Are jobs a thing of the past? ( Archived) (34)

IamTab: If you want to see those competitive salaries and benefits come back, we need to get those companies flourishing so that they, once again, need to compete for YOUR skills.

Today anything you have for a skill a robot can do faster, cheaper, and with higher quality. Once the robot is set up right all the goods are all made exactly the same. Robot work far less per hour, never complain, don't have vacation time, don't take off for holidays, never sleep or eat, and don't need rest. They also don't need any retirement fund set up for later. They are simply recycled into new better faster robots.
Ever see an old black and white movie with 100 secretaries typing away? Computers do that now, and they are much faster. With the next generation of robots there will be no more factory jobs.

IamTab: In one example, a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250,000 and replaced two machine operators, each earning $50,000 a year. Over the 15-year life of the system, the machines yielded $3.5 million in labor and productivity savings.

WhatUwish4: Sure robots can so some of those things but you still need someone to make them, sell them and service them. And there are so many other types of jobs beyond the factories. Lab techs, scientists, writers, doctors, researchers, innovators and so on. A robot is only as good as the company that owns it.

Albertaghost: The machines of course can direct traffic, weld a joint, carry the product to and from the production table, select the right drill bit on an adapted extension, answer the bosses question as to what the recommendation is for a quick change in product, give co workers advice on what their tasks or standards are and boost morale.

Point is they can't so your one machine will have to be twenty which means a loss rather than a gain.

Show me a factory where one person does one particular specific job every day n and out and I'll show you a place where they just might be able to be replaced by a machine but in reality, each worker is required to do a variety of jobs prior to and after his or her specific task. Hence your machine must replace a lot more than one person.

IamTab: NY Times – A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers. The dutch factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.


At an automation trade show last year in Chicago, Ron Potter, the director of robotics technology at an Atlanta consulting firm called Factory Automation Systems, offered attendees a spreadsheet to calculate how quickly robots would pay for themselves.

In one example, a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250,000 and replaced two machine operators, each earning $50,000 a year. Over the 15-year life of the system, the machines yielded $3.5 million in labor and productivity savings.