Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Should We Fear Apple Picking Robots?

By Andy Kessler

Is it time to bow to our robot overlords? Last week analysts at Morgan Stanley, using data from an Oxford University study, predicted that nearly half of U.S. jobs will be replaced by robots over the next two decades. Ouch. Maybe we should build a wall.

Cars that drive themselves? Waiters you don’t need to pay (or tip)? Self-folding clothes? Are we headed toward a post-job future? Signs are certainly there. Abundant Robotics, a company spun from the same Stanford Research Institute that brought us the mouse and networked computing, has begun testing a robot that picks apples. Red Delicious, not iPhones. Napa Valley vineyards are using vision systems to sort grapes.

According to a 2013 Stanford University study, some manufacturing robots now cost the equivalent of about $4 an hour—and they keep getting cheaper . . . and better. This month scientists at MIT have sampled a silicon chip-based LIDAR—light detection and ranging—like radar but much higher resolution, though it covers a shorter distance.

The Tesla Model S currently uses one radar sensor and one front-facing camera as vision for its Autopilot. Neither, sadly, picked out a white tractor trailer against a bright sky before a May 7 collision that killed a Tesla driver. LIDAR would. Current LIDAR can cost up to $70,000. The new chip? Maybe $10. At that price, they’ll probably be standard in every new car, “self-driving” or not.

And now we have thinking robots. Editors at the Associated Press claim robots write thousands of articles a year for them. So it’s over? The robots win? This certainly fits a certain world view for a bigger welfare state and universal basic income and other services to coddle displaced workers. See the May 26 Fortune magazine article “What Governments Can Do When Robots Take Our Jobs.”

But not so fast. The arena of prognostications is littered with the wrecked utopian dreams of leisure living—recall geodesic domes—and Skynet nightmares of roving robot armies. Both are bunk. Instead this is progress.

Technology always creates more jobs than it destroys. JFK worried how to “maintain full employment at a time when automation . . . is replacing men.” Employment was 55 million in 1962. It’s 144 million today. We’ve come a long way, baby.

This time will be no different. Steam engines destroyed jobs—OK, mostly for horse handlers—but enabled an explosion of manufactories, never imagined jobs and the Industrial Revolution. Cars killed trolleys but enabled hundreds of millions of new jobs. Vacuums and washing machines destroyed jobs for “domestic engineers” (though I will never admit to knowing how to operate either) but freed women to enter the much more productive paid workforce. Computers killed jobs for those with rulers and exacto knives who were laying out magazines or constructing physical spreadsheets. Now media and Wall Street don’t exist without Microsoft Office. In each case, technology augments humans, rather than replaces them.

Even Chinese workers shouldn’t fear robots. The coming global demand for manufactured goods will swamp a robot-deprived manufacturing economy. Robots will solve China’s looming logistic problems.

Simply put, jobs that robots can replace are not good jobs in the first place. As humans, we climb up the rungs of drudgery—physically tasking or mind-numbing jobs—to jobs that use what got us to the top of the food chain, our brains.

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

  1. The debate advantage the Luddites have, this time, is that a growing majority of workers don't think too good, due to lack of experience (barriers to entry-level jobs) and lack of skills (dysfunctional education). So it will appear that the robots are "taking the jobs" when, in fact, it is the humans who are becoming less qualified to add value by creative and analytical innovation.

    This dynamic will intensify until barriers to entry-level jobs are removed, and until education is once again allocated efficiently on the free market, instead of by explicit government subsidy and implicit subsidy of cheap debt. At that point, the gulf between the few skilled workers and the SJW-indoctrinated masses will peak.

    Whether that happens before economic collapse is an exercise left to you all who think gooder than me.

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