America’s Dazzling Tech Boom Has a Downside: Not Enough Jobs

>>57469623
>posts link to paywalled article
screenshot it or put it on archive.is or something if you wanna talk about it

I don't get it
>not enough jobs
>chart showing number of jobs increasing over time

>>57469668
Manufacturing employment goes down by way more than tech employment goes up (left chart)
those small number of tech workers produce almost as much output as the still much larger number of manufacturing workers (right chart)

and presumably that article will mention something about how the tech industry, like every other sector, neither needs nor wants the unskilled workers that manufacturing has been laying off.

>>57469693
Right. Presumably because those manufacturing jobs are actually still increasing, they're just being done in other countries, while software publishing hasn't been outsourced as quickly. But that is a political/corporate problem, not a tech problem

>>57469711
>Presumably because those manufacturing jobs are actually still increasing, they're just being done in other countries

Foxconn, who makes most of Apple's stuff, laid off 60,000 factory workers earlier this year. They've been replaced with robots. Chinese wages have risen to the point where it's economical to substitute machines for them. Industry will use labor instead of robots if that labor is cheap, but make the labor expensive ($15/hr is expensive, btw) and they'll decline to use it and automate.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966

>>57469747
Yeah that's definitely true. And will continue to happen in all sectors. Will produce a few jobs for robot creation/repair, but far less than will be lost. I guess I'm not sure as to how many jobs in tech manufacturing are currently possible for robots to do. I know they've got some impressive robots, but surely a good chunk of these jobs require a human touch still? Maybe not for long.

Is the robot future our collective hell? Everything will be cheaper replacing high cost labor with low cost robots, but we'll all be too poor and jobless to afford any of it.

>>57469784
>I guess I'm not sure as to how many jobs in tech manufacturing are currently possible for robots to do
Most of them. Soldering stuff to PCBs is pretty much a task tailor-made for a robotic assembly line. Reason being that there isn't any human touch. You don't want there to be, actually, you have a blueprint for some circuit board or something, and you want a hundred thousand identical copies of it made. That repetitive, well-defined, well-specified, high-precision assembly is exactly the kind of thing a robot can do very well. There'll be a few mid- and high-skilled workers keeping the factory in running order, and high-skilled people designing the things the factory makes and programming the robots to make them, but no low-skilled ones.

This kind of thing is why tech is so cheap. An IBM PC/AT, a 286 machine released in 1984 or so, cost about $20,000 in today's money. Much of it was hand-assembled. (Though not all of it at IBM, the disk drives came from other companies, etc) Nowadays you can have a computer for under $500. Once you've set up the factory to produce something (like a motherboard), producing additional units of it is very cheap indeed.