Jobs affect Everyone
Even if you can never lose your job or have 0% concern about
your income what would life be like with 30% - 50% - 90% unemployment? What
kind of world and community would you live in? Who would be paying
taxes? The top 10 most profitable US companies paid an average of 9% and many
pay nothing. Roads, schools, social security, police, firemen?
If you don't have time to read the 4 pages of the Times article, here is my 1/2 page synopsis.
“A 10th as many” means 90% lost jobs
128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility…
the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many
as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai. …they do it all without a coffee
break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year.
low-cost
automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution
in agricultural technology …farming employment in the United States fell
from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today
Such advances … beginning to transform other sectors
that employ millions of workers around the world. robots that zoom at
the speed of the world’s fastest sprinters can store, retrieve and pack goods
for shipment far more efficiently than people. Robots could soon
replace workers at companies like C & S Wholesale Grocers, the nation’s
largest grocery distributor
- Boeing’s wide-body commercial jets are now riveted automatically by giant machines that move rapidly and precisely
- Earthbound Farms - robot arms place containers of organic lettuce into shipping boxes. …robots far faster than people replaced. Each robot replaces 2 to 5 workers
- Robot manufacturers in the US say that in many applications, robots are already more cost-effective than humans.
- The next generation of robots for manufacturing will be more flexible and easier to train.
- Hyundai and Beijing Motors recently completed a mammoth factory outside Beijing that can produce a million vehicles a year using more robots and fewer people
- Kroger supermarkets - warehouse installed a German system That led to the elimination of 106 jobs, roughly 20 percent of the work force.
- Such robots will put automation within range of companies like Federal Express and United Parcel Service that now employ tens of thousands of workers doing such tasks.
