A Humanoid Robot Named "Baxter" Could Revive US Manufacturing 414
fangmcgee writes "Rethink Robotics invented a $22,000 humanoid robot named "Baxter" that could give cheap offshore labor a run for its money and return manufacturing jobs to U.S. soil. Artificial intelligence expert Rodney Brooks is the brain behind Baxter. From the article: 'Brooks’s company, Rethink Robotics, says the robot will spark a “renaissance” in American manufacturing by helping small companies compete against low-wage offshore labor. Baxter will do that by accelerating a trend of factory efficiency that’s eliminated more jobs in the U.S. than overseas competition has. Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.'"
Unclear on the Concept. (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh... seems like someone is unclear on the definition of "job."
Re:Unclear on the Concept. (Score:5, Insightful)
" a $22,000 humanoid robot named "Baxter" that could give cheap offshore labor a run for its money and return manufacturing jobs to U.S. soil. Uh... seems like someone is unclear on the definition of "job."
Well, not really. It would shift production back to north america, and that would require technicians to install and maintain the robots.
At least, until we replace THEM with robots too.
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People are mad because (say) 500,000 manufacturing jobs were replaced with workers overseas. If 1,000 jobs are created here to manage those robots, that still leaves 499,000 people mad because their job doesn't exist any more.
And the truth is that there is a large difference between people making portable DVD players and people running the robots to make the portable DVD players. It's quite possible that very few of those 1,000 "saved" jobs would even be people in that original pool.
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Well, not really. It would shift production back to north america, and that would require technicians to install and maintain the robots.
Installation can be done by a consultant, and is a one-time cost.
For maintenance, at $22,000, it would be cheaper to replace three of them per year than keeping a technician employed. All you need is someone who after his other tasks can spend ten minutes on loading in the program as per the instructions left by the consultant.
Still, someone has to sell them ... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, not really. It would shift production back to north america, and that would require technicians to install and maintain the robots.
Installation can be done by a consultant, and is a one-time cost. For maintenance, at $22,000, it would be cheaper to replace three of them per year than keeping a technician employed. All you need is someone who after his other tasks can spend ten minutes on loading in the program as per the instructions left by the consultant.
Until the robots are self-servicing, self-selling and self-assembling, there will be work. Once they've mastered two of those three, I think we will have larger issues.
... well, I don't speak binary or mandarin.
In anticipation of that time, it should clearly be stated that I, for one, will welcome our cold, unfeeling, american-made robot masters. Unless these get copied by the chinese as well, and then?
Re:Unclear on the Concept. (Score:5, Insightful)
This should be modded up! I work for an embedded electronics manufacturer, although not in the USA or China. Things like pick and place machines and automated testing has enabled us to produce a much higher volume with less employees.
The choice is either not to do it, then become overpriced, lose contracts and then everybody loses their jobs, or automate, then the shittier jobs disappear (repetitive manual labor) but *loads* of more qualified jobs are created!
Sure, we have less people soldering and manually testing stuff. But with the higher volume of sales we now have lots more technicians to do debugging and service, way more programmers, people designing, maintaining and programming test equipment, more sales folks, a bigger IT staff, more managers and various other "desk jobs", etc. We also buy lots of stuff from local suppliers (including many custom made parts) which create a whole lot of jobs locally, we keep the local delivery drivers busy, etc. And we train a lot of people. They get a lot of very meaningful design and manufacturing experience.
There's a whole lot of good that comes from keeping *some* jobs locally vs outsourcing everything to a country with sweatshop like conditions.
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Re:Unclear on the Concept.-EXACTLY (Score:3, Insightful)
Economy isn't a fixed concept (Score:5, Insightful)
What you're missing here is that there is more than one way to have an economy, and that the idea that "everyone needs to work" isn't a fixed datum in an unchanging world.
At some point, (non-ai) robotics will assume the load of manufacturing and menial work, and from there they will percolate upwards. This may be the beginning of that trend (ignoring heavy manufacturing robotics, which are already in place and entrenched.)
You need food, shelter, and healthcare. You do not have to provide that for yourself in order to have a healthy economy.
Change is inevitable in this domain.
Re:Economy isn't a fixed concept (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone can own shares in companies. Work will basically be deciding which companies to invest in. Govt can pay its expenses and even some welfare by taxing the corporation. Everyone can get paid and nobody would have to work. Workers would be super expensive at that point.
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How is this different from the argument that we should use spoons rather than shovels to dig ditches, because that requires more workers and hence creates jobs?
