The reason China beats us on cost is that their labor is cheap. If there is no labor, there's no way for them to beat us. Further, importation from China is not free.
There's no direct labour. But there's still labour. People have to program the machines, and then keep the machines stocked and running, and service the machines.
At the moment that's skilled work and a small number of US workers will gain at the cost of a bunch of low-paid workers in poor countries. But it won't be long before that work becomes semi-skilled (see also sub-contract electronic engineering) and is done in Poland / China / where ever, for less than it can be done in the US.
Importation from China is not free, but I can still buy a human-made t-shirt imported from China for a couple of dollars.
Intel is a perfectly good example of how robotic manufacturing works very well and scales.
If we can use robotics to mass assemble something as complex as a couple nanometer billion transistor chip, we can most definitely bring that to garments with some effort and scale it.
Intel can pump out a billion processors with probably a fraction of the employee count they have now (they have 100k total, but they're not all needed to just produce processors). That's intense efficiency.
Obviously the Intel example is a fairly ideal robotic manufacturing scenario. But the point is, that kind of ability will expand outward to all aspects of manufacturing as robotics leaps forward.
Actually, last I heard Intel had outsourced the actual assembly of their chips to places like Malaysia with low labour costs because that's still not entirely automated. The only thing that they do in high-labour-cost countries is patterning and doping the wafers to create the silicon die inside the chips. That's both a lot easier to automate than sewing (no moving parts) and a lot more important to automate because, due to the small scale, they need to keep out contamination by dust which is a lot easier if few humans are involved.
Initially, proprietary technology. In the longer run everyone will be competing on manufacturing flexibility and time to market. Garments are still largely ordered months in advance based on predicted sales of items (fashion buyers [1]). There is only marginal flexibility in supply (hence the rise of secondary distribution channels like Winners, Rue La La, etc).
There is a point in just-in-time manufacturing where the physical distance becomes important. It still takes around 3 weeks for a physical good to leave a Chinese factory and arrive at a US distribution center.
Nothing, but they have everything to lose from them and the US (and other nations) has everything to gain, because the US has already completely lost the garment industry.
China already has a massive supply of human labor, which is primarily why their labor costs are so low. If you were to automate their labor, it would cause substantial unemployment and or reductions in pay. I'd argue their society couldn't withstand that shock at this point. In the extremely near future, China's huge supply of labor is going to rupture their economy rather than being a net benefit. The robot productivity wave in manufacturing over the next quarter century will be extremely painful for them.
Whereas if the US re-acquires 50,000 jobs from robotics related to making garments (commodities & materials (farming, cotton), shipping, R&D, assembly of robots, maintenance of robots, etc etc) it's a massive win. Also, it would mean keeping wealth / capital in the US market, rather than sending it to another nation to the benefit of their future and labor pool. Then instead of buying a shirt made in China from Walmart, you buy the same shirt at Walmart and all the money stays domestically.
There's no winning scenario for China from robotic manufacturing.
> There's no winning scenario for China from robotic manufacturing.
This is a good point. Although I would argue that yes America would reacquire the garment industry some what, however the parts that make the machine up will still be manufactured by overseas competitors.
I think they are on the right track but the problem still lies in manufacturing chips and metal pieces cost substantially less overseas.
I agree. It's not a scenario in which the US is magically going to re-dominate 55% of global manufacturing like it's 1964 all over again. But it is plausible the US can retake a portion of manufacturing.
I wonder how deeply this could transform the transportation industry: if the production of certain goods no longer require cheap labor, wouldn't production centers naturally move closer to demand to reduce transportation overhead?
Or they will move closer to supply. It becomes a question of what is cheaper. Transporting raw/component materials near population centers, and then deal with all your waste near population centers, or building everything close to supply, far away from population centers, and polluting where "no one really cares".
I am cynical, so I'm going to guess the second. Even if we get mass robot manufacturing, we'll just let China continue to build all sorts of stuff, cause it's easier to pollute there.
The biggest threat to simple repetitive manual labor based manufacturing is robotics. The US has seen that type of domestic manufacturing decline to almost nothing over the last 30 years. China by far and away dominates that.
