>Elon Musk said he would probably launch a humanoid robot prototype next year dubbed the “Tesla Bot”, which is designed to do “boring, repetitious and dangerous” work.
>The billionaire chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla said the robot, which would be about 5ft 8in (1.7m) tall and weigh 125 pounds (56kg), would be able to handle tasks such as attaching bolts to cars with a spanner or picking up groceries at stores. Speaking at Tesla’s AI Day event, Musk said the robot could have “profound implications for the economy” by plugging gaps in the workforce created by labour shortages. He said it was important that the new machine was not “super expensive”.
>He described it as an extension of Tesla’s work on self-driving cars, and the robot would use the same computer chip and navigation system with eight cameras. But Musk gave no indication of having made concrete progress on actually building such a machine. At the point when a normal tech launch might feature a demonstration of a prototype model, the South African entrepreneur instead brought out an actor in a bodysuit, who proceeded to breakdance to a soundtrack of electronic dance music.
>Companies on the cutting edge of robotics, such as former Google subsidiary Boston Dynamics, have produced bipedal robots. But the clunky, heavy machines they have demonstrated bear little resemblance to the svelte designs Musk claimed Tesla could build. The announcement by Musk, who has a penchant for hyping new product launches, comes amid an investigation into the safety of Tesla’s full self-driving software.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/20/humanoid-tesla-bot-likely-to-launch-next-year-says-elon-musk
>I reckon people will quickly come to realise the intrinsic value productivity has to our mental wellbeing. Without the self-discipline of work to contrast against, the aimless pleasure of sex, drugs and indulgence lose meaning.
As someone who went into semi-retirement in their late thirties, I wholeheartedly disagree. I think that "people need work to find meaning in their lives" is just propaganda to stop people from going completely mental and murdering their boss. Not having to work and not having to worry about money is fucking brilliant; anyone who is in that situation and says otherwise is a liar or a lunatic.
Once you step out of the rat race, you don't really give a shit about status - fancy cars and designer suits are meaningless trinkets compared to the luxury of being able to get up at 11am, work only when you feel like it and never having to brown-nose anyone. Work stops being work when you don't need the paycheque and don't care about your career prospects, it's just organised play.
I really want humanity to reach a point where everyone can enjoy my level of luxury dossing, I'm just not that optimistic about the politics of it. I pay all my taxes without complaint and would willingly pay more because I know that I'm just a jammy bastard, but a lot of people in my position feel that their wealth is a justified reward for their hard work and innate brilliance rather than something akin to a lottery win. If automation continues to accelerate inequality, I fear that there will inevitably be a cataclysm akin to the Russian revolution or the fall of the Weimar republic.
Going into early retirement has evidently damaged your reading comprehension then.
>Work stops being work when you don't need the paycheque and don't care about your career prospects, it's just organised play.
That was pretty much the whole gist of the post, you numpty. What do you do with your time in this semi-retirement? I bet you don't just spend it drinking Tennants Super on the sofa and watching Bargain Hunt. This is the central reason we're always saying to depressed lads in /emo/, get a hobby. Productivity fundamentally releases the brain juice that tells us we're not a useless sack of shit and makes us happy.
The key point is that it's only fulfilling if it's something you willingly choose of your own volition, not the coerced labour most people identify as "work" because it's either that or starve.
My point is that there's no self-discipline involved. I'm incredibly lazy and disorganised, I spend the vast majority of my time doing absolutely fuck all, but I also have a knack for solving hard puzzles. I'm lucky enough that the kind of puzzles I'm good at solving have major commercial implications. People come to me with those puzzles and I very occasionally say "go on, that looks like fun", which is more than enough to sustain my shambolic and reprehensible lifestyle. There's no moral difference between me and the kind of scum that used to be publicly humiliated by Jeremy Kyle, I just happen to have certain intellectual gifts.
How many people might have gifts like yours, but will never find out because they spend their entire lives bailing out water on their poverty boat?
Sure loads of people will just stay at home and watch their big tellies, but in the future we dream of, that isn't an issue and certainly isn't a drain on the state.
>How many people might have gifts like yours, but will never find out because they spend their entire lives bailing out water on their poverty boat?
Loads, probably. The bigger question IMO is "how big can the gap between rich and poor grow before they start building guillotines?". Even if people just stay at home and watch big tellies, that's surely better than civil war.
