… not to mention that a lot of food is being produced by machines, or at least in a heavily automated environment. I’ve visited food factories, I don’t remember seeing many cooks. Even home cooking has been automated to a certain degree.
All these labor saving devices, even factories, are integrated by humans. While the productivity per worker skyrockets (fewer workers needed per X units of output), there is no factory that runs without people who do generally very easy tasks that are very difficult to automate.
The summer after high school I worked in a spray bottle factory. Yes, we made the spray nozzles like come on a bottle of windex. My job was to keep the bins full of the little parts that fed into the machine that assembled them. I also helped unload the boxes of the parts from the carts and stacked them near the bin where they needed to go. Someone else somewhere had a job to handle the “raw” plastic for machine that melted and molded the parts I needed. Someone else put the different parts in different boxes sorted for the cart driver.
These tasks were of course absurdly easy for any human to do with about five minutes of training. Somehow automating all this together into a single factory chain would have presented enormous challenges though. Because the labor is so cheap I could easily imagine that factory will run the same way for the next fifty years.
I suspect the driving forces behind automating that sort of thing will ultimately be, not labor costs, but the relative slowness, messiness, and unreliability of humans.
That said, I also expect that the technology that can do those sorts of jobs more quickly, cleanly, and reliably than humans will be developed for different applications where minimally trained human labor just isn’t practical (say, automated underwater mining) and then applied to other industries once it’s gotten pretty good.
Maybe but its still easily 50 years away. People are “messy” but they are so cheap and you need so few of them—there is no capital tied up in them at all its just a month-to-month expense. Even if you lease equipment you are still paying for the cost of the capital tied up in it. The diminishing returns for automating such a small cost will ensure its continuity for quite some time I think.
Predictions in years are less and less meaningful to me as I go along. I’d give .6 confidence that we’re no more than 5 tech-generations away from being able to build a fully automated mining facility (just to pick a concrete example), and no more than 3 generations from there to being able to build one in a way that would be cost-effective (given current-day labor costs and raw materials prices) for at least some application… perhaps underwater mining of rare earths.
I also expect that along the way, selected raw materials prices will increase enough (in inflation-adjusted currency) that using current-day prices is absurdly conservative. Then again, I also expect that along the way we’ll see several failures of such equipment that cause as much as half a commute-year (current-day) of environmental damage, which might set the whole project back by decades. So, who knows?
A commute-year, incidentally, is a measure of risk (e.g., death and property/environmental damage) equal to that caused by people commuting to and from their jobs in a given year. My guess is that half a commute-year is typically more than enough to cause the majority of Americans to insist that a new project is way too dangerous to even consider. (Of course, that doesn’t apply to the project of actually commuting to work.)
… not to mention that a lot of food is being produced by machines, or at least in a heavily automated environment. I’ve visited food factories, I don’t remember seeing many cooks. Even home cooking has been automated to a certain degree.
All these labor saving devices, even factories, are integrated by humans. While the productivity per worker skyrockets (fewer workers needed per X units of output), there is no factory that runs without people who do generally very easy tasks that are very difficult to automate.
The summer after high school I worked in a spray bottle factory. Yes, we made the spray nozzles like come on a bottle of windex. My job was to keep the bins full of the little parts that fed into the machine that assembled them. I also helped unload the boxes of the parts from the carts and stacked them near the bin where they needed to go. Someone else somewhere had a job to handle the “raw” plastic for machine that melted and molded the parts I needed. Someone else put the different parts in different boxes sorted for the cart driver.
These tasks were of course absurdly easy for any human to do with about five minutes of training. Somehow automating all this together into a single factory chain would have presented enormous challenges though. Because the labor is so cheap I could easily imagine that factory will run the same way for the next fifty years.
I suspect the driving forces behind automating that sort of thing will ultimately be, not labor costs, but the relative slowness, messiness, and unreliability of humans.
That said, I also expect that the technology that can do those sorts of jobs more quickly, cleanly, and reliably than humans will be developed for different applications where minimally trained human labor just isn’t practical (say, automated underwater mining) and then applied to other industries once it’s gotten pretty good.
Maybe but its still easily 50 years away. People are “messy” but they are so cheap and you need so few of them—there is no capital tied up in them at all its just a month-to-month expense. Even if you lease equipment you are still paying for the cost of the capital tied up in it. The diminishing returns for automating such a small cost will ensure its continuity for quite some time I think.
Predictions in years are less and less meaningful to me as I go along. I’d give .6 confidence that we’re no more than 5 tech-generations away from being able to build a fully automated mining facility (just to pick a concrete example), and no more than 3 generations from there to being able to build one in a way that would be cost-effective (given current-day labor costs and raw materials prices) for at least some application… perhaps underwater mining of rare earths.
I also expect that along the way, selected raw materials prices will increase enough (in inflation-adjusted currency) that using current-day prices is absurdly conservative. Then again, I also expect that along the way we’ll see several failures of such equipment that cause as much as half a commute-year (current-day) of environmental damage, which might set the whole project back by decades. So, who knows?
A commute-year, incidentally, is a measure of risk (e.g., death and property/environmental damage) equal to that caused by people commuting to and from their jobs in a given year. My guess is that half a commute-year is typically more than enough to cause the majority of Americans to insist that a new project is way too dangerous to even consider. (Of course, that doesn’t apply to the project of actually commuting to work.)