High level manufacturing could certainly be threatened by robotics, but labor in the US is a much smaller portion of costs when you're talking about jet engines or medical devices than sewing a shirt (eg if you're paying $80k per year for labor, you're not going to be making $7 toasters in the US at that rate, you're going to be making million dollar jet engines; and you can't get labor costs below around $22,500 total in a manufacturing environment in the US).
The US lost the garment industry because its labor couldn't compete on wages. The average garment worker in China isn't making anywhere near $7.25 per hour, which is the US Federal minimum wage. Legally the US literally can't compete on wages.
To what end? Selling them to the West and putting their own garment makers out of business?
Or using them domestically to put their own garment makers out of work? Do their garment makers then build robots? Does the math equal out? (I have no clue)
The labor dislocation would be extreme initially either way, and would be resisted. Take China's agriculture for example, they intentionally hold down productivity gains in agriculture to keep enough work available for the huge agriculture worker population and limit labor disruption.
It wouldn't take very long to severely reduce garment making in China and Vietnam once robotics gained a foot hold. The country with the least to lose in the robotic shift, that is highly capable of making that shift, would win very quickly.
In some time this may be the case. But I'm sceptical that the capital cost will be less than the labour cost in these countries. And is China the last post for cheap labour.
Global labor costs are rising, rather than decreasing. China has seen substantial increases in their labor costs over the last decade. That works against them and in favor of robotics (which will perpetually fall in cost).
Generally speaking, people always want to be paid more, but people have a very finite output capacity when it comes to base manual labor.
Robotic productivity has a radically higher output capability over time.
Interesting. Destroying mechanical looms is not a practical solution of course, but in theory yes: The benefit to so many poor people would be so great that it could be worth having an inefficient textile industry. There are probably less costly ways of helping the poor, but it would be better than the status quo.
Automation makes people redundant and you end up with people who consume but produce nothing. Those people are labelled as 'poor' as they are given minimal cash to survive on as they have no value to add to mainstream society.
If you increase automation and drop the retirement age in most countries to shorten the workforce and allow people to exist comfortably after retirement, I reckon you'd solve both ends of the problem i.e. less "poor" people and more people doing something constructive.
Smashing looms however doesn't do anything other than commit more people to slavery and poverty.
That's how revolution is born. I really wish for this.
And for the poor, well they can do as the french did hounded of years ago. History repeats itself for the Chinese, the greedy didn't learn or thought themselves to be invincible.
http://brontecapital.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/macroeconomics-o...
> ...robots could return manufacturing of smartphones, computers and TVs to U.S. shores
China will rule electronics for the foreseeable future. Even if its advantage in labor costs were eliminated, China's parts ecosystem, lax recycling regulations, and (increasingly exclusive) access to rare earth metals will keep it on top for some time to come.
Their manufacturing technology is also arguably the most advanced in the world. We can't assume that another player would win if this were just a technological problem.
It's the scale of China's monopoly on rare earth metals which scares me. I'm -very- happy that mines are re-opening in other countries, and I hope that they're around long enough that home-grown manufacturers become reliable customers.
But they simply won't have enough mines and production capacity to secure the supply. Molycorp is small enough that China can flood the market with cheap rare-earth metals just long enough to mess up their $753 MM investment in that mine and knock them out of business again. This has happened before:
http://www.ndu.edu/press/chinas-ace-in-the-hole.html
"The Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California, owned by Molycorp Minerals, was once the largest rare earth supplier in the world. Through the 1990s, however, China's exports of rare earth elements grew, causing prices worldwide to plunge. This undercut business for Molycorp and other producers around the world, and eventually either drove them out of business or significantly reduced production efforts."
Of course Chinese manufacturing temporarily loses that "access to rare earth metals" advantage if mines ramp up exports again, but if doing so can cripple foreign mining operations it may be strategically worthwhile in the long term.
Has outsourcing manufacturing to developing countries delayed research into robotic manufacturing? Seems like such low-skilled labor is relatively easy to build into robots, but likely the already cheap costs of foreign labor has made it unnecessary to invest in large upfront costs to develop robots.
KIVA Systems was / is one of my favorite examples of industrial robot automation that really worked well and demonstrated the ability to significantly improve output. They're obviously not in traditional manufacturing, but they're still a cog in the process.
