Es la revolución de los robots que van a quitar trabajo, muchos empleos se perderán en los próximos decenios…
In debates leading up to Tuesday's Michigan primary, everyone from Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders has touted plans to revive American manufacturing. It's no secret that manufacturing has been leaving the US for a while, and everything from new trade policies to targeted corporate tax reforms to repealing Obamacare has been cited as the key to bringing manufacturing jobs back to America.
Some of the ideas candidates offered to boost US manufacturing make sense, and others make less sense. But none of them are going to bring back the heyday of American manufacturing jobs, for the simple reason that when you look at the data, the decline of manufacturing employment actually doesn't reflect a broader decline in the state of American manufacturing. In fact, the output — as measured in inflation-adjusted dollars — of the US manufacturing sector is higher than it's ever been, even as manufacturing employment has barely recovered from its recession-era lows:
Two reasons manufacturing jobs are vanishing
One reason for these divergent trends is that as you might expect, the segments of the manufacturing supply chain that tend to migrate to Mexico or Asia are the ones that are the most labor-intensive and have the lowest value added in terms of complexity or intellectual property. So when factories go overseas, they tend to be unusually "jobful" factories relative to the ones that stay.
The other reason is that companies involved in manufacturing are working relentlessly to improve the productivity of their operations and do more with less labor. This is, in some respects, a cause of the relatively high wages we associate with the manufacturing sector — workers can get paid more when their work generates a lot of value. And it's in some respects a consequence of relatively high wages. If you have to pay a lot for your workers, it makes sense to invest in figuring out ways to use less of them.
Either way, the very strong implication is that any steps we take to strengthen the manufacturing sector are going to have a fairly marginal impact on manufacturing employment.
For better or for worse, the bulk of employment growth in the future is going to come from health care and other in-person services — and we're going to have to find a way to make a services-oriented economy work, not waste our time pining for the good old days of factory work.
Este hombre lo analiza también:
Hace un par de semanas un alumno presentó el gráfico que sigue; un gráfico estremecedor.
Como ven muestra varias cosas.
Por un lado el ahorro en costes laborales que se obtendría si se robotizasen el 25% de las tareas susceptibles de ser robotizadas en el escenario del 2025.
Por otro la eliminación de puestos de trabajo que la robotización supondría, considerando un supuesto agresivo y otro conservador.
Corea se lleva la palma, con diferencia, y delimita una senda a seguir. En el 2025, en Corea, robotizando el 25% de aquellas tareas susceptibles de ser robotizadas, se obtendría un ahorro de costes laborales del 33% y entre el 21% y el 47% de los puestos de trabajo desaparecerían.
En el otro extremo México (India en Indonesia, al no obtenerse ningún ahorro y no desaparecer ningún puesto de trabajo no lo consideramos). El ahorro en costes laborales sería del 3% y desaparecerían entre el 1% y el 7% de los puestos de trabajo.
España, ya ven: se halla en la cola: un ahorro del 6% y la desaparición de entre el 4% y el 19% de los puestos de trabajo. (En la cola y mal: muchos puestos de trabajo destruidos y poco ahorro proporcional).
La media de ahorro en los países contemplados: el 16%.
Bien. La cosa está clara. La robotización ahorra costes, pero destruye puestos de trabajo. Incrementar la productividad es imprescindible para reducir el consumo de commosities, pero el resultado es la rebaja en la demanda de trabajo. Para aumentar la productividad hay que robotizar, lo que genera y aumenta el desempleo estructural. La tecnología crea empleo, cierto: ultracualificado pero escaso, y destruye diez o más veces del que crea; y a esto se une el hecho de que jamás en la Historia la capacidad tecnológica ha sido como la actual.
España tiene dos problemas: 1) escasa necesidad de robotización porque la estructura de su PIB no lo justifica, y 2) a pesar de ello no es capaz de reducir el desempleo de su población activa: el peor de dos mundos posibles.
Las maquinas quitarán el trabajo a las personas. Van a ser millones los trabajos que van a desaparecer en pocos años… Lo que nos faltaba!!!
Davos Robot Eclipses Davos Man as Gloom Descends on World Elite
First there was Davos Man and then Davos Woman. Get ready for Davos Robot.
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Alibaba’s Jack Ma will share the spotlight with a prize-winning South Korean robot called HUBO at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum this week in the Swiss ski resort. It’s a presence they’ll have to get used to.