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...there would still be NO MANUFACTURING JOBS IN THE USA.
Do you realize that almost $2 TRILLION of goods were manufactured in the US, last year?
Do you think that was all done by robots?
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I was thinking the same thing. Won't be too long before Baxter is saying "You want Fries with that?"
In fact, I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened already- it should be drop dead simple to automate a fast food restaurant.
Even the summary is backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Of the approximately 5.8 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20 percent moved to places like China, Mexico, or Thailand.'"
So they're going to bring jobs back by increasing productivity? The cause of 2/3rd's of the job losses?
Re:Even the summary is backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
I really can't imagine a move like this being unpopular and/or economically suicidal in any way whatsoever. Nope.
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For those few jobs that require human intervention but NOT fine motor control / complex or difficult hand / body movements.
Basically, warehouse work - which is done by meat Popsicles at present (who get one of those mysterious 'job' things). Now it will be done by robots.
Nice work, bozo!
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Compared to, say, 1000 years ago - heck, just 100 or 200 - we are living in their Star Trek. Capitalism is still alive and kicking and remains the primary vehicle for advances in technology, medicine, entertainment, transportation, etc. There's no reason to expect that voluntary exchange would go away just because all menial labor can be done with robots. Robots still require energy and programming and materials.
Things would get a little more interesting if someone managed to invent a teleportation device o
This is the long term future (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the long term future for a lot of manual labor across the board. What that will mean for the future of human society is anyone's guess. Perhaps we'll all work 10 hour weeks. Or maybe most will be surfs, crushed under the boots of the aristocracy (robot owners).
How a consumer-driven economy can survive these changes is another huge question mark.
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Well, currently I'm a doctor. So I work on people-thingies. If they go away (or can't afford medical care, this still is going to be America), maybe I'll have to turn into a robot mechanic.
Hmm. Made of exactly the same parts. No annoying chemical brain to confuse things. An off switch.
Hmm. Progress!
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Thought of using these things as healthcare assistants and live-in care for invalids? If they had strong arms, they would be able to help invalids into beds, wheelchairs, assist with bathing, food prep, and cleanups - especially the messy kind people hate to get their hands in. They could also radio in for help when the situation warrants it.
God knows how many live-alone elderly could use one of these as a help-mate.
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Perhaps we'll all work 10 hour weeks. Or maybe most will be surfs, crushed under the boots of the aristocracy (robot owners).
Or maybe most of us will be the robot owners, either directly or as shareholders in the corporations that own the robots.
To make that work, however, we'll need to reverse this alarming trend of increasingly penalizing those whose parents left them more in the way of capital than the capacity for manual labor. Otherwise, each generation has to start over from scratch with increasingly worthless "seed capital".
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I've got a Roomba. Does that count?
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I've got a Roomba. Does that count?
Yes it does. It does work that would otherwise be done by a human, and frees up your time for other things.
I have a 3D printer, CNC mill, and CNC lathe in my garage. All of them cost under $1000 each. Now I just need an autoloader to place and retrieve parts, and I can run them 24/7.
The idea that only "the rich" will be able to own robots is as silly as believing (as people once did) that only the rich will have computers. Robots are currently expensive because of NRE. Once they are mass produced on th
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The idea that only "the rich" will be able to own robots is as silly as believing (as people once did) that only the rich will have computers. Robots are currently expensive because of NRE. Once they are mass produced on the scale that automobiles are currently made, they should cost no more than $10k each, and likely even less. Anyone that can afford a car will be able to afford a robot.
The problem is that when everyone can afford robots, the value of their work plummets too, making he investment a loss.
CPU cycles used to cost a lot of money, but even though you have several fast computers now, you can't make any money on CPU cycles. They're near worthless because the supply exceeds the demand. You need to put in more work to make money now - what the computers were supposed to save you from.
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Doesn't Amazon make money "on CPU cycles" - the thing that went down, screwing Netflix on New Year's Eve? Isn't any server farm that runs other companies' software make money on CPU cycles?
Exactly.
Which is why your CPU cycles are a worthless commodity, and that you can afford a computer doesn't make you rich. Before, you needed to work for eight hours a day to stay middle class. Now you need a computer, broadband, cell phone and work for 9-10 hours a day. The computer doesn't enrich you unless you use it for entertainment - the work you put in is all you're going to get rewarded for.
Similar with robots - that normal people will be able to buy them doesn't mean that normal people will gain
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This sort of thing will happen over and over again. And as progress marches onward, most of us still manage to find work.