That's the conventional wisdom among commercial AI-research spinoffs: the fact that you can get such cheap human labor in a globalized labor pool has been a major impediment to commercializing pretty big segments of AI research. The funding agencies even seem to agree, and have been putting quite a bit of funding in recent years into crowdsourcing and "human computation" projects to take advantage of that labor pool, instead of trying to replace it with machines.
As if the strategy of automation hasn't been tried in various areas to get back or keep jobs. In some areas this works, in others it hasn't. It also has been tried in this industry.
China is also not even the cheapest place. Clothing now comes from Vietnam, Philippines and other asian countries.
I'm also not sure making manual labor in that area obsolete is actually useful. Somehow the people in the developing countries also want to earn some money.
Science/Technology is not area where you try once, fail and never try again. Sooner or later it will be automated because there are lot of benefits: productivity, saving of nature and human resources and etc.
People in developing countries will figure out other ways to earn money. If people don't have food or money that usually because of stupid dictatorships (long-term) or not having protection against nature crisis (short-term, compare earthquake in Japan vs Haiti) but not because of lack of work.
> It's just as likely that a nation like Sweden or Germany might dominate building the robots that go in the manufacturing plants
I vaguely recall reading that the country that has had the foresight to stay at the top of the chain - making the tools that make the tools that make the goods - is Japan. I can't find a link right now, sorry.
You're right, they've been there from day one when it comes to robot manufacturing.
"The Japanese company Kawasaki Robotics started the commercial production of industrial robots over 40 years ago. Approximately 700,000 industrial robots were used all over the world in 1995, of which 500,000 operated in Japan"
There was a time when everybody thought that Japanese could not do widespread high quality manufacturing. Now they are known for the high quality. There was quality considerations of Finnish ship building, that changed too.
It's very common trend to shift from cheap country into a quality country. The industry will be seeking the next cheap place in the mean time.
This might mean that manufacture is not going to shift to Africa as Chinese might not need that cheap labor because of robotics.
> return manufacturing of smartphones, computers and TVs to U.S. shores
The problem with all that manufacturing being moved overseas is that local jobs are "destroyed". Moving back production for production's sake with the help of robots won't solve this problem. It will only give you a warm cozy patriotic feeling whenever you read "made in $your_country".
Now I think full automation is the future and in the remote future it will liberate humanity from physical labor. But there will be more changes needed than only stuffing factories with robots. We will need an economic system that can cope with a mass of seemingly unemployed/unemployable people.
I don't think that's correct at all. It will help a lot, specifically because it's not a zero sum game of just swapping Chinese based manufactured goods out for robot based goods.
The US would stop sending that capital to China (a huge wealth drain), which is helping build out their economy. The US would gain wealth and capital incentives for further robotic development. The US would gain jobs around robotics in all forms. Profitable manufacturing would need and pay for energy, buildings, transportation, and on and on. Profitable manufacturing would also pay taxes, keeping more teachers etc. employed and bolstering the weak US tax base.
Workers would be needed to create buildings, build roads and transmission lines, repair robots, scrap robots, replace robots, R&D robot tech, provide materials, and so on. It would cultivate a huge ecosystem.
Workers would be needed to create buildings, build roads and transmission lines, repair robots, scrap robots, replace robots, R&D robot tech, provide materials, and so on. It would cultivate a huge ecosystem.
Wouldn't robots eventually move into those fields as well?
Are we talking 100 years out? Because you'll still need engineers to decide where to put a building, what it should look like based on financial restrictions (a robot reading your bank account to decide how much building you can afford?) and future demand projections.
The robots aren't doing the financial decision making in the next 35 to 50 years. Assisted analysis (software), sure.
A robot isn't going to understand civil codes when it comes to laying down power lines (humans barely understand the civil codes). A human would be required to follow such guidelines and then could perhaps instruct a robot toward the actual labor.
Maybe one day in a very far off future civil laws will be understood by robots, but I'm betting that's not going to be very high on the list of things to get around to automating. It would also likely require extremely advanced AI, because the robot might have to negotiate civil code conflicts based on decisions made (and this just seems far beyond the next few decades). Who takes responsibility for a robot failing to navigate zoning laws properly?
Were not that far from mostly automated architectural design.