The adult-sized automaton, which can climb stairs and enter and exit a car, will be a star attraction at the conference. It illustrates a looming challenge for the 2,500 elite delegates: How to protect their companies and jobs by harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, without exacerbating the economic frustration and populist discord spreading around the globe.
“If some of the predictions about tech and employment come true, then we should all be worried,” said Alan Winfield, a professor specializing in robotics at the University of the West of England, who will be speaking in Davos. “There need to be solutions.”
Jostling with robots for the attention of the assembled executives, bankers, politicians and economists will be the slowdown in China and resulting tremors in financial markets, the renewed burst of geopolitical tensions from North Korea to Saudi Arabia, Europe’s migration crisis, and the U.S. presidential ambitions of Donald Trump.
All will shape conversations in the fabled Belvedere Hotel and other venues, which over the past four decades have become the focal point for the world economy one week every January. Stardust will be spread by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Spacey, and will.i.am.
Soldiers and Generals
About 20 sessions during the four-day conference are devoted to the official theme of "the Fourth Industrial Revolution," a catch-all term for rapid technological progress.
Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, will join Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella in debating how it will "transform industries and societies." Blackstone Group Chairman Stephen Schwarzman and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan will address the technological challenges facing finance.
Occupying what organizers have called the “Robot Space” will be a showcase of
HUBO, which was developed at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The robot last year scooped up a $2 million prize for beating 22 international rivals in a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.
HUBO, which was developed at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The robot last year scooped up a $2 million prize for beating 22 international rivals in a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Other discussions betray anxiety as well as wonder. There are panels on what happens when robots go to war, potentially replacing "both soldiers and generals," and whether innovation “is failing the middle class" by eliminating jobs. Few experts dispute that the rise of robots and sophisticated software to power them will create winners and losers, as did the steam engine and the advent of mass production.
Oxford University researchers, for example, reckon almost half of American jobs are at risk of being automated within the next two decades. Most notable are high-skill roles that have so far been largely shielded from the advances of technology. A WEF analysisestimates a net loss of 5 million jobs in 15 major economies by 2020.
In finance, Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch unit is already looking to automate investment advice for some clients with accounts under $250,000. Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo & Co. also say they’ll develop or acquire robo-advisers. Even the most traditionally lucrative corners of investing may not be safe; Highbridge Capital, an in-house hedge fund of JPMorgan, is working with San Francisco-based Sentient Technologies to use so-called artificial intelligence for building investing strategies.
Zuckerberg’s Automated Assistant
Meanwhile Google parent Alphabet Inc., which will be represented in Davos by Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, has bought a string of robotics companies. And Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg this month said his personal challenge for 2016 is to build an artificially intelligent home assistant.
“If the executives are smart, they see it as a challenge that they can wield in their firm’s own interest,” said Tim Adams, a former U.S. Treasury official who now heads the Institute of International Finance. Bank of America estimates manufacturing and healthcare alone will see $9 trillion in cost savings in the next decade, while productivity could jump by almost a third in many industries.
The rub is what happens if the losses from the revolution are sufficient to stifle economic demand for the products churned out by machines. One reason to fear this is that the number of people affected could be higher than once thought. McKinsey & Co. researchers estimate that by 2025 robots or automated software will be able to do the jobs of 140 million knowledge workers.
U.S. President Barack Obama, who is dispatching the highest-profile American delegation to Davos since he took office, in this month’s State of the Union address warned that “technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job where work can be automated.” That could increase economic frustration that’s already running high in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.
Disappointment with the current state of economic affairs is a major driver of support for anti-establishment politicians like Trump, said Davos regular Stu Eizenstat, a former official in the U.S. State and Treasury departments who’s now at law firm Covington & Burling LLP. If leaders aren’t careful, we’ll have “a revolution that disenfranchises a lot of middle class people and breeds a lot of resentment,” he said.
Those on the cutting edge of developing new computing systems are more optimistic. At IBM, researchers are working to build products atop the Watson computing platform -- best known for its skill answering questions on the television quiz show "Jeopardy" -- that will search for job candidates, analyze academic research or even help oncologists make better treatment decisions.
Such revolutionary technology is the only way to solve "the big problems" like climate change and disease, while also making plenty of ordinary workers more productive and better at their jobs, according to Guru Banavar, IBM’s vice president for cognitive computing.
"Fundamentally," Banavar said, "people have to get comfortable using these machines that are learning and reasoning."
Abrazos,
PD1: Todo intento de ser equilibrado y honesto, sin dar a la propia vida un sentido de servicio, es un empeño imposible…