You're wrong and you're defeating your own point though, to be honest ladm8. Just because you're a lazy bastard with the good fortune to be an autistic genius doesn't mean that holds true for everyone. Even still- If you didn't have your gift for solving hard puzzles, you'd have something else that fills that gap in your psyche of "why do I exist". Very few people are truly content with the raison d'etre of "scratching my arse and watching The Chase", no matter what your middle class Waitrose shopping wanker assumptions about people with big tellies might be.
Personally the thing that gives me gratification is being able to see what I have created and know I made it with my own hands. All my hobbies ultimately revolve around making stuff, whether it be music, mods for obscure 90s shooters, little plastic soldiers, or indeed furry porn. If I didn't have my regular day job I'd spend all my time making stuff, simply because that's what I enjoy. I'd be a pillar of society whom everybody respected as a source of entertainment, art, and culture and porn.
The truth is most people actually do have something they can offer to society, whether they realise it or not. The reason we have such high rates of depression in modern society, despite our incredible levels of prosperity and quality of life compared to the past, is because we have become atomised and alienated from those things that previously anchored us and gave us purpose.
I for one love scratching my arse and watching The Chase. I don't scratch my arse when Jenny is on though, that would be disrespectful. Also my hands are busy elsewhere.
>>4961 I think you're forgetting the ego dynamics of greed. I have a dream job and know from experience that it being interesting doesn't really keep me motivated when 80% of my time is still meetings and microsoft office. It's the social prestige that I run on and I suspect the same is true for most people.
I'm deeply sceptical of UBI and we (.gs) have been here before but I'll still admit that a teenager usually picks up the guitar to impress some girls.
>>4966 Why would the people rise up just because someone else owns a planet? It sounds daft when you're at the point of everyone living comfortably.
>>4967 >The reason we have such high rates of depression in modern society, despite our incredible levels of prosperity and quality of life compared to the past, is because we have become atomised and alienated from those things that previously anchored us and gave us purpose.
I'm loath to seriously enter into a utopian debate but, how exactly would you get people to resolve that sort of thing? I presume you're not going to go the coercion route so how do you get people to do community stuff.
My parents are rich enough that they could theoretically sustain me indefinitely, and indeed they have done a few times because I am a fairly shambolic adult. It was comfy, yes, but existentially it was hellish. I wouldn't buy myself a big TV, because asking mummy for your pocket money when you're 28 is, for me at least, fundamentally shameful. So I lived like a peasant. I don't know if it's just me, but I really want to have earnt whatever I have. Even if every millennial was in this situation, so I didn't need to feel as ashamed, that's pretty close to how things are in some places and I still don't like it. If they can get rich, why can't I? It would take a lot of effort for society to convince people to just sit quietly and accept free money without sacrificing their dignity. The recent furlough scheme has proven this; think of all the anti-lockdown people who didn't want to be paid to stay home.
>I'm loath to seriously enter into a utopian debate but, how exactly would you get people to resolve that sort of thing? I presume you're not going to go the coercion route so how do you get people to do community stuff.
I'm not sure what the question is. The overarching theme of my argument is that absent the threat of destitution and starvation, you wouldn't need to coerce people to do anything. They really would do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Maybe it's a naive view, sure, but despite my utter cynicism in a lot of other ways I reckon that one's right. If people were naturally lazy, we wouldn't have the society we do today, we would all just have stayed in our trees eating the funny mushrooms and picking lice out of each other's fur.
>It would take a lot of effort for society to convince people to just sit quietly and accept free money without sacrificing their dignity
Many Americans make essentially the same argument about universal healthcare- They don't want a handout, they want their independence, etc. Yet you don't hear many Brits saying the same about the NHS, even when they're wealthy enough not to need it.
If you don't like the sound of UBI, how about this: The citizen's wage. This isn't a hand-out from mummy government, it's be a fundamental right you are entitled to as a citizen, paid for by you and your ancestor's contributions to society at large.
Of course, there's still absolutely nothing stopping you working, and the idea is still that you want a decent workforce. But we're definitely going to need one that's better suited to a world of automation, and even from the most cold, lizard-brained capitalist point of view, some form of basic income makes sense in that respect. People will always still want more money on top of their free money.
>>4973 By all means top up my income however you want; I'm all for that. But I'm going to want a way to get more, and being an obedient capitalist lapdog is the traditional way to do that. Even clever cryptocurrency investments in my spare time wouldn't really do it for me, because I'm not very good at that and much better at just showing up to do a normal job. If Elon Musk's robots replace 20% of those jobs, say, some of the people who did those jobs will start eyeing up my job, and we can't both do what I do. Someone's going to wind up very unhappy.
