Topic: Rise of the Robots -- Paul Krugman - page 2. (Read 2632 times)

Yeah, we are starting to see the beginning of all that with devices such as the Makerbot Repicator and the RepRap.  The company that I work for is a major, international manufacturer, and they own a highly advanced 3D printer that the engineers use.  I'd love to have access to it, myself, but they won't even tell me where it is.  One thing is certain though, they are honestly scared about the quality of the self-replicating hobby 3D printers.  Some have estimated that, at the current rate, most of the products that we make on assembly lines these days will have comparable competition from a printable design.  The old guys are shooting for retirement, and the young guys are simply worried.  Studying to become a manufacturing process engineer, and then discover that a robot is about to make your job obsolete, is certainly disturbing.

I've told more than one that he might want to consider designing some of those competing devices for themselves, and sell the designs for a dollar or two apiece per costumer when the time comes.  Sometimes progress is harsh.  The buggy whip manufactures never did recover.

Quite simple really: If that trend is allowed to continue the Marxist dream of commonly owned means of production will be realized without Marxism. That is on an individual level.

Self replicating robots will be as common as kitchen stoves. That is except for:

Time to break out the sledgehammers and bust up some looms?

I wonder what earlier data would show.  The start of your graph happens to coincide with the removal of gold convertibility of fiat money.

Catherine Rampell and Nick Wingfield write about the growing evidence for “reshoring” of manufacturing to the United States. They cite several reasons: rising wages in Asia; lower energy costs here; higher transportation costs. In a followup piece, however, Rampell cites another factor: robots.

The most valuable part of each computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with robots, according to my colleague Quentin Hardy. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.

As more robots are built, largely by other robots, “assembly can be done here as well as anywhere else,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst based in San Jose, Calif., who has been following the computer electronics industry for a quarter-century. “That will replace most of the workers, though you will need a few people to manage the robots.”

Robots mean that labor costs don’t matter much, so you might as well locate in advanced countries with large markets and good infrastructure (which may soon not include us, but that’s another issue). On the other hand, it’s not good news for workers!

This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing about globalization and inequality, capital bias didn’t look like a big issue; the major changes in income distribution had been among workers (when you include hedge fund managers and CEOs among the workers), rather than between labor and capital. So the academic literature focused almost exclusively on “skill bias”, supposedly explaining the rising college premium.

But the college premium hasn’t risen for a while. What has happened, on the other hand, is a notable shift in income away from labor:



If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society”, or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents. And so on.

I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn’t seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism — which shouldn’t be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.

But I think we’d better start paying attention to those implications.