"This is the Future", states this article in NY Times -
What a Future and at what a human cost for the increasing World population estimated at 8 billions by 2020. Jobs in agriculture, factories, businesses, Offices and other Establishments, Homes etc lost to Machines. One shudders in fear at this final stage of mechanisation which started with the industrial age 300 years ago. Praise be to Gandhi and 'Small is beautiful' by Schumacher.
The Times web-site has a picture of a new Tesla factory in Fremont, California where "128 robot arms do the same (human) work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human".
A quote from the book "Star Sight" seems apt in the present context, advising us to practice self-restraint:
The Times web-site has a picture of a new Tesla factory in Fremont, California where "128 robot arms do the same (human) work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human".
A quote from the book "Star Sight" seems apt in the present context, advising us to practice self-restraint:
The danger that lies ahead in the near future then is that today's Prometheans, trusting their power to change the future will lead us into disaster and unwittingly pay the heavy price of losing the future itself ! Wisdom therefore, consists in restraint and making our choices in harmony with and not contrary to Nature's laws which we should try to understand fully. With our intelligence, we have reached a stage when anything is possible; it is now time to use our power of discrimination and choose what is holistically desirable for all of us.
Book: Star Sight by Patricia Wallace Garlan; Maryjane Dunstan; Dyan Howell Pike (1977)
Read a longer extract from this book at: http://kirtimukha.com/surfings/Cogitation/6Futurists.htmExtract from the Times article:
This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhonemanufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.”
In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.
In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.
Tesla Factory, Fremont, California, USA
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