I would absolutely quit working if I was being given enough money to live on comfortably. It would give me the freedom to do more volunteering and community-related stuff.
I think from the government's point of view, even unconsciously, there are a lot of people who'd be working to overthrow them one way or another, if they could. Forget bread and circuses, keeping people too busy earning a crust is a far more effective form of social control.
>If Elon Musk's robots replace 20% of those jobs, say
My sweet summer child, you really think it'll be so few?
Consider that a full ten percent of the labour force in most countries is employed in the transportation industry alone. Mr Musk has already just about developed, as of right now in 2021, a working automation system that will make the lot of them obsolete.
That's ten percent of all jobs total, just gone, poof. Those trucks and busses and trains and trams can and will drive themselves, and that's literally the beginning. That's the tip of the iceberg, the very first baby step into the brave new world we're approaching.
>>4976 So even more jobs will go, and even more people will be eyeing up even fewer jobs, and even more people will be hugely unhappy. Paying people to stay home and expecting them not to have existential crises is an even worse idea than I speculated! It's almost like I aimed low on purpose. You fell right into my ingenious galaxy-brained trap. Laughs evilly.
>>4972 My point is that despite abundance and despite opportunity people sometime just don't. Certainly it's true when talking of our atomised society where people, despite being lonely etc., don't go to church like in ye olden days or whatever the fruity modern replacement is.
The reason I'm loath to enter into utopian debates is that they almost always end up being a hell once you factor in people who don't fit the mould. A good deal of the motivation behind society becoming atomised is that dealing with groups of people can be a pain in the fucking arse, you're not going to bring back nosy cornershop owners chatting with every customer despite a massive line. I don't even use manned checkouts if I can avoid it.
>>4973 To get Ted Kaczynski about this, we accept the NHS because we've been socialised into it. A UBI is, however you phrase it, a new dependence upon the state over your own hard-graft and not yours, it's golden handcuffs. Assuming the state doesn't fuck with your good boy credits with expiration dates and the reduction for bad behaviour, the relationship between citizen and state is fundamentally changed.
>People will always still want more money on top of their free money.
That's also terrifying. Planet of the dolescum with politicians increasingly just doing bread and circuses to win votes with new taxes and higher inflation to pay for it.
>>4976 10% is more than what is involved in just driving the bus, you're forgetting how long the tail of the snake is. And anyway, falling transportation costs feed into economic growth in new areas which creates new jobs just as we survive without many canal boats these days.
Anyway, jobs have historically not gone *poof* from new technology, there might be economic dislocation but this has always given way to new industry. We're not heading towards luxury communism.
FIRE (Financial Indepence, Retire Early) is a thing, and there are a several blogs and guides for how that works. And the sum of it is that once money is no longer an issue you need a hobby. Or two, or three. No matter where you are on the spectrum we as humans desire company, food, shelter, and purpose. In that order.
It's not a hobby, it's purpose. You need a reason to be alive, and some find that in religion, but the better people find it in a craft. But (give or take some exceptions) none of us humans want to just vegetate and dwell on a couch. We're inherently creative.
It surely says something about our conception of freedom that having to work 40 hours a week to live in a job that it isn't really necessary for a person to be doing is freedom, while it would be a dystopian tyranny to imagine a society where you just get UBI and (say) to stop you dossing about all day, you've got to spend say 5 hours a week in some kind of creative or educational pursuit.
Not that anyone ever really proposes the latter, but it's sort of implied by the idea that we should carry on the way we are because the alternative is people spending all day watching telly. "Okay, just force them not to while still reducing the total amount that they're forced to do shit they'd really rather not bother with" never really seems to enter into it. The state coercing you to work at Tesco via the DWP is freedom, the state coercing you to learn a subject of your choice via the DWP's successor is unimaginable tyranny.
Having a job makes you time poor. You're forever prisoner to having your week constrained and you're in a constant battle for convenience to give yourself more time. If you're on the dole then you may not be rich in a monetary sense but you're no longer a prisoner to time.
UBI would bring about a new cultural golden age because people would be freed from wasting their lives in pointless make-work jobs.
Jobseeker's Allowance was introduced in 1996 and made it more difficult to stay on the dole. British music has been utterly shit for the past 20 odd years. Coincidence?
