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labor and its discontents
Jun. 16th, 2014 01:50 pmI think we're in a period of massive upheaval which we are all desperately trying to avoid noticing.
One of the things which is changing is the allocation of income and wealth as a proxy for allocating goods and services. Activities which were once rare are now common; some which were valuable are not; some which were unthinkably esoteric are temporarily valuable.
There is a trainable pick-and-place robot station now available for $25K. Any factory job that involves a variety of repeated motions while sitting or standing can now be automated by a machine that costs about the same as a year of minimum wage labor, but can run 24/7 and never takes a break. Long term that's about an order of magnitude reduction in costs. An autonomous micro-forklift for warehouse use should be available in the next few years at a cost of about $50K. Amazon and Walmart will swap them for people first, but it won't be long before a supermarket is run by two people and a bunch of droids: one front-of-house customer service rep and manager, one stocking and accounting supervisor. Both of them clean up spills as needed.
The lesson of the 21st century is that jobs are going away. But if you value a person by their job, most people are then valueless. Since that's an outcome we want to avoid, we need to start valuing people in some other way.
One of the things which is changing is the allocation of income and wealth as a proxy for allocating goods and services. Activities which were once rare are now common; some which were valuable are not; some which were unthinkably esoteric are temporarily valuable.
There is a trainable pick-and-place robot station now available for $25K. Any factory job that involves a variety of repeated motions while sitting or standing can now be automated by a machine that costs about the same as a year of minimum wage labor, but can run 24/7 and never takes a break. Long term that's about an order of magnitude reduction in costs. An autonomous micro-forklift for warehouse use should be available in the next few years at a cost of about $50K. Amazon and Walmart will swap them for people first, but it won't be long before a supermarket is run by two people and a bunch of droids: one front-of-house customer service rep and manager, one stocking and accounting supervisor. Both of them clean up spills as needed.
The lesson of the 21st century is that jobs are going away. But if you value a person by their job, most people are then valueless. Since that's an outcome we want to avoid, we need to start valuing people in some other way.
