000. In the US, a person working full time at minimum wage makes only $15,080 a year.
Assuming that those numbers hold up then we’re getting very close to the idea of the one man and a dog factory. The man being there to feed the dog and the dog to bite the man if he tries to touch any of the machines. At which point there’s great wailing about what everyone’s going to do if they don’t have to work in a factory. The answer to which is, well, anything and everything other than working in a factory.
The best analogy here is with farming, when that mechanised. From, perhaps 300 years ago, 90% of the population having to stand about in muddy fields to feed all of us we’re at a point where some 1.5% do that and the other 98.5% of us do anything and everything other than stand around in muddy fields. And life is immeasurably better for all of us. As it will be when fewer of us have to do exhausting, noisy, boring and repetitive work on production lines.
Two things to note: everything produced on those robot lines is going to become amazingly cheap too. Competition between suppliers will see to that. The other is that no, the people who own all the robots aren’t going to end up with all the money. Those farmers who still owned all the land after automation didn’t end up with all hte money, did they? In fact, we’ve had to support them out of taxes ever since.
Which is how it’s going to go with robots as well. Money flows to whoever it is that controls the scarce thing. Whatever that is. If there’s a shortage of capital then yes, it will flow to the capitalists. But think about it this way: cheap robots make capital very much less important. Who needs to be a gazillionaire to produce something if robots are $20k a pop? Or, if you like, cheap automation increases the amount of capital (or at least capital equipment) available and thus reduces the amount of the economy that’s going to flow to capital. We’ve just reduced the scarcity of capital so we’re going to be reducing the earnings of capital too.
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