In this video CGP Grey discusses pros and cons of automation and the impact it will have on human employment. Explaining automation as a tool to produce abundance for little effort and its inevitability the author warns we need to prepare for the time when large sections of population become unemployable.
Video courtesy of CGP Grey
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In the 1950, 1960s, and 1970s it took thousands of guys working on auto assembly lines to produce cars. The same thing was true in dozens of other industries too.
Then Pontiac Motor closed their main assembly plant which had once employed 20,000 workers, a plant big-enough that it had included its own steel mill, and opened a new plant where the line workers were replaced with robots and robotics engineers.
On down the road the original robots were replaced with new more-efficient robots, and later the plant and Pontiac Motor was driven bankrupt by the combination of foreign competition and the Great Recession killing new car sales.
Today in China and Mexico it takes thousands of men working on the line to produce cars just like back in the good old days, except today they only make half of what our guys in the 1950s earned then.
Moral of the story: It is far less expensive to shut down an old human labor car line and layoff some of the workers when car sales are slow than it is to shut down a robotic plant when you owe the robotics manufacturer a bunch of money.