How to Make America's Robots Great Again

[yallerdawg]

More losing with Corrupt Trump's regressive policies.

Source: New York Times, by Farhad Manjoo

Here’s what you might call an alternative fact: American factories still make a lot of stuff. In 2016, the United States hit a manufacturing record, producing more goods than ever. But you don’t hear much gloating about this because manufacturers made all this stuff without a lot of people. Thanks to automation, we now make 85 percent more goods than we did in 1987, but with only two-thirds the number of workers.

Pushing a robotics revival in the United States would be more difficult than in China, where there hasn’t been much outcry from workers over the government’s embrace of automation.

“There is not a public conversation in China about the pluses and minuses of automation,” said Scott Kennedy, a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They don’t talk about the losers in society from globalization or potential automation.”

In the United States, on the other hand, losing is all we seem to talk about. Mr. Trump rose to power in part because he crystallized a feeling among voters that we have lost our edge to China. He promised to bring jobs back to America. In a hot-take political climate that can’t stomach nuance, an investment in robots would be seen as a betrayal of the manufacturing workers he promised to save.

Read it all at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/technology/personaltech/how-to-make-americas-robots-great-again.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region

[longship]

1. Just never forget, "Gort. Klaatu barada nikto."

[mwooldri]

2. Not just robots, it's Artificial Intelligence in general.

For starters, IBM's Watson is replacing a bunch of people at an insurance company in Japan. That to me was a recent news headline that stood out. In my own industry, AI will replace the call center rep.

[HughBeaumont]

3. Each generation is getting screwn by Repub policies.

Millennials: Finance half a mortgage for college, shove them out to an underpaying (and soon to be sparse) job market.

GenX: Have next to nothing saved for retirement since that requires disposable income that's being gobbled up by merely surviving.

Boomers: Getting screwn in pending and current retirement due to ridiculous medical costs. Most putting off retirement because, well, they can't.

But hey, let's automate and offshore all the jobs; and when asked what will replace them, vaguebook, duck and dodge with terms like "Innovation", "Opportunity", "Technological advancement", "Entrepreneurship", "new industries".

Because that's what's great about Capitalism; it's almost assured to solve the problems it creates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . right?