This is from an article(in 2005) about an automated system to design custom metal buildings[1]:
"The automated engineering done with the EDS, which is still being extended, is close to 98% complete for the simplest buildings and 50-60% complete for the most complex buildings. The tasks that are remaining are not automated, as they are either highly custom, or occur so seldom that the added knowledge capture for these few occurrences does not justify the automation cost."
There's also a similar tool for design of private construction[2].I think the software even understand civil codes.
One problem with this path of investing in robotic technologies, is that even if some jobs are created in the u.s., you help improve the technology so that many other jobs are becoming unnecessary.
It's hard to tell in advance if this will bring more jobs to low/medium skilled people , which are the ones mostly struggling, or destroy their jobs.
And another reason to be cynical, check out the labour cost on this consumer device made in China - iPhone. The savings made via further automation would be basically meaningless. I'm willing to bet that label brand clothes have far higher profit margins than i-devices too. www.asymco.com/2012/02/26/iphone-sine-qua-non/
Something that a shift to robotic manufacturing plays to is the theory of inflection points in systems. In this case, the inflection points are very very long markers in time.
1) You start at highly domestic manufacturing for most goods (mostly the case right up until the mid 19th to 20th century).
2) Global outsourcing brings huge efficiency gains through specialization and optimizations with regulation and labor costs.
3) The inflection swings back to domestic manufacturing of most goods. If the US could automate the sewing of its clothing, why not most every other country? There's no reason Italy couldn't buy enough materials to then sew all of its own clothing domestically; ditto Spain or Belgium or whomever.
The swing back also brings all sorts of benefits for security when it comes to being less dependent on other nations for your basic goods. If you could make your own clothing at a cost parity with outsourcing it to China, why wouldn't you do so? And even more important than a cost parity, is a net value parity: the capital kept domestically, the jobs kept or created domestically thrown into the value calculation.
> the jobs kept or created domestically thrown into the value calculation.
The thing is, this is not creating much jobs. Far less than it replaces. On the global level, this causes job loss. I loath luddites, but we need to understand that, and to understand that the obstacles won't be technological but political.
66 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadAt the moment that's skilled work and a small number of US workers will gain at the cost of a bunch of low-paid workers in poor countries. But it won't be long before that work becomes semi-skilled (see also sub-contract electronic engineering) and is done in Poland / China / where ever, for less than it can be done in the US.
Importation from China is not free, but I can still buy a human-made t-shirt imported from China for a couple of dollars.
If we can use robotics to mass assemble something as complex as a couple nanometer billion transistor chip, we can most definitely bring that to garments with some effort and scale it.
Intel can pump out a billion processors with probably a fraction of the employee count they have now (they have 100k total, but they're not all needed to just produce processors). That's intense efficiency.
Obviously the Intel example is a fairly ideal robotic manufacturing scenario. But the point is, that kind of ability will expand outward to all aspects of manufacturing as robotics leaps forward.
There is a point in just-in-time manufacturing where the physical distance becomes important. It still takes around 3 weeks for a physical good to leave a Chinese factory and arrive at a US distribution center.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyer_(fashion)
China already has a massive supply of human labor, which is primarily why their labor costs are so low. If you were to automate their labor, it would cause substantial unemployment and or reductions in pay. I'd argue their society couldn't withstand that shock at this point. In the extremely near future, China's huge supply of labor is going to rupture their economy rather than being a net benefit. The robot productivity wave in manufacturing over the next quarter century will be extremely painful for them.
Whereas if the US re-acquires 50,000 jobs from robotics related to making garments (commodities & materials (farming, cotton), shipping, R&D, assembly of robots, maintenance of robots, etc etc) it's a massive win. Also, it would mean keeping wealth / capital in the US market, rather than sending it to another nation to the benefit of their future and labor pool. Then instead of buying a shirt made in China from Walmart, you buy the same shirt at Walmart and all the money stays domestically.
There's no winning scenario for China from robotic manufacturing.
This is a good point. Although I would argue that yes America would reacquire the garment industry some what, however the parts that make the machine up will still be manufactured by overseas competitors.
I think they are on the right track but the problem still lies in manufacturing chips and metal pieces cost substantially less overseas.
The US isn't going to go back to holding 55% of global manufacturing again. There's zero chance of that happening. What part of that are you refuting?
