Sure. At the farm you need less workers now. But the loss of farm workers is surely compensated overtime by the workers needed at the tractor and combine factory, the fertiliser and pesticide plant, and the various shops which service and supply these things.
Same way automation may reduce the number of workers on the factory floor, but you now need more people to design and maintain these machines and handle their extremely complicated logistics.
Has there ever been a study which looks into this?
Machines are more efficient. For example, one automatic cotton 'gin can produce thousands of pounds of cotton per hour, that is, something like a hundred times faster than manually. If you start counting workers, it will not take 100 to keep that machine running, or to build it, given the technology of mass production.
This has been discussed since at least the 19th century. One 1970s example was typists. The photocopier meant large typing pools were now obsolete. But one technician can look after a lot of photocopiers, and those typists did not become photocopy machines assemblers
In the mid 80’s Boeing automated their 737 wing production, they built tooling to drill and install rivets on the upper and lower wing panels. This progressed over the years to include wing ribs and other substructures. The number of people to build an entire wing went from about 6000 people to about 1200. As automation has progressed, the number of people has gone down. The number of folks in tooling, that is those that build and maintain the equipment has remained static. Instead of building and maintain all the jigs and supporting tooling, the same folks built and maintain the new automated equipment. The plus for the company with this was a better quality wing which meant a lot fewer defects were found in final assembly. The number of wing rework mechanics working in final assembly went from about 50 to 10. This automation had also moved to the production of fuselages, rudders, stabilizers, doors, and composite panels. The only thing that has kept employment growing over the years is the increase in the production rate. When I started on the 737 line in 1986, Boeing was building 18 737’s a month on 2 production lines. Before the shutdown of 737 production due to problems with the Max, we were building 62 planes a month on 3 lines. If the Max problems and Covid didn’t happen, production would probably be at 76 planes a month today.
You don’t need an ongoing team of robot makers to automate your factory. You just need to have somebody build the robots once and then the job is done. There may be other factories to automate but overall it’s a dead end process.
As for maintaining the automation, I figure factory owners can do the basic math. They’re not going to hire eleven employees to maintain robots that do the work of ten employees. The maintenance workforce is only going to be a fraction of the regular workforce the robots replaced.
There’s also the collateral effect of having fewer jobs around. Even the people who are employed will find their wages are lower because of the competition from unemployed people wanting jobs.
The example I gave back when to students in Computer Literacy classes was Disney animation studios.
Back before Beauty and the Beast and such they were running on fumes. The last of the old animators were retiring and not being replaced. They were barely putting out any features and those were pretty poor quality.
But then computer assisted animation matured and within 10 years their workforce greatly expanded. And expanded and expanded. They could make features and stuff for TV so much cheaper that they could produce material at a much higher rate and make money.
The general rule of thumb is increased productivity is good overall. The issue is moving workers from one type of job to another.
We sometimes forget this economy is largely organized from the top down and those at the top are interested in profit. They are not interested in providing jobs good jobs, or good lives for everyone else. Sometimes they can be forced to supply these, or to let governments protect people, but they resist, whine, scream, and organize very effectively to remove anything, from rules on tech change to environment controls medical care, that interfere with profits.
As noted in another thread, imperial Roman pissed and moaned about the extortionate tribute it paid Attila the Hun, but that tribute amounted to only the annual income of a wealthy, but not the wealthiest, Roman senator. The rulers preferred to send thousands to their deaths rather than say to Biggus Dickus, “we’re going to tax you and your buddies to pay off the Hun and preserve your privilege.” Plus ça change…
How did that work? According to your post, they greatly expanded the number of workers plus added computers but the cost of the resulting product went down. Where was the savings?
If you can make 1 movie a year for $100, vs 20 movies a year for $1000, you are spending more overall, but spending less per movie. And if the movies also come out as higher quality, that’s a bonus as well.
They weren’t saving money, they were spending more than they were, however, they were also making a lot more, so they end up being more profitable.
Technology and automation are generally a good thing. Producing more with less labor means more goods and services available to everyone.