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Current trend: No way we'll be working 10 hour weeks, that's just a perennial geek fantasy. Power and wealth are nowadays accruing to the top 1% (IP owners). Reduced work weeks only ever came from active union organizing a century ago, and most unions have been crushed in the last few decades.
Re:This is the long term future (Score:5, Insightful)
Naturally with meaningless, fiat currencies and increased government intervention in the economy, true wealth for most has dropped recently. But let's go farther back to see the general trend.
Today the average worker works for about 8 hours. Now depending on the job field that can be really working for 8 hours or it can be working for a couple hours while being "on duty" for 8 hours. Back 150 years ago, you literally worked from sunup to sundown, something that few workers do anymore, excepting those employed in agriculture which is down to about 3% or so of people in the US.
For example, working in as a "tech guy" at a fairly small business, I'm there for 8 hours on weekdays but probably only do 3-4 hours of actual work while the rest is just downtime (waiting for a patch to download, etc.). Now, if there is a problem I work much longer hours (until the problem is fixed) but I'd say I've got about a 20 hour workweek already. There's no reason to think that its going to get much longer anytime soon, unless we add a new computer system and even then it will only be temporary, or unless we expand REALLY quickly. Sure, I'm on call for 40 hours a week, but do I really work those 40 hours if all goes well? Nope.
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Well, you're here reading Slashdot...
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I just read Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano [wikipedia.org].which happens to deal with this issue. I found it quite enjoyable.
Silly (Score:2, Interesting)
The total cost of hiring a 30 cent a day worker is 30 cents day. The maintenance on one of these robots would be more than that. Plus if robots could compete with 30 cent a day workers, then China would be using more robots.
The companies that compete against the Chinese and win, do it like the Germans do, they use dedicated production automated lines designed to make the article, NOT general purpose robots, DEDICATED kit. Making perfect identical quality components again and again and again. People will pay
Good luck finding 30 cents a day worker in China (Score:2)
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The total cost of hiring a 30 cent a day worker is 30 cents day.
Plus the cost of management, lighting, heating, A/C, restrooms, cafeterias, downtime for breaks and shift changes, and dealing with the defects caused by human workers.
then China would be using more robots.
China is using more robots [businessweek.com].
O now where did I read about this before... (Score:2)
Can Baxter buy the products it produces? (Score:5, Insightful)
If nobody has jobs anymore we better transition to an economy where everything the robots produce is free.
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Using robots is not about creating jobs in the US or any other country. Its about stopping outsourcing. Stopping technology theft and secret leaks, stopping the financing of potential rivals and even enemies, and by producing locally, increasing distribution speed.
And while automatization may not create as many jobs as outsourcing took, it will create more than we have right now: thousands of technicians, programmers and en
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If nobody has jobs anymore we better transition to an economy where everything the robots produce is free.
If nobody can pay for what the robots produce, the robots will produce only soylent green.
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Already done that.... my mother bought a new car in the mid Sixties... about $12000 or very close (if not more) than her salary at the time as a high school teacher.
Today (in Vancouver) teachers make $40-$60k a year... and a new low end car is not that much more than $12000... So cost of ownership went from over 100% to maybe 40-50%.
It doesn't stop there though. The car in the sixties was less safe (steel box, no air bags, no seat belts, no pretty much anything other than motor and 4 wheels), needed to have
Lets do the math (Score:2)
What could they see that the US did not at that time?
They could have invited a lot of cheap guest workers in or put production lines in low cost parts of the EU, the world...
You end up with China today, huge production lines of people putting ever smaller parts together at a faster pace with wage demands.
The EU/parts of Asia kept pace with tech in the main areas
Where is the math? (Score:2)
That's not quite true (Score:2)
GM bet the farm on robotics famously in the early 1980s, as did many American firms, but the technology was simply not there. there's a great story about how GM spent 1 million bucks to get a robot to stick stickers aligned right on the dash for speedometers, but Toyota spent like 500 bucks coming up with a guide and had a person do it. It's not that the USA didn't do robots, in some ways, it did them too soon, spent too much on them, and failed.
In any case, saying that robots will bring "jobs" back is ki
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And I guess the person operating that jig worked for free without a paycheck, healthcare or a pension?
GM was bankrupt down by pay and benefits, not robot purchases.
