When words and logic do not make your point conduct violent lawless actions and the Left awards you.

"Black Lives Matter brought Sunday’s Pride parade to a standstill on Sunday to force the annual celebration of LGBT equality to answer for its “anti-blackness,” the protesters said."

(fyi - Obama's logic about terrorism being statistically unlikely for Americans also applies to BLM's concern about police violence. But that's not okay to say.)

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/07/03/black-lives-matter-protest-scores-victory-after-putting-pride-parade-on-pause.html

The SJW are running our of others, and beginning to eat their own? That's fantastic.

(blacks aren't anti-gay? It's the other way around? Who knew??)

Happy Fourth of July!

Amazon has given an award to the winner of its robotic arm warehouse pick-n-sort contest, and expects to replace tons of humans with robots in the near future.

So I'd like to share this 2014 article from the Pew Research Center.

We are the buggy whip.

Yeah Gog, but we are the best damn buggy whips around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q

Apparently, #AmericaWasNeverGreat is trending.

I don't think anyone using that hashtag would agree to my terms of buying them a one-way ticket to a sub Saharan African nation of choice: become a citizen of that country and renounce your US citizenship.

Gog, thanks for that link.

Karl Fogel: We’re going to have to come to grips with a long-term employment crisis and the fact that—strictly from an economic point of view, not a moral point of view—there are more and more ‘surplus humans.’”

Saying we're "going to have to come to grips" with more "surplus humans" is one thing. Deciding how we might do this is quite another.

@Bob - funny you brought that up. I was just reading accounts in the Toronto newspapers. Apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to invite BLM to participate in the annual gay pride parade.

They returned the favor by shutting down the parade and gassing the crowd. The parade organizers were forced to accede to their demands before they agreed to allow the parade to continue. These include banning all police presence, lots of money for their satellite groups, and full control of all minority representation at the parade - even those not affiliated w/ BLM.

The Toronto papers are twisting themselves into knots trying to rationalize how this was a wonderful and enlightened development. But event the parade organizers have acknowledged that they felt threatened and were extorted into agreeing to BLM's demands. They're now saying that they have not intention of giving them money or banning police.

The Progs really really want BLM to be a sane and honorable civil rights group. But they're not and have no desire to be. In reality they're a cultish hate group that uses violence and intimidation to further their aims.

"Whaddya do with surplus population? We can't count on the Plague anymore. And our wars are just little."

There has always been a fraction of the population unemployable at any task. That this will go up with more automation is not a surprise.

Market professionals know this - they got their lesson from the change in service arrangements forced by unit construction and integrated circuitry (throw it away, can't be fixed, or send to specialized depot for refurb).

The hard part will be paying huge, bloated government agencies with fewer taxpayers. There is a hint that a robotic device may be taxed so nobody loses their government job.

Imagine for a minute the establishment of US Robotics and Mechanical Men, Inc. When all labor is automated, what does Man do?

Why, destroy himself. We already see what happens when government provides everything for nothing; nothing has value.

Radwaste: There has always been a fraction of the population unemployable at any task. That this will go up with more automation is not a surprise. . . . The hard part will be paying huge, bloated government agencies with fewer taxpayers.

Let's say that the number of people working for government agencies is actually cut, along with more and more people losing their jobs to automation. That means even more unemployed people. How are we -- to use Fogel's term -- going to "come to grips" with this?

@grrr, when the gas grenades go off do you wait for the screaming before you start shooting?

They are missing the big picture over at pew. Those 'surplus population' are also customers. Yes, people lose their jobs. But when everyone loses their jobs then no one has an income to pay for goods. The curve has two parts, supply and demand. When you eliminate the demand the price becomes zero.

Automation requires high volume production to be profitable. When you want one widget you still hire a human. When you want one million widgets you hire a robot. Current technology is no where near to changing this reality.

Of course, current government policy does what technology does not. By driving up the cost of that human labor and increasing the capital costs on that human worker we've made those robots much more cost competitive. Over the last eight years it hasn't been technology that has driven automation. It was government policy.

They are missing the big picture over at pew.

So you're saying that any concerns are unwarranted, right Ben? That those at Pew are all just a bunch of Chicken Littles?

There has always been a fraction of the population unemployable at any task. That this will go up with more automation is not a surprise. ~ Radwaste at July 4, 2016 12:58 PM

It will be interesting to see how people make themselves useful to society as menial and low-skill jobs are eliminated. We can't all be artists and musicians, although if a recent article is to be believed, machines may eventually be better than us at those pursuits, too.

"Automation requires high volume production to be profitable."

Automation is amazingly flexible. Look at the variety of motorcycles now offered, from ~10 to over 200 HP, or look at stereo equipment.

Or video cards.

Some things can be profitable with just a thousand units sold. That's not counting "loss leaders" engaged just to keep staff busy.

We can't all be artists and musicians,

Don't mean to nitpick but I believe what you mean is that we can't all be artists and musicians who can make a living at it (in fact, very few of us can.) Anyone can be an artist.

Interesting piece @ TechRepublic: Why AI could destroy more jobs than it creates and how to save them

The prediction that society is heading towards a period of technological unemployment was made decades ago by John Maynard Keynes, who forecast it as an inevitable outcome of society discovering ways to make labour more efficient more rapidly than finding new uses for labour.

