“In October, when Apple announced its redesigned Mac Pro, the company boasted that it would be assembled in the U.S. This was a curious about-face for the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant whose success has been inextricably linked to shoulder-to-shoulder assembly lines in China,” John Patrick Pullen writes for Entrepreneur. “In addition, as the New York Times reported, at a private dinner in February 2011, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told President Obama, ‘Those jobs aren’t coming back.'”
“Indeed, they haven’t. And they won’t,” Pullen writes. “According to statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the manufacturing industry lost 2.3 million jobs in the most recent recession. Since then, factories have only regained 526,000 jobs, a sad sign of Jobs’ visionary nature.”
“A promotional video on the Mac Pro’s assembly clearly shows what led Apple to produce the new computers in the U.S.: robots, not people. An ambidextrous Fanuc M-710iC swings the Mac Pro’s machined aluminum casing from station to station. The metal is polished by Guyson Corporation’s blast-finishing robots. And components are placed on the circuit boards by Jot Automation machines,” Pullen writes. “Of course there are humans milling about, but not nearly as many as at Foxconn in China.”
“The growing use of robots in the workforce isn’t just happening at Apple. From Kiva Systems droids fulfilling Amazon warehouse orders, to telepresence robots zipping through offices and conference halls, robots are suddenly everywhere,” Pullen writes. “Though they weren’t necessarily programmed to destroy jobs, some experts believe machine-caused mass unemployment is possible.”
“Meanwhile, small businesses will scramble to keep up. But instead of joining the robot workforce, entrepreneurs can firewall their operations by cyborg-proofing their companies,” Pullen writes. “According to the Oxford study, “occupations that involve complex perception and manipulation tasks, creative intelligence tasks, and social intelligence tasks are unlikely to be substituted by computer capital over the next decade or two.” So the key to defeating robots — in the movies and in real life — is doing what they can’t.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The issue isn’t really whether manufacturing jobs are lost. Over time, there have been many industries which have come and gone. I don’t see anyone bemoaning the loss of the horseshoe industry due to the invention of the automobile…
We don’t need to protect manufacturing jobs, we just need to ensure there are opportunities for jobs in general. As nations become more developed, the workforce trends more into providing more services and sophisticated transformation of manufactured goods, rather than manufactured goods themselves.
That means we need the right infrastructure to retrain existing workers for the new industries and sectors and to provide the right mix of education for our children to enable them to find useful employment as well the right stimulus for entrepreneurs and inventors to come up with yet new industries.
China will also go through this and there is already evidence that an increasingly large proportion of their economy is now going to servicing their own people and not just on making and exporting cheap goods to the West. So, they too will start churning out jobs for baristas, mechanics, computer engineers, patent lawyers, hairdressers, etc as their economy becomes more sophisticated. The less skilled jobs will go to cheaper parts of China (they are already moving to China’s west to the less developed regions), to even cheaper countries (hopefully Africa will benefit and stabilise as a result of this) and of course a large proportion will be completely lost to robotisation.
There are positives to bringing back automated manufacturing to Western countries. It means we can eliminate the long and increasingly expensive transport component of the manufacture and yes, output less carbon and just generally be more efficient as it is always better to be as close as possible to your target market to respond more quickly and have to hold less inventory for contingencies.
End of long-winded rave….
“some experts believe machine-caused mass unemployment is possible.”
Luddites, your time is now! Destroy the job-stealing automatons!
Yes, Daniel Pinks’ book A Whole New Mind talks about this and how only jobs that due to abundance, Asia and automation, American workers need to get new skill sets in the Conceptual Age. Transitions can be painful!
Dan-O
http://www.danosongs.com