And No Jobs Were Gained (Score:2)
... which is the unstated assumption (get jobs) whenever anyone bemoans the loss of manufacturing.
ummm... (Score:2)
That thing is retarded. Every manufacturing company in the world has a "Lab" where engineers build automation to replace humans wherever possible to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Any tool that is built to do everything, does nothing well. That's what this is. Automation has been in every production plant since the Model T. The simple fact of the matter is humans are cheap. They learn quick and adapt to change fast. Humans are used in areas where you may only have a short run of something, or you nee
Not all labor is equal (Score:5, Insightful)
At $22k for a 3 year life, assuming 24x7, it labors for $0.84/hour with no outages. The other video had $3/hour. Add that you can save on transportation costs, customs, etc and its a no brainier that manufacturing will become "local".
As far as job creation, i can only see it create technician jobs to repair the machines. What this will not do is create the manufacturing jobs themselves. The age of low skill labor is over, those jobs are lost. That segment of the US population (poor, undereducated, entry level) will continue to be unemployed. It will also create Chinese unemployment.
Robots need to be paid a fair wage (Score:2)
If robots can make everything... (Score:3)
Why have jobs?
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Indeed the fundamental problem in the world is scarcity. We don't have unlimited resources. Some resources are nearly infinite (solar/wind energy) while others are quite scarce (gold). If you can eliminate any scarcity of manual labor, you can then better extract resources from the earth (and beyond!) to where there is virtually no scarcity of resources. When there's no scarcity of labor and no scarcity of resources, the only "job" left to do is one of the tinkerer or in
What's the point? (Score:3)
Who cares what country things are produced in if nobody is hired to do the production?
Robot to own? (Score:2)
Supposedly has better software (Score:3)
"Baxter" looks like a clone of the Yaskawa Motoman SDA two-armed robot. [motoman.com] Brooks quotes a cheaper price, though; the SDA dual-arm is about $63K. Mechanically there's nothing new here.
Brooks claims better safety systems and easier programming, so that the thing doesn't have to be run behind safety fences. That's the claimed innovation. It's about time for that. Industrial robots have been expensive semi-custom products for decades, and there's no good reason for that. Today, it's cheaper to include a vision system and good force feedback than to support both smart and dumb versions. iRobot's experience with the Roomba has taught them how to deploy and service standard robots in quantity. So they have a good chance of bringing this off.
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Industrial robots have been expensive semi-custom products for decades, and there's no good reason for that.
This product isn't going to replace the expensive semi-custom robot systems; that is not their target market. This is enabling automation in lower-speed, lower-volume, low-complexity tasks. Look at the specs listed at the bottom of this page [rethinkrobotics.com] on the Rethink Robotics website.
- 8-12 pick & place operations/minute (total incl. both arms)
- 5 lb. payload per arm
- 1 m/sec arm speed
So they won't be competing with the following "expensive semi-custom products":
- high-speed pick and place (i.e. PCB surface m
"Not thinking this thru" award for 2013. (Score:3)
I love the way the article talks about these robots in the hands of the "factory workers" when it means the "factory owners".
Sounds like a stiff property tax on robots is in order to me, if for nothing else except to prevent civil unrest.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also shitloads of engineering still happens in the US -- offshoring of that has been far less successful than manual labor.
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I see real potential in giving every high school senior their own Baxter that they need to learn how to maintain... then they send them off to work and people's only remaining job is to fix them when they break down.
Of course, that's not how capitalism works, instead, we'll have robot maintenance specialists who maintain thousands of these things, specialists in highly specialized types of robots will be the most highly paid, flying all over the country on no notice to fix them when they break. For every w
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:5, Interesting)
They used to predict in the 50s that in the future a man would be able to easily support himself while only working two days a week.
Funny thing is, they were actually correct. It's easy to live on two days of work a week... if you restrict yourself to living at a medium level of prosperity by 1950s standards.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmmm....
Work two days a week and ... raise 2.5 children, own a home in the suburbs and a sensible late-model auto, enjoy an annual family vacation to a popular American tourist destination, and have not one single case of throat irritation (from smoking Camel cigarettes).
I'm not seeing it.
Maybe you mean something like ... wages garnished for child support, a home in government subsidized low-income housing and a mini-van (technically, your moms mini-van), selling your food stamps (to take a different sort of trip), and a prescription that you need, but can't afford to fill.
That makes more sense. Well, more sense than Kurzweil has ever managed...
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm....
Work two days a week and ... raise 2.5 children, own a home in the suburbs and a sensible late-model auto, enjoy an annual family vacation to a popular American tourist destination, and have not one single case of throat irritation (from smoking Camel cigarettes).