I am cynical, so I'm going to guess the second. Even if we get mass robot manufacturing, we'll just let China continue to build all sorts of stuff, cause it's easier to pollute there.
That could make a huge numbers of job in the US obsolete as well.
High level manufacturing could certainly be threatened by robotics, but labor in the US is a much smaller portion of costs when you're talking about jet engines or medical devices than sewing a shirt (eg if you're paying $80k per year for labor, you're not going to be making $7 toasters in the US at that rate, you're going to be making million dollar jet engines; and you can't get labor costs below around $22,500 total in a manufacturing environment in the US).
The US lost the garment industry because its labor couldn't compete on wages. The average garment worker in China isn't making anywhere near $7.25 per hour, which is the US Federal minimum wage. Legally the US literally can't compete on wages.
To what end? Selling them to the West and putting their own garment makers out of business?
Or using them domestically to put their own garment makers out of work? Do their garment makers then build robots? Does the math equal out? (I have no clue)
The labor dislocation would be extreme initially either way, and would be resisted. Take China's agriculture for example, they intentionally hold down productivity gains in agriculture to keep enough work available for the huge agriculture worker population and limit labor disruption.
It wouldn't take very long to severely reduce garment making in China and Vietnam once robotics gained a foot hold. The country with the least to lose in the robotic shift, that is highly capable of making that shift, would win very quickly.
Generally speaking, people always want to be paid more, but people have a very finite output capacity when it comes to base manual labor.
Robotic productivity has a radically higher output capability over time.
I'm hoping this comes much later.
Automation makes people redundant and you end up with people who consume but produce nothing. Those people are labelled as 'poor' as they are given minimal cash to survive on as they have no value to add to mainstream society.
If you increase automation and drop the retirement age in most countries to shorten the workforce and allow people to exist comfortably after retirement, I reckon you'd solve both ends of the problem i.e. less "poor" people and more people doing something constructive.
Smashing looms however doesn't do anything other than commit more people to slavery and poverty.
I really wish for this.
China will rule electronics for the foreseeable future. Even if its advantage in labor costs were eliminated, China's parts ecosystem, lax recycling regulations, and (increasingly exclusive) access to rare earth metals will keep it on top for some time to come.
Their manufacturing technology is also arguably the most advanced in the world. We can't assume that another player would win if this were just a technological problem.
Is that after accounting for the reopening of rare-earth mines in California and other locations? E.g: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/rare-earth-mining-ris...
It's the scale of China's monopoly on rare earth metals which scares me. I'm -very- happy that mines are re-opening in other countries, and I hope that they're around long enough that home-grown manufacturers become reliable customers.
But they simply won't have enough mines and production capacity to secure the supply. Molycorp is small enough that China can flood the market with cheap rare-earth metals just long enough to mess up their $753 MM investment in that mine and knock them out of business again. This has happened before:
http://www.ndu.edu/press/chinas-ace-in-the-hole.html "The Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California, owned by Molycorp Minerals, was once the largest rare earth supplier in the world. Through the 1990s, however, China's exports of rare earth elements grew, causing prices worldwide to plunge. This undercut business for Molycorp and other producers around the world, and eventually either drove them out of business or significantly reduced production efforts."
Of course Chinese manufacturing temporarily loses that "access to rare earth metals" advantage if mines ramp up exports again, but if doing so can cripple foreign mining operations it may be strategically worthwhile in the long term.
Military robots that build other military robots.
No wonder they want their stuff cheaper.
Bezos among others for example are backing Heartland Robotics ($27m or more in VC so far):
http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/
KIVA Systems was / is one of my favorite examples of industrial robot automation that really worked well and demonstrated the ability to significantly improve output. They're obviously not in traditional manufacturing, but they're still a cog in the process.
The article is poorly researched.
As if the strategy of automation hasn't been tried in various areas to get back or keep jobs. In some areas this works, in others it hasn't. It also has been tried in this industry.
China is also not even the cheapest place. Clothing now comes from Vietnam, Philippines and other asian countries.
I'm also not sure making manual labor in that area obsolete is actually useful. Somehow the people in the developing countries also want to earn some money.
