But the cost of 2 to 10 workers is equal to 10 to 50 robots.

What we need is to concoct a vast range of Barnum-statement-compatible personality disorders and distribute the money to unemployable young men through disability welfarebux.

Why haven't US working hours decreased then?

For the same reason that women are less happy than they were 50 years ago. But I dont think I said work hours would decrease, I simply said the amount of work needed to meet your basic needs has plummeted. The one does not really follow from the other....

ok fair enough.

Naw, I've blogged this before. I was a vendor, not a prisoner.

I was a manufacturing engineer, a big part of my job was to design and install factory floor and material handling automation. Let me try to clear up a few misconceptions here.

First, factory automation itself rarely directly destroys employment. I can't think of any example which I worked where that was the case. The reasons being that (1) robot lines are still quite labor intensive. You still need operators, except now they can work two or four machines instead of one. You need more maintenance guys, more techs, and more housekeeping. You need more engineers, and more support from vendors. Second (2) factories automate as part of a capital improvement program. IMO this was driven by a desire to increase gross widget production. Often customers would add lines and jobs at the same time they automate.

Today's factories crank out significantly more gross widgets than our grandpas. So why is there significantly less peeps working there? Well back in the day there were a whole lot more levels of middle and low level managers. Those jobs mainly disappeared. A lot of those jobs that remained have been moved to corporate offices. There's a whole lotta outsourcing now, a lot of onsite work is done by vendors, from housecleaning, the cafeteria, to engineering (like me). There used to be armies of directly employed folks inventorying, shipping, receiving, and moving around raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished product. Modern JIT supply chains, automated material handling, modern production techniques, and again off-loading to distribution centers and logistics vendors have vaporized most of the on-site support crew.

Vhawk is pretty on the money here. People are still focused on jobs requiring physical labor being replaced by automation whereas the day where most knowledge work is replaced by software is much sooner than most people expect.

Not sure that is true.

Anyway you are missing the point again.

The point is though if I cut the wages of my workers by 50% and then hire enough to double my work force, the way productivity is measured there is zero increase in productivity.

Productivity is measured by output/hours of labour to produce.

Cheaper workers dont mean increased productivity, so I dont see how cheapr robots, which is just a cheaper worker ultimately does, any productivity has to come from the intrinsic level of output of the robot.

What is the significance of robot labor? How is a robot different from any other machine? The point of measuring productivity is to figure out how much human effort it takes to make stuff. The contributions of robots and hammers and internal combustion engines do not count by design.

EDIT: In your example, we fire 10 workers and replace them with 10 robots who cost less but do the exact same thing. By hypothesis, the same amount of stuff gets made, and 10 guys go home and play Xbox rather than having to work in a factory. Or they get different jobs and more stuff gets made. Either way, the system is more productive than it was before the robots showed up because it makes the same amount of stuff with less human effort.

You are completely conflating to very tangential discussions because they both involve robots.

Anyway you are wrong, there will still need to be a way to choose from configuration of production/output X to Y and however much stuff there is, its still finite.

The best way to do this is via a currency mostly given out via the government or analogue that is backed by the surplus it is the representation of.

You still have consumer choice configuring output like you do now. Maybe have some decided by AI/committee/politicians, again like you do now apart from the AI bit.

There would probably be a secondary economy where I bartered or sold for robo credits my craft or whatever skills.

However much stuff there is, is finite? Explain.

Thanks, get it now, robot is just a tool. Been watching to much West World.

Vhawk talked about abundance, however there will still be limits until we can manipulate base matter/energy. There will still be an opportunity cost over making X instead of Y, there will still need to be allocation of recourses to production.

They are a tool on that show also, just depends how you want to use them.

With remote jobs, one third of a switch crew is eliminated(the most expensive third at that). Even though you can switch more cars with an engineer, is it one third more? I doubt it, especially in a hump yard. In the right applications, remote controlled locomotives do reduce the cost per car switched which is how productivity in that field is measured.

Freight railroads are developing/implementing software which re-bills cars to reduce switching moves.

Something about a tree falling in a forest and no one hears about it

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...09e21702d35d5?

No, your making the same mistake regarding confusing productivity and profitability. Consider...

I can mow my own lawn with a machine, or with the scissors on my Swiss Army knife. Which way is more productive?

Let's say my boss cuts my pay in half, but I continue to do the same quality work. Did I just become more productive?

Let's say an owner, who is paying a dude $10/hr to work a machine in the US, decides to ship that machine to Thirdwordistan, where he can pay a dude $1/hr to work the same damn machine. Did that machine become more productive in transit?

Forgive me if I get some of the terms wrong but I think productivity is the wrong sort of measure. Firms are running to stand still in productivity terms as they cannot just maintain their prices as they and their competitors produce stuff using less human labour.

Daca, it's important to distinguish between productivity and productivity growth.

Productivity is growing. However, there has been no increase and even a decrease in the rate at which it is growing. Think of it as velocity vs acceleration.

That's because the Democrats refuse to stand up and take credit for their successes. They couldn't take credit for successes from the stimulus because that's "big government" and "big government" gets outpolled by "small government 52-48 so we can't use it in messaging.

Own Socialism, argue what good it can do. People will be more receptive to it than a lot of people think.

What is happening now is not like what happneed before. To put it in crude terms: Before we automated existing jobs done by people. Now we're beginning to replicate our abilities to do any task - as we increasingly do that it wont matter what new jobs are created.

Exactly. A lot of the singularity people are nutjobs who think you can just extrapolate any line into the future however you want, but the basic idea that building machines that build machines puts you into the realm of the geometric rather than the arithmetic is inescapable.

Logistic, not geometric.

haha maybe i should have been clearer, but i get this difference. the question was why, if this is an entirely new thing, does the change look so much like it's always looked, maybe even slightly slower.

Productivity measure will have to be examined. For example, in terms of productivity, a Gordon gecko era brick cellphone is the same as a modern smartphone but functionally they are completely different beasts. What's more, the Gordon gecko era cell phone had a much higher market value at that time than a modern smartphone in 2016. So that's part of the problem of looking at productivity growth numbers.

I am not saying there aren't inherent problems but at the same time, the measurement is fairly incomplete. I have some ideas on the inherent problems but it will take a while to sort them out and make sure they are logically correct.