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Friday, May 29, 2009 12:00 AM

The future of manufacturing: Here come the robots

It's not just Detroit -- even China is losing factory jobs. And they're never coming back.

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  • Saturday, May 30, 2009 05:23 PM

    Mack Reynolds was saying this in the 1950s...

    ...and he was hardly the only science fiction writer to predict the impact of industrial automation. He postulated a "negative income tax" (under various names), which was nothing more than a direct government payment to all unemployed citizens - and in his books, most people were unemployed.

    You might want to look up his books. Some are a bit lowbrow; Reynolds took an unusually strong social/economic viewpoint in his writing, but he was a former soldier-of-fortune writing for money. A bit of soft-core porn wasn't beneath him. Nonetheless, he was seriously thinking about these issues back when most of us weren't even born.

    As for those service-sector jobs that require warm bodies, Mr. Reich? You might want to consider the possibility that many of those, too, are likely to be replaced by automation. At my local supermarket, they've had self-check-out lines for years, now. Just lately, they've introduced scanners that let you scan each item literally as you put it into your cart.

    Combine that with RFI technology, and supermarkets will be slashing their payrolls to near-nothing - except stockers and managers. And how long will it be before robotic stockers are developed?

    The simple fact is that unless society collapses or is deliberately rejiggered to create fake make-work jobs, unemployment of the majority of the population is inevitable. Free-marketers don't have an answer to that issue, of course. But neither does anyone else. What will the effect be on society when MOST people are effectively on welfare, with nothing to do all day but watch TV or otherwise entertain themselves?

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