Tag: economy

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Human Unemployment in a Robotics Industry

Technology has surpassed the thin line between humans working as the leading labor force and robots performing the same tasks in several industries today. A lot of the repetitive tasks are very well being done by machinery that hardly ever errs, or gets tired or asks for increased wages. It’s good for business and easier for mass production and humans can very well perform at places where a non-linear creativity is needed.

The change has multiplied in pace over the past years. From manufacturing industry to packaging, from digging a hole to 3d printing, where a certain task required dozens of men earlier, it started being able to be done by a machine and governed by one (and the employment vs machine debate was ever so consuming for all of us); however, technology has come to the point that even that one man isn’t a necessity anymore.

Tesla’s self-driven car is extremely precise, at times safer than a human driving one and is definitely a game-changer. Uber is clearly thinking of self-driven cab service. But where the former was to eradicate people driving their cars (not a big bump on employment), the latter is definitely going to leave a huge number of people unhappy. Self-driven taxis, the billing is always haggle-free, the drivers never have moods, the cars know exactly where the traffic might be heavy and take a better route, and everybody is always on-time.. who wouldn’t want that?

But it’s not just that these jobs are going to be quenched. Tesla’s self-driving truck is going to be the nightmare to logistics industry that electronic media was to the print one. Imagine, hundreds of people unemployed in a jiffy. They’re not gonna find jobs overnight, even if trying to get training for other jobs, it’s going to be quite an issue.

The government might have to facilitate this with some scheme, perhaps introduce new industries fit for less trained people, perhaps allocate resources evenly in different training institutes while providing stipends to the affectees, or perhaps just ask them to wait for change that might never come. The government might need more tax money to do most of these things, (of course promises are free, so that’s one way out), but more tax will be harder to collect from an economy with a large newly unemployed chunk of people. And even if the promises premise is undertaken, it hardly ever ends up in a nice way.

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Republic of Corporate Inc.

South Korea has Samsung.

Japan has Sony and JVC.

US has General Motors, Big tobacco.

UK has it’s financial sector, which unofficially so but influences or tries to influence the laws that may affect itself, in extension to influencing the well being of the country. The country must survive for the survival of the business. The country must prosper for the business to flourish. And for the business to thrive, if there is a tad bit of tinkering needed with the legality of some issue, it must be done. Because lobbying is necessary to the control it all in favor of the company, as not to threaten the profits of the company.

It’s not as evil as it may sound like, because the company itself is running the much needed foreign exchange of the country, means the country essentially needs the company as well. The country may get a lot of benefits from just one giant that it wouldn’t want to cause any inconvenience in an entity that is feeding itself as well as cultivating a feedable habitat for the environment around and the tiny but many plantations nearby.

So since it’s not essentially evil, the only evil would be when the company lobbyists wouldn’t care about the country’s citizens in order to maximize it’s profits. However, of the country citizens, it is also to be noted that they unknowingly become the employees (or at least affectees) of the company. If the company does good, they prosper, or at least remain where they are. If the company does bad, the country’s budget gets affected and ipso facto the citizens get affected too. Mr. XYZ is self-employed in a country which has a giant corporate. He thinks he is not related to it, but if the giant collapses, the GDP may be affected, the foreign investment, the tax rate, the employment, the whole chain reaction and his personal life is affected the same way that the employees of the giant’s are.

But the problem arises when the company has more consumers in other countries than it’s own, and it uses it’s country’s citizens as modern serfdom or peasants just to export more goods and import more foreign exchange in lieu to maximize profits to the fullest.  That is where it can be troublesome because it can go against the country’s citizens’ benefit. But the company is so strong already, it’s lobbyists are strong, the company can maneuver laws in their favor to continue doing this, because it is profits that matter in comparison to merchandise (read people).