Edit: this is a book, and the book explains the fallacy of the above comment
People in developing countries will figure out other ways to earn money. If people don't have food or money that usually because of stupid dictatorships (long-term) or not having protection against nature crisis (short-term, compare earthquake in Japan vs Haiti) but not because of lack of work.
How so? Those robots are still made in China. Or robots making those robots, or orbot parts.
It's just as likely that a nation like Sweden or Germany might dominate building the robots that go in the manufacturing plants, rather than China.
I vaguely recall reading that the country that has had the foresight to stay at the top of the chain - making the tools that make the tools that make the goods - is Japan. I can't find a link right now, sorry.
"The Japanese company Kawasaki Robotics started the commercial production of industrial robots over 40 years ago. Approximately 700,000 industrial robots were used all over the world in 1995, of which 500,000 operated in Japan"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_robot#History_of_ind...
It's very common trend to shift from cheap country into a quality country. The industry will be seeking the next cheap place in the mean time.
This might mean that manufacture is not going to shift to Africa as Chinese might not need that cheap labor because of robotics.
The problem with all that manufacturing being moved overseas is that local jobs are "destroyed". Moving back production for production's sake with the help of robots won't solve this problem. It will only give you a warm cozy patriotic feeling whenever you read "made in $your_country".
Now I think full automation is the future and in the remote future it will liberate humanity from physical labor. But there will be more changes needed than only stuffing factories with robots. We will need an economic system that can cope with a mass of seemingly unemployed/unemployable people.
The US would stop sending that capital to China (a huge wealth drain), which is helping build out their economy. The US would gain wealth and capital incentives for further robotic development. The US would gain jobs around robotics in all forms. Profitable manufacturing would need and pay for energy, buildings, transportation, and on and on. Profitable manufacturing would also pay taxes, keeping more teachers etc. employed and bolstering the weak US tax base.
Workers would be needed to create buildings, build roads and transmission lines, repair robots, scrap robots, replace robots, R&D robot tech, provide materials, and so on. It would cultivate a huge ecosystem.
Wouldn't robots eventually move into those fields as well?
The robots aren't doing the financial decision making in the next 35 to 50 years. Assisted analysis (software), sure.
A robot isn't going to understand civil codes when it comes to laying down power lines (humans barely understand the civil codes). A human would be required to follow such guidelines and then could perhaps instruct a robot toward the actual labor.
Maybe one day in a very far off future civil laws will be understood by robots, but I'm betting that's not going to be very high on the list of things to get around to automating. It would also likely require extremely advanced AI, because the robot might have to negotiate civil code conflicts based on decisions made (and this just seems far beyond the next few decades). Who takes responsibility for a robot failing to navigate zoning laws properly?
"The automated engineering done with the EDS, which is still being extended, is close to 98% complete for the simplest buildings and 50-60% complete for the most complex buildings. The tasks that are remaining are not automated, as they are either highly custom, or occur so seldom that the added knowledge capture for these few occurrences does not justify the automation cost."
There's also a similar tool for design of private construction[2].I think the software even understand civil codes.
[1]http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2005/RCCstudy.html [2]http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2005/Norway_prefab.html
It's hard to tell in advance if this will bring more jobs to low/medium skilled people , which are the ones mostly struggling, or destroy their jobs.
See the following for more thinking along these lines: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
(This has been on HN before, Google [robotic nation site:ycombinator.com].)
1) You start at highly domestic manufacturing for most goods (mostly the case right up until the mid 19th to 20th century).
2) Global outsourcing brings huge efficiency gains through specialization and optimizations with regulation and labor costs.
3) The inflection swings back to domestic manufacturing of most goods. If the US could automate the sewing of its clothing, why not most every other country? There's no reason Italy couldn't buy enough materials to then sew all of its own clothing domestically; ditto Spain or Belgium or whomever.
The swing back also brings all sorts of benefits for security when it comes to being less dependent on other nations for your basic goods. If you could make your own clothing at a cost parity with outsourcing it to China, why wouldn't you do so? And even more important than a cost parity, is a net value parity: the capital kept domestically, the jobs kept or created domestically thrown into the value calculation.
The thing is, this is not creating much jobs. Far less than it replaces. On the global level, this causes job loss. I loath luddites, but we need to understand that, and to understand that the obstacles won't be technological but political.