The problem is that workers will be displaced by technology, and they may not have the skills required for the new jobs that are created. And it’s also not reasonable to assume that there will always be new jobs created to absorb those displaced.
I’m assuming it was the cost per output (I.e., movie). As your return on investment increases, dollars—much more profitable dollars—will follow. Making up numbers: before I was making a 2% return on my investment because it cost so much for each flick. Now I get a 15% return because it’s cheaper per unit.
Short version: studies looking over history have been done and to date technological advance have not resulted in less employment. Higher productivity yes and new jobs that result from that higher productivity. Not necessarily jobs making or servicing the machine but that occurred because of how much more was being produced for less.
The cotton gin example was given. In that case the “jobs” were mostly filled by slaves. The gin reduced the number of slaves needed to process the cotton once picked. It did not take too many to build or service the machines. Result was cheap cotton which drove massive increases in demand which required more slaves to grow and pick the cotton that was now in higher demand. Jobs also created in the north by the availability of cheap cotton allowing for products using cotton to be cheaper …
Historically labor needs have not decreased as a result of automation and mechanization, from the first needle used to sew hides together, to the plow, on. Is this time different? No one can know.
Historically, we haven’t had such a fast pace of technological development, and there has always been people touching any product at just about every step in its journey.
When we get to the point where an iPhone shows up at your door, and you are the very first human to touch it or interact with it in any way, all the way from the materials being mined, processed, manufactured, and shipped, what job were you doing that allowed you to afford it?
This seems like a problem: more and more stuff, fewer people able to buy it? That’s one reason some tech honchos are in favour of some sort of UBI, but there may be a flaw in their reasoning of “give people money so they will buy our stuff”
The question is similar to whether Malthus was right about the population always growing faster than the food supply.
He’s been wrong the past 200 years. In fact, recent years has increased the food supply for a billion people.
Two things need to be said, though. First, the food supply continues to be unevenly distributed. Some people are lacking food to the point of starvation, while others waste enormous quantities of food. Second, just because we’ve been able to do this is the past does not necessary prove that we can continue to do so in the future with an ever-growing population.
Much the same can be said for mechanization reducing jobs. It hasn’t yet, but those factory jobs certainly have been lost to people in countries with higher payscales. Moving factories to the lowest paying countries in the world is totally not what people think of when they say that no jobs have been lost. We are also in the infancy of robotics. Nobody can predict exactly the art and science will improve and how commercially feasible they be will be compared to other methods involving humans. All previous predictions have been low quality. However, the number of jobs lost to automation continually increase, while the number of service jobs not yet replaceable by machines grows steadily.
On a personal note, a pet peeve is “has there ever been a study” questions. Yes, there always have. Thousands of them. Just because a subject has been studied doesn’t mean that the future is predictable. Some companies are proceeding along the assumption that machines will always be cheaper than humans, some think that having humans interact with humans creates better results, some are waiting for machines to greatly improve, some are are moving factories to take advantage of cheap labor, some are doing any number of other things. The totality is not predictable in the short-term and utterly unknown in the long-term.
As implied above, it can be noted that the studies of history also has shown that past major technological shifts have led to increases in wealth inequality, sometimes coming back down … after centuries, or after events like The Black Death. Again look to the cotton gin example. More workers needed in the South and the North both. Wealth though did not go to the slaves or the factory workers but concentrated increasingly in the hands of the few.
Again though … this time could be different. Isn’t so far in that aspect of it but could be.
Several different things are bundled into a broad question, and they scale at different rates.
2010: You have 1000 manual workers, and can sack them all when you buy 10 fully automated robots. All the ?50 support staff [payroll, toilet cleaners, car pool mechanic etc] get sacked. Buy 5 machines and you can sack 500 workers, but all the support staff will still be needed for the remaining staff.
2022: Buy 10 robots and you move into a technological environment you’ve previously not invented in. Now you are putting money into an industry that builds and automates mechanical systems and creates jobs that did not exist in 2000. Probably not a job in your factory but in the local off-shoot of Silicon Valley.