You should check to see what "middle class" living was actually like in 1950. You might have a car and a house but the house was only 600 sq ft. The father got bacon and eggs and the rest got porridge because that was all they could afford. The family had to do laundry at the end of the week as if they didn't they wouldn't have any clothes for the next week. The wife had to stay home because most modern appliances did not exist or were not available to their price range.
The 50's were good times not because we were wealthy through the entire thing but because it was a time of increasing wealth. It was a general .com boom for everybody. Men were job hopping every year or two into a new job at a higher pay. Appliances were becoming affordable to lessen the work load at home. Clothes and food were becoming cheaper. What was considered middle class in the beginning of the 1950's in terms of size of house lived in, food purchased, and clothing owned would be considered well below poverty level these days.
If you really want to see bad times though, go back and look at the great depression. People in the US were actually in threat of starving to death. The soldiers of WW2 were an inch or two shorter than the generation before and after simply due to lack of food while growing up. People of today would consider great depression conditions worse than apocalyptic and probably were worse than some movies show life after the apocalypse.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Insightful)
They used to predict in the 50s that in the future a man would be able to easily support himself while only working two days a week.
Funny thing is, they were actually correct. It's easy to live on two days of work a week... if you restrict yourself to living at a medium level of prosperity by 1950s standards.
I remember the daydreams about how robots would do all the work and people would lead lives of leisure. Instead we work harder to try and keep up with the machines we built. Those daydreams were still going into the 80's.
Where I live plenty of people live on zero days of work a week though. The state seems to have accepted that some people don't need, or just won't, work.
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I remember the daydreams about how robots would do all the work and people would lead lives of leisure. Instead we work harder to try and keep up with the machines we built. Those daydreams were still going into the 80's.
I remember that too. Not robots particularly, but computers to do the paperwork and automated machines to do the labour. Just a few humans would need to work a few hours per week on maintenance. Sociologists writing in periodicals such as New Society, New Scientist and the more serious Sunday newspapers used to say that the main worry for the future was to keep the millions of idle, bored people from getting into mischief.
That state of affairs could be almost practicable by now. But what has happened
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Funny)
Lots of people do this today. The sad thing is they make them show up to the office 5 days a week.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, this may be due to the fact that in reality inflation is somewhat controlled by the majority of the population, so if the majority of the population worked 2 days a week, the guy who worked 3 would be *loaded* making 50% more than the average wage at which point the majority would say "hell, one more day a week and I can go from 40k/year to 60k/year!" but then someone works 4 days a week... Economics are nebulous and this is why they're much debated, but simple fact is there's no way a bunch of robots doing all the work ends up with a liesure life for the populace; the singularity is a lie, if we no longer have work to do that just cements 100% the income divide by making the disparity so significant. The efficiencies talks about by the singularity are so large that those who are reaping their benefits will have magnitudes more wealth than others to an extent that if you aren't on the beneficiary side of those efficiencies you won't be able to afford bread. The efficiences of the singularity would effectively make money wholesale without value. I wonder what we would value then... Robots maybe will be the new currency... There's a weird thought.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Insightful)
Jobs should not be the ultimate goal. We must challenge the idea that jobs are the only way to contribute. Let us free people from the necessity of making a living by doing what a boss tells them, and let them instead pursue their own creative interests. Give everyone the option of a basic income, and have lots of challenges by business and government to stimulate the natural curiosity and scientific spirit that most of us are born with. Knowledge and technology will advance, which is what confers survival fitness by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Insightful)
Jobs should not be the ultimate goal. We must challenge the idea that jobs are the only way to contribute. Let us free people from the necessity of making a living by doing what a boss tells them, and let them instead pursue their own creative interests. Give everyone the option of a basic income, and have lots of challenges by business and government to stimulate the natural curiosity and scientific spirit that most of us are born with. Knowledge and technology will advance, which is what confers survival fitness by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
in capitalism, we have tons of lazy people.
they claim to make our laws, but I'm not even sure about that.
they own land, sit back and just collect money.
there's lots of kinds of lazy. take your pick.
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Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
If you are referring to the Soviet Union and China, communism never really existed there. They started down that road, sure, but only got half way there when the dictators took over. If Trotsky had won out against Stalin, the Soviet Union may have ended up as a democratic communism, where the educated workers actually did make the decisions. You can't say that communism didn't work, because it was never really tried. Norway and Sweden are closer to the communist ideal than the Soviet Union ever was.
