On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 10:11:44 -0400, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 16:34:46 +0700, John B.
wrote:

On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 19:21:45 -0400, Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Sat, 06 Jun 2015 18:01:17 -0500, Ignoramus26399
wrote:

On 2015-06-06, Gunner Asch wrote:
Btw....the unemployment figures are growing again..particularly in
places that have instituted that $15 min wage.


I am convinced that $15 minimum wage is a disaster for cities that
adopt them, because it will decimate low income communities through
unemployment and crime.

I am very interested in what happend to Los Angeles a few years after
their new minimum wage goes into effect.

Generally, robots will replace low income people anywhere, but not as
fast as where a high minimum wage is adopted.

After all, a robot can flip burgers pretty well!

i

If a robot can flip burgers, it won't make a damned bit of difference
what humans are making in wages. They're done, whether it's in five
years or five years and six months.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop automation. And what wages are
being paid has nothing to do with it. The technology has it's own
pace.

But, I suspect that labour costs do have an influence on how quickly
robots will be added to the work force. If the robot is, say a half a
million dollars, and labour is $1.10 an hour then management looks at
the robot as something to be added in the future 1 robot=155 years of
labour. If labour is $15.00 an hour than the utilization of a robotic
work force becomes a much more important factor. 1 robot = 11.4 years.

But it just doesn't work that way in practice, John. Over the years
I've done dozens of stories on robots and other automation, visiting
and interviewing the managers who actually are doing it. The usual
scenario, in manufacturing, involves making a big operational change,
usually to expand capacity or to get more production out of existing
resources. That simple wages vs. investment calculation that many
people think is the determinant is not it. It is so trivial, compared
to the total costs and operational disruptions involved, that it
hardly gets a nod.


But I didn't say that labour cost was what drives the change over
merely that labour cost may well influence it. And I think that I am
probably correct that cost is a large factor that is taken into
consideration.

Some years ago I did some research on materials moving (conveyer belts
mostly) methods here in Thailand and in the process came across some
companies that were making "robots" for some of the car plants here.
Labour costs would have been in the 100 - 150 baht/day range then and
in every case the robots" were designed to do a single job more
consistently than doing it by hand. One I remember was a robot to weld
the axle tubes into a differential housing. It was faster than a human
but, according to the robot maker, the importance was that it didn't
make any bad welds :-)

Further, implementing robots usually doesn't involve laying people
off. Most often, the influence on employment is about people who are
*not hired*, sometime in the future. It has a strong effect over time,
but it's not a straight, immediate substitution.

Again, I didn't say that. However, unless the U.S. is different from
the rest of the world, the cost of making the product is a very
important factor in whether the company is viable, or not, and almost
without exception labour costs are the first item looked at when a
company is feeling a money crunch.

In services, automation is implemented mostly through IT, not through
mechanical hardware. That's a different scenario and I don't have much
direct experience with it.
--
cheers,

John B.