Race Against the Machine

Couple links...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfMGyCk3XTw

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating-Productivity/dp/0984725113

We are the mothers and fathers of a new era of workers.....workers that will farm our crops, drive our cars, mow our lawns, they are of a mechanical nature...but may some day possess biological components as well.....No one can say for sure what the outcome will be, or what society will look like in a 100 years....Perhaps all that will be left will be scientists and artists, doctors and engineers....

You are already on the losing side. "my job" marks you as a loser.

Winners don't have "jobs", they have companies. I'm a loser, too.

I see no way to mitigate the damage that exponential strides in technology will cause.

Soon a factory will build itself, then build out the interior, and then build the widgets that are the end product.

Times They are a-Changin -

Actually i have a 2 man company outside of my job. Its a bootstrap type.

Here is the other side of that coin. Both recent breakthroughs in batteries and robotics have begun to reshape geopolitics.

A good example would be Japan, a leader in robotic technology, where recent standardizations for safety have opened the door for these tools to help humans. Battery powered limbs and assisted exoskeletons are changing the lives of those that are immobile or incapacitated.

Japan has a particularly large stake in this technology. As the population segment ages with fewer young adults in the workforce to support them, robotics may be their best alternative.

Japan has the most robotic industrial base in the world and advancement in that technology will fill jobs that would normally be vacant for Japan as the population shifts to more older people. Japan's vision is to use robots not only in industry, but childcare, nursing, and service for those that are physically challenged.

Much of this vision depends on the advancement of battery power density. Renewable power and the ability to store large capacities of that power will reshape political lines and create and shift new centers of geopolitical power around the globe.

Japan is not the only geopolitical segment facing a population crises. Russia and Europe have the same population imbalance where there are simply not enough youth to support the larger aging population (I have written about this before on CR4). Robotics and advancing battery systems could mitigate a pending economic collapse of these regions.

For the rest of us where the population segments are more linear, the prospect for new jobs may exist in the field of robotics. Strangely, when the world first saw the automation revolution begin it was believed that there would be mass layoffs as the workforce was displaced with automation. What actually happened was a displacement of skills, not labor. Many manual labor skills shrank, but a new frontier of skill sets was created (designing, programming, and maintenance) that more than offset the losses.

We will see if history repeats itself with the second automation revolution as robotics comes of age.

I am not following the battery density limitation issue to the least bit.

Given I am 6'3" 250 #'s and have a 4000+ calorie a day diet the numbers work out to being around 4.6 KWH of energy expended every 24 hours.

Now going by common battery energy density of 200 Wh/Kg for typical LiPo type batteries and a generous 18 hour run time between charging it would take one battery set weighing roughly some 15 Kg or 33 pounds.

Physical size wize using a fairly robust build of .5 Wh/CC that would make such a battery about the size of a common two slice toaster.

Also going by fair market value of larger Lithium type batteries that could carry that sort of charge I see the average price would fall someplace around $2500 - $3500 at the most which to be honest any robot that could come anywhere physically close to being to do similar autonomous work equal to that of a moderately handicapped but still fully mobile human is going to have a price tag some 100+ times the cost of the battery.

Now even with dismal efficiency ratings even then that battery should still be able to give it a reasonable run time in excess of 8 hours.

As I said. Given a robot capable of doing any form of work somewhat similar to a human the battery capacity limitation issue seems like a very weak argument against it's implementation.

What we see today in robots still requires an umbilical cord to a socket. Breaking that link is going to require more advancement in technology. We are moving in that direction and that is why I stated that batteries and robotic hardware (and software) have been the cause for the advances in the field we are seeing today.

Maybe fuel cells...robots of the future may have to eat like the rest of us.

Great view Hero. Man's evolution has always been smaller and faster. It is the natural order of things. Those who are capable of looking at the whole (big) picture, see that. Japan had that foresight when they mastered LSS, and have it now in their robotics approach. Those who only see the engineering math, or only the physical science, or only sociology, may not be capable of seeing the big picture.

Please define LSS.

THX,
GEP!

LSS = Lean Six Sigma

Oh, I don't know... humans may still have the upper hand for a while.

It's sort of shaping up that an autonomous machine (nearly so, anyway) recently took Asiana flight 214 into a controlled flight into terrain, impacting the seawall at San Francisco International Airport.

Another discussion about this here.

In most cases, I see the machines replacing tasks, not jobs. These tasks are typically unskilled, repetitive, dangerous or not humanly possible. The workforce transitions to something requiring the 'human element' of judgment, dexterity and intelligence.

I have been in manufacturing for over 30 years and have seen this paranoia countless times - "damn machines replacing jobs." The companies that have invested in high tech machines have almost always become larger, stronger and have grown their workforce.

I would have to say that machines compliment workers.

You may also find this interactive world robot usage google map tool interesting. Shows the spread of robot automation. See https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/105018508881428751734