I am actually a fan of Kaczynski's, beleive it or not, so I appreciate where you're coming from.
The fundamental failure of his outlook was that it doesn't account for necessity. It's nice when you can be a principled, philosophical purist about the concepts of freedom and autonomy, but the trouble is they always come off badly when you crash them into reality. With seven billion (and counting) people on this planet and a looming ecological disaster, anarcho-primitivism is an appealing fantasy, but ultimately fucking useless.
What we actually need, honestly, is leaders who have the balls to stand up and say "Look you snivelling cunts. You're going to have your freedoms curtailed, and it's tough titties. You can cry about it all you want, but the species isn't making it through without these changes, so you're going to have to suck it up." And yes, that's a terrible state of affairs, but this is the bed we made for ourselves. We're the ones who pissed in it and now we've got to sleep in it.
I mean, the way I see it the only other option is radical depopulation, really. We simply cannot have our cake and eat it going forward, we're going to have to make compromises.
>>4976 I read a great book which made the point that it would be far easier to automate heart surgery than toilet cleaning. I wish I could remember the title.
Apparently this is a fundamental problem in AI - some of the lowest status jobs are going to be the most resiliant to robotisation.
>>4969 This is an insightful and accurate comment.
Musk is a troll - he knows what he is doing; what he has on his side, compared to Bezos, is that he is actually an engineer. Bezos used to be a C++ programmer, and some of that shows in his work at Amazon, but he is not fundamentally an engineer in the same way as Musk.
This is a kite-flying exercise, like many of his projects - if enough people bite, he'll do it.
>A UBI is, however you phrase it, a new dependence upon the state over your own hard-graft and not yours, it's golden handcuffs.
The issue is that an increasing number of people won't have the option of earning through hard graft. The rapidly increasing sophistication and falling cost of automation technology will inevitably create an underclass of people who just can't do anything better than a robot.
I don't know what the right answer is, but I think it's fairly clear that the status quo will not last. Is a completely artificial make-work job any more meaningful than a handout from the state? Can we disentangle politics from a UBI through some sort of sovereign wealth fund? Dunno m8, but things are going to get weird.
As has already been pointed out, plenty of people have already been made surplus to requirements by automation and technology. We don't have to postulate. We know what happens to them. They don't get UBI. They get made homeless.
>>4996 >The issue is that an increasing number of people won't have the option of earning through hard graft. The rapidly increasing sophistication and falling cost of automation technology will inevitably create an underclass of people who just can't do anything better than a robot.
That's not what has happened throughout history and I think we can be confident that it's not what is going to happen now. In a best case scenario we work less hours with less repetitive bullshit and injury. Again the productivity gains lead to growth which leads to new jobs just as the technology in itself opens up new fields of work.
If we're at the level of bullshit fantasy land tech then you can go out and found a colony on one of Jupiter's moons, teaming up with machines because we have different skills.
>Is a completely artificial make-work job any more meaningful than a handout from the state?
Probably. But then make-work jobs are entirely subjective in a world of agricultural surplus.
>>4997 Lolwat. People aren't homeless because technology has made their job obsolete. If you're homeless in this country then chances are it's because you're either a druggie living on the streets or you're in temporary accommodation because you want to live in parts of the country with a very high cost of living whilst having a minimum wage cleaning/shelf stacking job and can't afford the rent.
>That's not what has happened throughout history and I think we can be confident that it's not what is going to happen now.
100% disagree. What's happening now is completely unlike the industrial revolution, because we're building machines that can think. A steam hammer can't replace a skilled craftsman, a horseless carriage can't replace a skilled driver, but computers can be skilled. A lot of people are going to find that none of their skills can match those of an intelligent machine that will also work 24/7 for no money.
Realistically, do we think that we're going to retrain a couple of million lorry, taxi and bus drivers to be computer programmers or robotics engineers when self-driving vehicles inevitably take their jobs?
People complain about working conditions in Amazon warehouses, but they're >this close< to fully automating their warehouses - they rely on humans to pick up objects that are too awkward for current-generation robot arms, but the vast majority of tasks are automated. What the hell happens to the thousands of people for whom working in an Amazon warehouse is the least-worst option available to them?
Even assuming we do eventually replace all of those jobs, it's likely to be an incredibly messy and traumatic process that could take decades or centuries. Many towns and cities in the North are still suffering the after-effects of losing their pits, shipyards and factories in the 70s and 80s. A lot of people who lost their jobs in that time never worked again - they just drifted from unemployment to incapacity to a pension.
