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If USA wants to become a strong "manufacturing" country again, it needs to become a leader in the robot workforce revolution, too.

You are more right than you know. This sentence is ten years or more out of date.

I don't blame you for writing this sentence, because journalism is nigh-100%-broken and absolutely nobody understands the following facts. But:

The USA is and has been a "strong manufacturing country". US industrial capacity has risen steadily since 1970. Until this last recession started, there was no year since 1970 where that capacity had gone down:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/ipg1.gif

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/

(The Great Recession is, obviously, a problem, one large enough to show up on this chart. But it's a problem for China and other countries as well.)

The problem is that US manufacturing employment has crashed. Here's a chart showing a 30% drop in the last decade alone:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001?data_tool=XGtab...

Why is this happening? Increased productivity. Why has productivity soared in this way? "The robot workforce revolution".

And why do people persist in maintaining that US manufacturing is "not strong" in the face of very obvious evidence that it is strong? Because there is mass suffering due to mass unemployment, and it is easier to blame "robots" than to blame the humans that mismanage the economy and allow needless suffering to persist.

And why do people persist in maintaining that US manufacturing is "not strong" in the face of very obvious evidence that it is strong?

Because a lot of today's stuff, e.g. iPhones, LCD monitors are made in China.

It's largely sampling bias, though. It seems to us, as regular consumers, that everything is made in China because we buy phones and monitors, but we never buy steel girders and Boeing 777s.

Indeed, by definition people in the USA don't buy exported goods.

And speaking as someone who used to work in the business of building electronics parts in the USA, parts that were then sent to Malaysia for final assembly: Lots of things undergo final assembly overseas because that's one of the least automatable manufacturing processes, so you save a lot of money on hand-assembly by paying lower prices for workers. But that doesn't mean that all the parts of your "made in China" goods - or of the machines that are used to make them - are made overseas.

And as Apple's accountants will tell you the profits are not in the assembly step. For example, lots of machines with "Intel inside" are assembled abroad, but the processors are made in the USA - largely by robots - and a lot of the value is in those processors.

The USA is already a strong manufacturing country. It accounts for 20% of global output, and output has more than doubled since 1975.

In the same period, worker numbers have decreased by 31%, implying that US manufacturing is already beginning to replace workers with robots.

It's also worth pointing out that China has only exceeded the USA in output this year, and then only by a few percent. Given that China relies heavily on cheap manual labor, whilst USA employment in the manufacturing industry has plummeted, the USA is already betting heavily on robots.

Sources: http://mercatus.org/publication/us-manufacturing-output-vs-j... http://articles.boston.com/2011-02-06/bostonglobe/29344173_1... http://www.manufacturingdigital.com/tags/us/china-vs-us-manu...

You have references but they don't back up that implication robots are being used in US factories.

There are a lot of things that have changed in US factories in the last 35 years but I don't think widespread use of robots is one of them. But I can't find references :-(

For the purpose of this discussion, any machine that automates or assists in a task is a robot. Electric screwdrivers and conveyor belts are robots, albeit unsophisticated ones.

I'm happy that the internet is creating 3x more jobs than it is replacing....

But just in case the unemployment rate continues to rise will you do me a favour and calculate what the tax system should do if you have a couple of hundred rich people who own all the robotic factories, farms and trucks and 80% of the rest of the country on 'government handouts'. I'm just saying that we should think about this problem just in case we accidentally manage to replace all the jobs with computers and robots.

I wonder what the tax system should do once >90% of the population can't work as farmers anymore, as a majority of the tasks is done by machines.

I agree with the parent (of your post) that jobs will just change and people will switch to other jobs that provide a better return.

But let's assume that this isn't the case and a few hundreds of people own the robots that are doing _all_ of the work (even founding startups). I'd say that this would be the perfect case:

We don't need to work to survive, but we would have plenty of resources that allow us to work on things that make fun (of course most of us are doing this anyway). Of course it's pretty clear that for this to work we also would need to change the political and economic systems considerably, but this is not a bad thing - they change all the time.