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TWo points.
China and Cuba are doing remarkably well for communism not working.
Given the current state of the economy and the fact the USA is defaulting on it's obligations and debts right now I would say our current system is also broken.
Social security isn't an entitlement. it is a mandated 401K at minimal interest. you pay into it. EVERYONE under the age of 40 won't ever be able to collect anything they pay into it because capitalist politicians spent all the money stupidly expecting infinite growth.
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China is communist in name only. They're more of a fascist dictatorship.
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It's insurance. Retirement insurance to be fair, they run the actuary tables and adjust the costs such that they're betting more people won't live to retirement than are paying in, if more people reach retirement than there are payers then just like any o
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Well, no shit. It is difficult to succeed if a large part of the world actively tries to destroy you.
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So, in other words, don't create anything. Don't earn your keep. Become a "useless eater". Nice.
Funny how Americans are all TV-watching morons until this topic comes up, then we are a nation driven by natural curiosity and scientific spirit. Did anyone not notice that elephant in the room?
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I'm supposedly incapable of working for reasons that -would- make it difficult to keep a regular job, so I get some form of welfare. It doesn't stop me from doing things others might see as work. The desire to prove myself and do things that look neat drives me to better my own skills. So despite being a bad fit for a regular job, I do have some sort of creative output.
The biggest problem is that I'm an outlier, not the norm. But I think more creative minds would blossom if freed from the pressure to get a
Easy, watch Star Trek TNG (Score:5, Insightful)
Notice how many episodes of the series that should never have been, start with an artsy fartsy act of a crew that really doesn't seem to have a day job. The Enterprise is a floating luxury hotel that runs itself and were nobody ever has to get their hands dirty, leaving its passengers to pursue the arts and not be very good at it.
The PROBLEM is... your art has no value. Very little art has. You can see this with the art shops run by bored rich house wives that are often little more then tax dodges or in some cases active money laundering operations or used for bribes. "No no, I won't slip you a brown envolope... say, that painting in your wives shop, what would you say that is worth *wink wink*".
You can see it for the lower classes on youtube, only a tiny fraction has views over half a dozen, millions of video's have no views whatsoever. The simple fact is that the modern world doesn't need as many artists as it once did. Older ages, before replication of art was easily available to all, needed every painting, every book, every performance done by hand. It was a golden age for artists. These days, one artist can supply the needs for the entire planet. Consider comedy: Once every time you wanted to hear a joke, you needed to pay someone to tell it. Now you can just replay the same video over and over of the best comedians the world has ever produced.
Why should I pay you for your crappy work when I can experience the masters for peanuts?
Really, WATCH ST:TNG, it is nothing but layabouts going to each others performances. Work? That happens to other people. The series Friends is roughly the same idea, that the "elite" doesn't have to work. The Victorians thought the same BUT the Victorians did it over the backs of a massive work force who worked very hard indeed. The 90's tried to sell us the idea that EVERYONE could be the elite and that their would be a natural demand for all the creative works created by the entitled non-gifted. This hasn't turned out to be the case. A few artist have gotten really really rich and the majority of the plebs by cheap reproductions of their work, rather then original works in their price range.
There have been many novel ideas about future economies where hard work is no longer the core of the economy and basically, none of them really work out because sooner or later so far, someone has to do the work AND there is always someone willing to launch the B-ark into space. The masses are not going to support an idle middle/upper class for very long... well maybe just long enough to help them up the little steps to the block.
The US economy RAN on all those boring factory jobs that people in the movies always want to escape from but that were for decades the places fathers and mothers went to earn the money to raise their kids. See "An Officer and a Gentleman" the girl is working in a factory making cardboard boxes. Hardly inspiring work but all the girls who do NOT marry a jet pilot, it is their only source of income until they retire or die. It ain't glamorous, it ain't the stuff of dreams but all those workers payed their full taxes while the likes of Romney didn't. The economy runs on factory workers, not the elite. The elite can't and won't pay for millions of workers sitting idle reading Shakespeare and writing sonnets. Neither will the workers support an ever growing middle class doing nothing either.
You can try to move the working to China but then they will just do what the Koreans and Japanese did before them, become the elite themselves and make their own phones. And kiddies, all the idiocy you can come up with why the Chinese can never be creators the same was said about the Koreans and the Chinese. Hell, go back a bit further and the Brits said the same thing about the colonies (that is you Americans) when they outsourced farming, so the British country side could be reserved for gardening, parks and recreational hunting. And then the US copied industry too and the British economy has been sliding into obscurity ever since.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no idea what certivity is, but I'm sure the basic income the parent post mentioned would be in dollars, which certainly would pay your bills (unless your bills are too high), as well as enable you to buy food for you and your cats.