I think it's incredibly blasé to assume that everything will be fine just because we've survived so far. Every previous technological revolution has been accompanied by huge social upheaval and massive amounts of bloodshed; I don't see why the next technological revolution will be different unless we learn from the past and plan for it.
Have you actually seen the fucking dance the man pretending to be a robot does? This has to be a prank, right? Like when Joaquin Pheonix became a rapper? That kind of long winded prank that doesn't quite land.
We're not. Not with Elon's breakdance bot and not with any realistic plan to deploy machines into the workforce. The AIs we're building and looking to deploy in the workplace think distinctly different to people because the demand is in different tasks or, and this is where the real innovation is, complementing people.
In fact we actually have a window into this as Tesla did experiment with a fully automated factory but quickly discovered it was a nightmare.
>A steam hammer can't replace a skilled craftsman
Depends on the job. Many craftsman lost work and shifted into high-value goods, we saw massive job losses throughout the various waves of the industrial revolution. As you yourself go on to point out.
>Even assuming we do eventually replace all of those jobs, it's likely to be an incredibly messy and traumatic process that could take decades or centuries. Many towns and cities in the North are still suffering the after-effects of losing their pits, shipyards and factories in the 70s and 80s. A lot of people who lost their jobs in that time never worked again - they just drifted from unemployment to incapacity to a pension.
So you want to solve economic dislocation and the problem of people getting stock on the dole with...the dole and a prayer that other economies follow the same plan and people don't get mad when you massively raise taxes to pay for it. This is daft, we know how to avoid economic disruption with retraining, education and nudging people into the right careers etc. That's the kind of policy you should be advocating and what was behind those posters everyone was whinging about last year.
>>5003 >and [a prayer that] people don't get mad when you massively raise taxes
Tax robots. Even the epic meme robber barons of technology like Elon Odour and Jeff Spanish-for-kisses think we should do this, or at least claim to. You could even tax the company a whole minimum-wage salary for each robot, and give it to the person whose job was replaced.
Regarding making up awful busywork jobs, that's almost certainly what will happen. There were very few sales jobs 100 years ago, but there are loads now because there's nothing else for anyone to do. I tried to find a source to back up this claim, but most search results were just for recruitment sites offering me sales jobs, so that's QED as far as I'm concerned.
No that would ultimately lead to passing the cost onto consumers and retard innovation. You don't tax someone for having a forklift on site because several workers could be doing backbreaking labour instead. This whole discussion seems to hinge on a lump of labour fallacy where there's some magical fixed-sum of jobs to do.
>Regarding making up awful busywork jobs, that's almost certainly what will happen. There were very few sales jobs 100 years ago, but there are loads now because there's nothing else for anyone to do. I tried to find a source to back up this claim, but most search results were just for recruitment sites offering me sales jobs, so that's QED as far as I'm concerned.
What's happened is the most developed economies moved into consumer industry, IT and very high-skill manufacturing jobs. Just as the surplus agricultural labour once fed into the cities to create specialists during the Bronze Age.
>A lot of people are going to find that none of their skills can match those of an intelligent machine that will also work 24/7 for no money.
The important part that needs a lot more emphasis is that will work 24/7 for no money.
In the eyes of big business, that makes up for almost any reduction in the quality of work. It doesn't matter if the robot pizza boys run over a dozen people every week, Papa John is probably still coming out better off because he no longer has to pay real any delivery drivers.
Most of you are already familiar with the way your bosses would rather force more work onto already overloaded teams and "streamline" their processes or whatever shite, regardless of the consequences it has. You can see with your own eyes it's barely staying upright but from a management perspective, the costs are saved, the profits go up, therefore it's a 100% success. Automation will be much like that.
>The AIs we're building and looking to deploy in the workplace think distinctly different to people because the demand is in different tasks
Nobody cares about "thinking differently" or "complementary skills", they just have a business objective that needs to be satisfied - lowering costs, increasing productivity or both. Modern AIs aren't programmed but trained - we give them example inputs and outputs and the algorithm figures out how to get from one to the other.
Automation won't replace all jobs any time soon, but it's aggressively eroding the middle of the labour market. Robots struggle with varied tasks in organic environments (cleaning, waiting tables etc), they struggle with very complex creative and intellectual tasks, but everything in the middle is ripe for automation.
