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I agree with this. I think people are looking at the wrong layer for automation. Frontline workers will exist for a long time because of their flexibility and dexterity. I think automation will largely impact one level up - at the supervisor/manager level. My bet is on cameras and computer vision to be the enabling technology for this.

>>Nations like India will be hit the hardest.

This is what a minister in the Central Government has to say: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/there-are-no-jobs-...

This situation in India has been pretty much anticipated since the late 1980s.

I'm guessing eventually India will pass laws and enact reforms to increase agricultural productivity and some kind of UBI scheme on the longer run.

> Nations like India will be hit the hardest.

Which is why India is banning things like self driving cars. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40716296

That is not the kind of productivity that is the problem. People are talking more on the lines of factory and industrial automation. Please note in countries like India, land fragmentation, and lack of machinery to do mass farming/industrializing food production is the core of the problem.

There are also a range of things that might have to be done. Including taxing agricultural returns, defragmenting land ownerships, and changing nonsensical laws like letting only the farmers progeny be farmers. Then of course letting import of equipment to industrialize food production etc etc.

But India being India, I expect these things to happen at the very last moment. Like when everything is about to melt.

The Union transport minister still wants level 2 features like adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning etc even as he banned level 3 vehicles.

https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/new-vehicle-will-soon-...

Nations like India will be hit the hardest

When the majority of the population is essentially living extremely efficiently on a vegetarian diet without so much as personal transport, one should expect very little economic shock from issues as remote and abstract as gradual technology change. In addition, in many parts of India electricity is not yet reliable enough and corruption too endemic to allow the confident adoption of industrial automation.

highly automated systems are expensive, and difficult to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion

Highly automated systems are cheaper and more capable than ever, and getting cheaper. They are easy to justify on a budget because they pay for themselves in saved wages, 24x7x365 operation, and reduced error. Two examples are the dozens of companies now producing (1) industrial robot arms; and (2) warehouse goods transport robots at scale in China.

You can design automated systems for modular upgrade, it just means accepting the costs for that up front. Often it doesn't make sense to do so, because by the time it matters you can probably design a new facility to pilot new off-the-shelf technology before retroactively updating prior sites. I believe major western companies use this approach for iterating data center designs, for example.

In the US and similar, we've automated about as much as we could given existing technology. Newly available technology raises the automation cap a bit, but not that much.

Strongly disagree. Just a few examples of areas the US has dropped the ball on despite access to technology would be: mobile payment, sustainable energy, transport, agriculture, health care, retail banking. From outside this often seems to be the case because the US domestic macro-economy is against change for reasons of monopoly, litigation, regulatory configuration, educational focus or similar.

It seems that the technologies and social configuration being deployed in China today are likely to be the forebears of living arrangements for the majority of urban populations globally in the near future: package dropboxes (HiveBox), mobile payment (WeChat), high speed rail, nationalized critical infrastructure, etc. This is largely because they have, versus the US, what Tony Fadell recently described as "last mover advantage" and a population comfortable with socially mandated solutions. https://overcast.fm/+Lkc1bqy8c

> When the majority of the population is essentially living extremely efficiently on a vegetarian diet without so much as personal transport, one should expect very little economic shock from issues as remote and abstract as gradual technology change

That does not make sense...

if(population.de_linked_from_technology && population.resource_consumption_effectively_trivial) { assert(is_irrelevant(gradual_technology_change)); }

Rewriting the same incongruent phrase in pseudo-code does nothing to help your case.

The phrase doesn't make sense logically. You don't have to be an avid consumer of technology to be affected by gradual technology change.

Have you been to rural India? Many people don't even have reliable power. Industrial automation trajectories are so far removed from their reality as to be fairy tales.

Just read a paragraph very relevant to the reasons why the US has, arguably, lost it. A leading Chinese history scholar on the criticality of the Renaissance on birthing modernity in Europe...

The further I penetrate into the detailed history of the achievements of Chinese science and technology before the time when, like all other ethnic cultural rivers, they flowed into the ocean of modern science, the more convinced I become that the cause for the breakthrough (occurring only in Europe) was connected with the special social, intellectual and economic conditions prevailing there at the Renaissance, and can never be explained by any deficiencies either of the Chinese mind or of the Chinese intellectual and philosophical tradition. In many ways this tradition was much more congruent with modern science than was the world-outlook of Christendom. - Joseph Needham, page 2, Part 2 (Science and Society in East and West: General Conclusions and Reflections), Volume 7, of Needham's Science and Civilisation in China (2004)

This posits the question: are the social, intellectual and economic conditions prevailing in the US the root of its problems? Perhaps that swamp should be drained first.

My experience is primarily in manufacturing. I work with the people who make the decisions to purchase the robot arms you mentioned at a large number of companies as an outside vendor. As the article specifically mentioned the US being hit by manufacturing automation, that's what I'm weighing in on. The US was already hit by manufacturing automation. Additional automation won't hit US manufacturing nearly as hard as the first wave (until AGI, if we get there).

There are a large number of decisions to weigh when automating. Wages are only a piece of this, and 24/7 operation isn't useful in all scenarios. Again, it depends on what you're making and how much of it.

Each facility is limited by its own constraints on production. Lately, at most companies I work with this has been a shortage of skilled labor. They want more smart humans right now, not more robot arms. You need even more skilled and expensive employees to set up a robotics cell than to run a typical automated facility. When your robot guy leaves and you lose all ability to adjust how the cell works, you end up in trouble. I've seen this happen, and it's an example of over-automating.

My knowledge of India is basically non-existent, but I've heard (on HN) that companies will make up for a lack of skilled labor by hiring a large number of unskilled workers. I don't know if this is actually true. As per capita income appears to be rising there, my theory was that this is an environment ready to be hit by the same wave of automation the US has already seen. While my guess on India and similar countries may be way off base, my opinions on the US come from direct experience and I would stand by those.

You made your point that the US has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. However, that's not really relevant to other countries or new entrants, who don't care and are not following an industrial revolution inertial development path and may go straight from manual work to total automation. Fundamentally, automation is becoming cheaper, more generally applicable, more accessible, more manageable, more adaptable, and is available from more and more fiercely competitive suppliers. The large margins once commanded by leading suppliers are under threat. Huge factories may now be completely automated and are staffed by as little as three or four people to provide high-level supervision, security and anomalous event handling only. I suppose it is also probably true to generalize that the single line / critical-path flow of traditional facilities is being replaced by parallel, redundant lines which are explicitly designed to ensure graceful degradation instead of absolute failure. Future factories will self-assemble.