Which won't work when the people who make human and cat food don't have to do their jobs to get paid.
The premise was that it will be the robots who make the human and cat food.
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Rethink wants to use Baxter to perform simple jobs that manufacturers have never been able to automate cost-effectively before.
Great! Like what?
Baxter has a basic knowledge of how to perform a wide range of basic manufacturing operations such as loading and unloading, counting, reorienting, and light assembly.
Ah. Those things that robots are already doing quite efficiently. What else?
It can also be programmed with additional capabilities. (Rethink is currently developing software that would allow Baxter to communicate with other machines, say a conveyor belt.)
Nothing to see here, move along.
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Baxter has a basic knowledge of how to perform a wide range of basic manufacturing operations such as loading and unloading, counting, reorienting, and light assembly.
Ah. Those things that robots are already doing quite efficiently. What else?
Quite efficiently but not cheaply. I've no idea about Baxter but Rooney Brooks has come up with funky stuff. Roombas, bomb disposal robots, and a whole load of academic papers.
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Electrical service is much more reliable in the US compared to China/India. There is also an advantage of having your product manufacturing close to your marketplace... namely lower shipping costs.
Isn't that what Mexico/Nafta was for?
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they miss the point.
overseas labor is cheap because the operations needed -require- human hands, eyesight and abilities that robots still don't have.
sheesh, if we COULD use robots for things (like iphone assemblies) we would (they would). but its still human based and because of that, those jobs will never come back to the US.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
You also have to consider, (trying not to sound too Luddite in the process), that replacing a human in a paying job with a robot is scarcely better than off-shoring the job.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet everyone (i hope?) agrees that it would be ridiculous to complain that automation kills jobs or that we should eliminate automation....
(for those who dont, perhaps we should use spoons instead of shovels for ditch digging)
I have to ask how much sense it makes to complain about where the job gets done, unless the angle is "are the conditions humane". Spending more money to do the same job seems to make more sense, and honestly the guy in China hoping for $100 a month seems to deserve the labor more than the guy in the US coasting off of his (relatively) large unemployment check.
Not trolling, would be interested if someone could make a case for where Im going wrong here.
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That's exactly where I was heading.
There is value in raising the living standard in other parts of the world, and one way to do this is to find employment
for these populations, or a sizable portion of the population, enough to stimulate the rest of their economy.
The problem with shipping all these jobs overseas is you end up shipping a great deal of your money supply and wealth overseas with it.
These robots are aimed at stemming that transfer (the money) without much thought as to employment EITHER at home
We Need a Jobless Economic System (Score:4, Interesting)
The writing is on the wall. Machines will replace everybody, period. And I don't just mean the factory worker, the fry cook, the maid or the gardener. I mean, every effing body. Your PhD won't mean diddly squat. So all this silly talk about preserving jobs is pointless. Both capitalism and communism were wrong from the start because they base the economy on slave labor. Why do I say slave labor? Because unless you own land and the ability to make a living on your land, you are at the mercy of someone else. We, humans, are territorial animals and we should all be living on our own domains. Capitalism gives control of the land to a few and enslaves the rest. Communism takes the land away completely and enslaves everybody. The arrival of intelligent machines will destroy both.
We need a land based, jobless economy where the land is divided for an inheritance (not for a price) and where only individuals have the right to own intelligent robots, not the corporations. And since robots will make robots, robots will be dirt cheap or, at least, as cheap as the energy supply will allow. Politicians better stop promising us jobs (as if they were doing us a favor) because we don't want no stinking jobs. We, humans, are gods. We want synthetic intelligent servants to do our work for us, all of it. We just want to sit by the pool and enjoy our margaritas and delicacies and rule our own land. We're tired of being slaves to invisible masters.
Re:We Need a Jobless Economic System (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt your scenario.
Once we have the drudgery handed off to machines we willffind more work to do. Maybe we will start on mars or maybe just started a wholesale reinvented earth, with better cities that impact the planet less.
History hasn't shown fewer projects with mechanized industry. If anything its the opposite. Less drudgery just to survive means more time for worthwhile work.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:5, Insightful)
"And yet everyone (i hope?) agrees that it would be ridiculous to complain that automation kills jobs or that we should eliminate automation...."