>This is daft, we know how to avoid economic disruption with retraining, education and nudging people into the right careers etc.
Except we don't. One in five British adults lack the literacy and/or numeracy skills expected of an eleven-year-old, a figure that has remained stubbornly high for decades. It's a cruel delusion to imagine that everyone could be a robotics engineer or a cardiac surgeon if they just put their mind to it. Some people just aren't very bright. It's not their fault, it doesn't make them bad people, but they couldn't scrape together five GCSEs to save their life.
We saw the failure of this ambition during the Blair years. We radically increased the number of people who went to university, but the number of jobs that actually require degree-level training barely changed. We thought we were upskilling the economy, but we were really just creating make-work for junior lecturers and university administrators and lumping young people with the cost.
Wages haven't gone up since 2008 because per-worker productivity hasn't gone up. An increasing share of profits goes to capital rather than labour because an increasing share of productivity is generated by capital rather than labour. The threat of automation isn't hypothetical, it's happening as we speak, we're just pasting over the cracks and hoping for the best.
Sticking loads of people on the sort-of-dole isn't an ideal solution, I've said that I don't know what the answer is, but it is abundantly clear to everyone working in AI and automation technology that we need big political change in a real hurry, because things are going to get seriously ugly. Remember when scientists were warning us about climate change back in the 90s? That's where we are right now with automation. The people in the trenches are absolutely shitting themselves, but nobody seems to be listening.
Pinning all your hopes on retraining bus drivers as computer programmers is a really risky strategy when OpenAI are doing this:
The machine-tending robot arm I showed in a previous post is a clear example of this. It's objectively worse than a human operator; it's slower at actually loading the machine, it doesn't know what to do if something gets clogged up with swarf, it can't do odd jobs around the workshop etc. None of that matters, because it does the work of three-and-a-bit full time employees and pays for itself in a matter of months.
Self-checkout machines in supermarkets are annoying for customers and increase theft, but the economics of replacing eight employees with one employee and eight machines is utterly compelling. Robots don't have to be better than you to take your job, they just need to be acceptable as a cheap-and-cheerful substitute.
>>5006 I submit that back when forklifts were a new thing, trade unions still mattered so the workers who weren't made redundant (not a huge problem because full employment was government policy) got a large pay increase due to their increased productivity. That increased pay then ran through the tax system, so the overall result was no real change if you look at things as a distribution between capital owners and labour. (including the unemployed as "labour")
Now in the shiny new progressive 2020s, where Trade Unions aren't allowed more than 3 people lurking around outside and they can have their car doors confiscated if they look at you the wrong way, there's no need for passing on productivity gains. Just keep paying the guy who makes sure the robot doesn't trip over the extension cord whatever he was being paid before and fire the rest, then pass the gain onto shareholders, the most important people in the world. Don't weep for the unemployed, the DWP will have them programming the next angry birds or get them to take an innovative new job on an app where people pay them to pretend to be their friends or some other exciting innovation in boring dysopia.
A little anecdote I quite like: Economists used to think that it was "one of the most surprising, yet best-established facts in the whole range of economic statistics" that the share of the national income that went on wages was pretty constant. Varying up and down a bit as the economy itself does, but basically steady. Then a funny thing happened across the developed world starting in the 1980s: it began to fall. As an equal and opposite reaction, the share going to capital owners increased. How very odd. I'm not even really attributing 100% of that to unions, it's just that the union's biggest political disadvantage - that it was visible - also makes it the easiest one to point to. This post is overwritten enough as it is without pointing at other things too.
Also there's a huge microeconomic difference between a forklift and a robot arm. A forklift increases the productivity of a skilled worker, granting them more economic bargaining power; a robot arm replaces a worker entirely, greatly reducing the bargaining power of whichever unskilled worker it replaced.
This the crucial difference between mechanisation and automation that a lot of people overlook. In the 1970s, printing was heavily mechanised, which made skilled printers highly productive workers with a lot of bargaining power - the printing machinery needed constant skilled intervention and everything ground to a halt if the printers walked out, but they were capable of producing huge quantities of newspapers. In the 80s (starting with Wapping), printing became automated. The new automated machines didn't need printers with specialised skills to operate them, only electricians and mechanics to maintain them. Without effective bargaining power, the protests by the printing unions were futile.
Mechanisation can benefit both labour and capital, but automation benefits only capital because it replaces rather than augments the productivity of labour.