> I wonder what the tax system should do once >90% of the population can't work as farmers anymore

What do you mean by this? Are 90% of people farmers now?

> I'd say that this would be the perfect case:

Actually in that case I'd say people would be consumed by politics and trivial bs and destroy themselves in a generation. It'd be very similar to today, except rather than spending all day minus 8 hours on youtube they'll just be on there all day.

I think what he means is that there will come a point at which technology renders most occupations obsolete. What happens when 90% of the population aren't needed in the workforce?

Read "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut.

They do something else, as the said 90% of agricultural workers did during the industrial revolution, as did typesetters in the 80s, as did computers (the profession) when computers (the machines) took over.

Human desires are endless. This is why you will always have employment. Technology frees up time and humans than use part of that time for leisure and part of it for doing more meaningful, higher value work.

What do you mean by "employment"? In the far enough future, anything that's deemed profitable can be done much faster by automation. No one will pay a human a check to do something that can be done dirt cheap by a robot.

The point is that our society rations limited resources through money. When resources are no longer limited, and no one can earn any money through employment, we'll require a completely different social and economic system for distributing resources.

I don't think that will happen until we have "replicators". Until we can make literally everything ourselves, we'll still need jobs. We'll also need almost limitless resources, too, unless our desires will tend more and more towards virtual things rather than physical. Either way, it's really hard to predict what will happen 50 years from now, but I'm quite optimistic about the human race.

With things like MakerBot one can argue we are getting to the point where we have "replicators" pretty rapidly.

Time will always be scarce. Even if we live forever.

No, but most people used to work in farming. Then manufacturing became dominant. Today the service sector is dominating. It is 1.4% agriculture, 20.6% industry, and 78% services. (source: Wolfram Alpha).

For this reason, automatic web services probably have a larger potential for destroying jobs than robots. Hopefully nextparadigms is right that more jobs is created than destroyed by this process (I have no idea). Previous shifts seems to have worked out alright.

We have a while longer until we don't have to work anymore, if that will even happen. What happens in an economy where jobs are automated, is that even more opportunities are being created for other types of jobs.

Just because farming will be replaced with robots, doesn't mean those people will sit home doing nothing. They will get other jobs instead, and pay taxes from there. If the farmers themselves are buying the robots, then their companies will pay the taxes, since they'll have a business then.

I don't get why people seem to have confidence that we'll find new ways to employ everyone when automation takes over. The whole point of automation is that it takes an order of magnitude less human labor to produce the same output. That's a lot of people to work at a McDonalds. The end game is that there will be jobs for no one. A humanoid robot can do any manual labor job potentially hundreds of times more efficiently than a human. Most white collar jobs could probably be replaced by a sufficiently advanced AI. We need to start at least thinking about the type of society that will be needed when significant human labor is no longer required. Just brushing it off by saying "they'll get other jobs" is burying your head in the sand.

I remember a story from a book (could've been Innovator's Dilemma, I don't remember), where he said that around 1900's I believe, they needed 200 humans to do a job, like carrying a big lumber from a cargo ship. Then cranes came about, and they could do the same job with just a handful of people, because most of the physical work was replaced by a crane.

Fast forward to today, and we have to have done alright by replacing those jobs. As long as robots are not smarter than us and can't think for themselves, I believe there will still be plenty more jobs in the future to go around. There could literally be invented hundreds or thousands of jobs by the end of this century.

Robots making iPhones is not some kind of huge milestone that could put humanity on the verge of collapse. Automation already exists for making cars for example. The net result of that was positive. This is just another transition.

I don't mean to come off as argumentative, and I certainly hope you're right. I just can't imagine the types of jobs people would pay for that could employ most of humanity in the age of robots.

The way I see it, the economy is set up to provide us with necessities (food, water, shelter), entertainment (physical devices, creative output), and to connect businesses to each other, to more efficiently provide for previous mentioned things. Food, water, shelter, and physical devices the robots have a lock on. And most B2B industries will become obsolete because everything is dirt cheap to make anyways. You'll still need people to design devices and people for the creative output.