"There's no economic law that says 'You will always create enough jobs or the balance will always be even', it's possible for a technology to dramatically favour one group and to hurt another group, and the net of that might be that you have fewer jobs," said Brynjolfsson.

Interesting piece @ TechRepublic: Why AI could destroy more jobs than it creates and how to save them

The prediction that society is heading towards a period of technological unemployment was made decades ago by John Maynard Keynes, who forecast it as an inevitable outcome of society discovering ways to make labour more efficient more rapidly than finding new uses for labour.

"There's no economic law that says 'You will always create enough jobs or the balance will always be even', it's possible for a technology to dramatically favour one group and to hurt another group, and the net of that might be that you have fewer jobs," said Brynjolfsson.

This will probably be declared hate speech by our know-it-all elites before too long:

Paul Weston went off on pro-Muslim politicians and it was EPIC

"So you're saying that any concerns are unwarranted, right Ben? That those at Pew are all just a bunch of Chicken Littles?"

No JD. I'm saying their analysis does not fit the data.

Yes there will be changes. But the major forces leading to high unemployment today are not automation, they are political. Trying to predict where things will be 100 years into the future may be fun but it is usually futile.

"Automation is amazingly flexible. Look at the variety of motorcycles now offered, from ~10 to over 200 HP, or look at stereo equipment."

Actually it isn't. True it is better than 50 years ago but automation heavily favors high volume production. In almost anything dealing with electronics the best product is also the cheapest. It has the highest volumes and consequently it has the most design dollars spent even though there are fewer design dollars per unit.

Here is a simple analysis of the unit cost of standard FR4 circuit boards: All, 1 week turns.
4 units, $84.60
5 units, $68.45
10 units, $36.15
25 units, $16.77
50 units, $10.20
100 units, $5.10

Note, for this particular manufacturer it doesn't matter how big the boards are. Material costs are insignificant. Setup/tear down costs are a huge percentage of the production cost. It is true that manufacturing costs are coming down. But with increasing automation you see the percentage of the cost due to setup/tear down increasing.

"it's possible for a technology to dramatically favour one group and to hurt another group"

More than possible. It is almost guaranteed.

JD, do more than a one point regression on the data. Automation reduces the needs for workers by 90% while improving quality. Those workers no longer have an income and can no longer purchase goods. Now the factory has lost 90% of it's customers. Either the factory reduces output to maintain price (only sell to other factory owners) or it reduces price (deflation). In option one those out of work people open their own factory, hire all their friends, and start back up where they were prior to the automation. In option two those workers get jobs at lower pay doing something else, but the cost of goods has dropped, hence no real change in their quality of life.

In 1913 a pound of bread cost ~5.6 cents. Today it costs 142.2 cents. This is inline with the CPI's measured inflation of 136 cents. But the average income in 1913 was $750/year, or $18,200 in today's terms. The average annual income today is $50,750. That bread is no only higher quality but it also costs half as much as a percentage of your income. That is automation.

Yes, the robots are coming for your jerbs. As are the foreigners and the illegals. You will have to change and adapt to survive. Things will be different. But far more fearsome than all of those are the well meaning politicians. They are far more destructive and far harder to adapt to.

" True it is better than 50 years ago but automation heavily favors high volume production. "

But as society overall becomes wealthier, a lot of things are moving towards lower-volume production. An item: Thirty years ago I was working for a computer manufacturer in Florida. This was the time when pick-and-place machines (robots that put the parts on the board for soldering) were starting to become big in circuit board manufacturing. One day, out of curiosity, I got to asking around about the company's manufacturing methods, and I asked someone how many pick-and-place machines we had. I was rather stunned when the answer was "none". The explanation? "For the volume we produce, it's cheaper to send the boards to Puerto Rico and pay people there fifty cents an hour to place the parts." Now, the computer business has changed a lot since then, and the advent of surface mount has impacted the ability of humans to do the work. But the general principle still stands: at some labor-price-vs-volume point, it's cheaper to hire people. The problem is that the government keeps interfering with the labor price side of the equation.

Yes, it's inevitable that more people will become unemployable due to lack of marketable skills. What will those people do? A lot of them will eventually do what people throughout history have done when they felt like the society they lived in had no place for them: they'll head for the frontier. As it happens, the frontier is now not Westward but upward, and at the moment it's really expensive to get there. But it was also really expensive to get to the Americas in the 16th century.

Or develop an entrepreneurial spirit. There are plenty of us who are unemployable, so we create our own job.

"Actually it isn't. True it is better than 50 years ago but automation heavily favors high volume production."

Sigh. You've addressed your own idea more than my comment. So manufacturers are losing money on motorcycle runs in the USA of less than 10,000 units... I had no idea. It is the capacity to do this and still profit which is the big green flag.

Somebody is missing the fact that market communication is faster than ever, as it offers {1-24 of 293,805 results for Electronics : Computers & Accessories :"video cards"}

Apologies Rad, I didn't realize your comment was a non sequitur. Or what did it have to do with automation? The mere fact that electronics were involved? So how were those 293,805 video cards designed and assembled? How many little old Polynesian ladies were used to build them?

To bring this back to the original discussion, were any jobs actually eliminated as Pew and JD so fear?

Ben: "When you want one million widgets you hire a robot."

You are forgetting rapid prototyping, AKA 3D printing. That's a robot making a complex piece one time.