why are we arguing about "manufacturing jobs" instead of building robots?
If I recall my stats correctly, the US is #2 in robots, which isn't exactly bad. (Lagging Japan, as a result of 30 years of policy decisions. Japanese government/industry put their chips down on "robots win the future" many years ago and this was not a disastrously stupid decision.)
Interestingly, Japan has spent loads of time on manufacturing robots and personal service robots of dubious utility (see Asimo, Toyotashi and others), while the U.S. has dumped military money at robots and ended up with drones, bomb disposal robots, exoskeletons, etc. etc.
While I agree that the level of technology and packaging in Japanese robots in generally higher than U.S. counterparts, to take a rather cheap shot, it was U.S. drones and robots that were first on the scene.
Due to the pedigree of mobile robotics, the U.S. needed systems that worked now and not the future...resulting in a variety of heavy duty
operable robots capable of working in difficult environments.
Here's arguably the most advanced robot in the world handling perfectly normal stairs
It's critically important PR for the Japanese robotics industry to respond to Fukushima with something of utility. Otherwise these decades of work and millions of Yen in R&D haven't amounted to much more than an interesting series of public demonstrations.
Human-form robots : robots :: Space Shuttle: ICBMs. It's just a media-friendly way of demonstrating that you have the capability to produce something of use. Most robots look nothing like a human. The overwhelming majority are in industry.
Interesting you mentioned exoskeletons. The US is 5 to 10 years away of getting them on a battlefield. They're commercially available in Japan for medical use. (I'm not making a value judgement on that, except to the extent that "You could actually buy this" is superior to not being able to buy it.)
Interesting you mentioned exoskeletons. The US is 5 to 10 years away of getting them on a battlefield.
Actually that's a very good point, and a fascinating demonstration of the differences in commercial funding for a technology vs military funding and the similar but completely different kind of tech that comes out of that.
For reference, when Japan's Fukushima number 1 NPP reactors started going pear-shaped, there was no robot in Japan that they could use to enter the facility.
They had to turn to either a US or French robot to enter the reactor.
I'm not whether this serves as a proof of problems with Japanese robotics.
If Japan builds robots for the factory and the US builds robots for the battle field, it seem logical that US robots would be more useful in nuclear disaster. An power plant leaking hard radiation after a hydrogen explosion does resemble a battle field more than a factory floor, after all.
That aside, it's a fair point— lots of people are working on robots. But we should be building more robots. We shouldn't be talking about "how can we create American jobs," we should be talking about "how can we replace every American job with a robot."
If we are going to talk about "how can we replace every American job with a robot", we'll have to talk about how replace humans can live ennobling lives of leisures rather than either pushing shopping carts or experiencing empty hedonism.
It would be a good conversation. I don't hear it starting. In fact, there was discussion of these issues in the 1960's and 1970's. By now, with the various crises on our heals, no one wants to consider the problems in this fashion.
I think it's way late to start talking about that. In America, we have this puritanical ideal that working leads to happiness— or that working is, itself, happiness. Scientifically speaking, that's bollocks. To take the classic case study, people who win the lottery aren't any happier or unhappier than their workaday peers. They are exactly as happy.
Real happiness seems to come from something like the Buddhist ideas of mindfulness and acceptance, and that's true whether you're a poverty-sworn monk, a janitor, a CEO, or a pot-smoking layabout.
The idea of "rewarding work" vs. "empty hedonism" is an arbitrary Western construct with little basis in reality.
Forgive me if I've misread, but I think what you're putting forth as acknowledged fact here is in fact controversial. You seem to be referencing the 1978 study "Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?" as well as, perhaps, the idea of the Hedonic Treadmill. Brickman's ideas are considered outdated.
That's not to say that working, alone, producing happiness is a correct idea, but it might make sense that accomplishment does. And these levels of accomplishment - cleaning the floor well for a janitor, for instance - can differ. Most people desire to "make a difference," another way of saying the same thing. If you're talking about deathbed wishes when looking back on a life, the more positive impact your life visited on others, the better.
My guess is that people with low skills will still find work but not as much (part-time) and consequently their pay will be lower. However, if robots are doing all the work then production becomes cheaper which means products become cheaper which again means that people can buy more with less money. So in reality people will not become poorer. The economic level will stay the same or probably increase. The purchase power will probably increase. Question is, what do you do with all that extra time?
Well, this is only one scenario of the things that can happen.
However, if robots are doing all the work then production becomes cheaper which means products become cheaper which again means that people can buy more with less money.
That's a big assumption there. More likely, companies will experience higher profit margins rather than pass along the entirety of the cost savings.
It's a measure of the ability of automation to replace human labor.
Let's say that, as a middle-class American, I consume enough to employ ten manual laborers full-time. If we have ten robots for every person, then everyone can live like me and no one has to do the physical labor.
If I recall my stats correctly, the US is #2 in robots, which isn't exactly bad. (Lagging Japan, as a result of 30 years of policy decisions. Japanese government/industry put their chips down on "robots win the future" many years ago and this was not a disastrously stupid decision.)