The problem here is that creative output scales massively. It's a stretch to imagine an economy based solely on creative output. And you're still left with the problem of distributing the necessities. Only a handful of corporations will be responsible for producing the necessities. No one will have any "money" to buy them.

I don't know if it's true that we've done alright. Realistically speaking, if you were employing 200 people to do something, and you can replace that job with ten people with ten cranes, you should be able to keep on paying 190 people — less the cost of the cranes — to stay at home and not work. Instead the difference goes into the pocket of the employer, and 190 people need to find new jobs or starve to death.

This is the pattern we need to break. The problem is that the only economically feasible system in the long run is some kind of welfare state — at some point food will become so cheap that we have to give people free food — but it's absolutely politically infeasible to even talk about the ways that might be good.

But if that ends up happening anyway (people finding other jobs), then what is wrong with it? Should we stop progress because we want everyone to keep their current jobs for life?

The only "problem" that is see with this is when these shifts are on a massive scale and happen in a very short term. Because it has the potential to leave a lot of people unemployed before there is an alternative for them. So Governments might be able to help there with free training programs for jobs that are in demand and on a growth trend.

If I look at the trends in the past, to me it seems automation has always led to more jobs. In the industrial revolution, 25 million jobs were lost, but 44 million were created. So you should always look at it from that point of view. The industrial revolution led to the progress of mankind, and it did kill a lot of jobs back then, but it also ended up creating a lot of new ones, too.

It's not a problem in the short term— that is in the short term someone can find more work, sure. Maybe less skilled work, almost certainly worse paying work, but okay, they probably won't starve to death. And the benefits of industrialization make the economy as a whole grow, so their kids are actually better off. Great!

The problem is when we carry it out. As my ancestors discussed, we're going to reach a point where there just aren't more jobs. Or rather, a point where the value of the work done by robots essentially for free is so great that it completely dwarfs the value of whatever minor service labor is still done by humans, making human labor essentially valueless.

And thus the logical end result of mechanization, and one I'd argue we're starting to see already, is a world in which a) nearly everything, including food, is produced "for free" by largely self-sustaining robots, and b) nearly everyone on Earth has starved to death. That strikes most of us as, you know, just a little bit sideways.

Yes, taxes. Taxes will be a problem.

I say do away with money. No money, no taxes. I won't need money. My robot will provide the things I need.

Since I said that much I better elaborate. Here it goes.

Most major countries do their thing. One thing is to be competitive. A company in China is employing 1 MegaBots. They will produce more and less expensive products. Another country might eventually employ more robots. Short of war there is no stopping it.

Lets say there is no war. Eventually everything is automated. What will I do? Well, I like sitting here doing relatively nothing. I also like messing around in the garage. I like going on walks with my wife. I don't like working.

Who will control the robots? Elected people. They will also be unpaid. They will run and be elected because they like to do such things.

No money. That's the key.

Who gets what? I would hope that greediness would be frowned on. No one wants to be frowned on. And social standing (getting along) will be everything. And that will not be a function of how much money I have.

That's my 2 cents.

That won't happen, anymore than powerdrills will be the end of carpenters -- it will require people to adapt and learn new skills but so have every invention ever.

Replacing humans with computers is easy in a lot of cases, but far from all. Human workers will simply have to take those jobs that are difficult to get robots to do.

They tend to be better paid too.

Here's what's going to happen. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Reference needed for "creating 3x more in return". I don't say it isn't true, I just think it's really hard to measure (what is a job "killed by the Internet"/how far do we strech it). I just know that "98% of all statistics are made up".

" Among 4,800 small and medium sized enterprises surveyed, the Internet created 2.6 jobs for each lost to technology related efficiencies."

This is from a study made by McKinsey for e-G8 this year. I can't seem to be able to reach the direct link so here's the Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

And their PDF:

http://www.eg8forum.com/fr/documents/actualites/McKinsey_and...

"Among 4,800 small and medium sized enterprises" that didn't go bankrupt!

There may be survivor bias (Is that what it's called?) involved in that figure. Not enough details in the report that I could see.

Impressive reference hunting though