Well, my take on it is that omni-automation will produce an inhuman dystopia unless it's coupled with a proportional rise in socialism (so that we can communally benefit from the advances). My #1 choice would be to leverage automation in that way; but at the same time, the US seems committed to heading in the exact opposite direction in how we use it, so...
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you cannot fix the world. you can, at best, try to make things better where you currently are.
Ive struggled with the concept of why a guy on this side of the ocean deserves jobs on this side of the ocean more than the starving, harder working guy on the other side of the ocean-- simply by virtue of which side he is on.
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No more ridicoulous than a farmer running a 60' cultivator instead of hiring a whole lot of people to follow horses pulling a 6' one (at a quarter the speed).
If we still employed the vast majority of our work force to grow things to eat there would be two problems. First not enough food. But second not enough people to do all of the interesting (and not required) jobs that simply didn't exist 100 years ago.
Pretty much anyone in the entertainment industry. Most of the telecommunications people. Vast majority
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Robots are getting those abilities, and it is causing some manufacturing repatriation:
Foxconn begins replacing workers with robots ahead of US expansion
"In June 2011, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou announced plans to deploy one million robots across factory assembly lines, as part of a company-
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Interesting)
It won't bring jobs for blue collar workers back on shore, but it will bring manufacturing back, the few engineering and operations jobs that it will require to keep the production line going, and of course, the pollution the factory brings.
Of course, America will want to keep it's stinking rich getting richer, as the spoils from the new robotic slave class go to them, and let the rest of the plebs just stink more as they are left to wallow in their own filth. Cue - get a job, ample opportunity meme's.
I think the technology of simple robotic automation is fantastic, but the robots should be the servants of humanity, not a significant subset of humanity. Since the government will be losing out on a significant level of tax revenue, (note, robots are currently a complete tax deduction, where a human wage earner pays income tax), it would be the perfect segway to universally tax robotic production, and redistribute that into education.
Failure to solve this issue could result in the unravelling of capitalism as we know it, to either a super class that will need to kill off any pleborian dissidents, or lead to a revolution similar to what the French had.
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Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
Higher.
China pays about the same per KW as the US but the electricity supply in China and especially India is nowhere near as reliable or clean as western nations. Factories in China have to maintain large transformers to clean the power and large backup generators which increases the cost.
Although, replacing Chinese factory workers wont exactly bring the "jerbs they turk" back to the US.
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Interesting)
I work at a largish US manufacturing plant. We normally generate about half our power on site. The rest is generated by the local municipal power company (which is pretty much in the factory's pocket since it's a HUGE employer). Our suppliers are required to have back up generators so they don't shut us down during a thunderstorm.
I'm guessing that large backup generators are standard equipment.
I've worked at factory place in Australia, a backup generator that can produce enough power for production to run isn't that uncommon although at the last place I worked, the backup power requirement was for 8 hours, where as in a similar factory in china had a requirement for 21 days of backup power as they couldn't even rely on regular diesel deliveries if things got bad.
Also the power delivered to us from the state power company (state gov owned) was in a very good condition, compared to china where it needed to be filtered. At a local aluminium refinery, they generated all of their own power but they get natural gas delivered to them by pipeline from a feild in the north of the state. About 1/3 of the piped gas goes straight to that refinery so at their size, it's more economical to run your own powerplant. I think the size of the operation we were discussing wouldn't be that large.
Doesn't anyone use Wikipedia? (Score:3, Informative)
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Overseas ofcourse. Doesen't anyone think about these things? What is the cost of electricity in China/India compared to the US?
That depends on how many nuclear reactors we can build. Sure, we're sacrificing the future, but it's already so bleak ...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Guess where will it be cheapest to operate Baxt (Score:4, Funny)
That sounds like defeatism.
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Huh? Hasn't Hawaii switched to wave and geothermal yet- of which they have PLENTY?
What does it take?
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Thanks to their lack of regulations they have more than 20 million people who can't safely go outside this week. I suspect they may be getting regulations soon.
Re:Robots bring jobs to America... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you suggesting the robots are not US citizens!?
No, that US citizens are robots.
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In that series, a legal case was withdrawn after it was revealed that the Hubots in question had illegal after-market firmwares installed.
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One place I would like to see Baxter is at McDonalds or Starbucks. Now really how cool would that be!
If they made a Baxter that looked like a Cylon Centurion [wikipedia.org] and had it working at Starbuck's. that would be totally cool.