Discussion Automation and the Lie They Try to Sell Everyone...

[Dejected 55]

Was reading today about Apple apparently beginning a plan to enforce total automation of manufacturing for their products... i.e., removal of people on the assembly line. They have been encouraging it, but I guess now they are trying to force it across the board.

Automation is generally sold as a "better way" to make products. In theory to be able to make more things, cheaper, higher quality, and faster than people. Of course this comes at the expense of needing far less workers in manufacturing, which traditionally has been a BIG part of the middle-class economy. They always brag on the savings that they will pass to the customer... though they will not pass all of it... and they gloss over the loss of manufacturing jobs by saying, yes but it will create more new higher paying jobs to maintain those automated components.

But here's the dirty secret they don't want you to think about.

They are mostly doing it to save money in production. They don't care if the products are higher quality, they don't care about selling to you cheaper... it's about maximizing profit. So... there is ZERO reason to think they would replace those lower-paying manufacturing jobs with enough higher-paying maintenance jobs to cost them money. Why would they do it? The automation requires a LOT of money invested up front. People require very little up front investment. The whole thing is they pour in money now for the conversion to automation, then reap it all on the back end when they spend very little... they would NOT do this if they anticipated spending a lot of money on higher-paying maintenance jobs.

Meanwhile, even in the fairy scenario where it was break-even on cost... there might be 10 higher-paying maintenance jobs for every 100 lower-paying manufacturing jobs... and I think I'm being overly generous with that estimation... as we've seen the manufacturing industry dry up jobs over time already... it would not be surprising to find 90+% increased unemployment in these jobs... so most of the people replaced aren't going to have a place to land even if they could qualify for those maintenance jobs.

Forget caring about people... because the companies don't... except for customers... and they don't care about you, just your money... so here's the thing, systematically growing your profit by eliminating workers also eventually eliminates customers. At some point the bottom is going to fall out of this thing. It is not sustainable. I don't think I'm going to live long enough to see it crash, but it is going to be a spectacularly bad crash... and somehow all the people at the top of the food chain are going to be somehow surprised when it happens, even though they really shouldn't.

 

[ObsidianMidnightSky]

It is kind of funny, every sentence I had a comment to, you continued with a proper following rebuttal. Spot on.

As consumers, we can choose to not support the companies that have unethical business practices and other businesses will eventually take their place if they don't change.

 

[Kali_Yuga13]

The automation requires a LOT of money invested up front. People require very little up front investment. The whole thing is they pour in money now for the conversion to automation, then reap it all on the back end when they spend very little... they would NOT do this if they anticipated spending a lot of money on higher-paying maintenance jobs.

Yes and no. I've worked for a few corporations and existing IT high-achievers got steered toward coding and automation building roles effectively pulling up the ladder for those below them and even themselves. The companies I'm sure paid for consulting and some of the software and licenses but even engineers get used as grunts.

Even before automation companies have been going "lean" by squeezing the productivity of 2 or 3 people out of a single employee. It's remarkable how few people it takes to run some big companies, at least on a technical level.

Automation means the company doesn't have to pay for employee administration overhead, fewer salaried managers, fewer HR staff, less 401k matching, less medical benefits, oftentimes less real estate (an entire call center staff can be replaced with AI bots hosted on a server blade and a handful of work from home people for the complex issues for example), less lawsuits and workman's comp for injuries etc.

The Fortune 500 companies and such that pay an enormous amount of money for membership in the WEF are making business decisions on ESG scoring ahead of bottom lines in order to fit into their larger vision for the future. Some of these companies will undergo a controlled collapse and the executives presiding over it will be well compensated.

I've been to McDonalds where it's all touch screens one person working the drive thru and one in the kitchen and that's it. Almost every supermarket has maybe 1-2 lanes open out of 10 with a human cashier and then a single person doing oversight on 6-8 self checkout. So even the entry level jobs are getting automated out where possible.

It would appear that we are heading toward a society with a vast stratification gulf between the rich and the poor and a small middle class. And when I say rich I mean yachts, private security, bunkers in the mountains, hunting ranches and any other means to shield themselves from any kind of social revolt.

They always brag on the savings that they will pass to the customer... though they will not pass all of it..

Yeah that never happens. Now that they mandated low energy consumption LED lightbulbs that last 10 years have our electricity bills gotten lower? No.

Any amount one might have saved on gas by going with an electric car is offest by the upfront price + battery replacement down the line. They often start with teaser though - The first gen Toyota Prius was a good investment but now it's high end Teslas. Honestly I think they are phasing out cars to a certain extent. If it goes to universal basic income people will get a transportation allowance for Uber and Lyft.

I think the future will be like Victorian London in an economic sense but automation canceling out the need for a dirty Oliver Twist type of underclass working industrial revolution factory jobs. That leaves a lot of aimless, unskilled and unhappy people. I'm sure the back room discussions the big money players are having about what to do with them would scare the crap out of most people.