Doug’s Dynamic Drivel

Last night I watched I Robot and this morning I run across this article. I can tell you it certainly sent a small shiver down my spine.

The social and geo-political consequences of Toyota’s actions are going to be huge. While they are the first large company to go this route they most definitely will not be the last, nor will it be confined to their industry or to the extent they are automating. Do you think Ford, GM and Chrysler won’t follow suit in North America? As the fine motor control, AI systems and other control systems improve human workers will factor less and less into the equation. This advancement in control technology by Toyota is only the very thin wedge of a revolution that is about to explode. Tens of thousands of jobs will disappear as production lines become fully automated. There won’t be any need to ship jobs off to China or the Philippines as robot technology infiltrates every manufacturing process. If there’s one thing the history of the Industrial Revolution has taught us it’s that so long as a machine can do a job as good as or better than a human can a machine will always be the worker of choice because it will be cheaper over the course of its lifetime.

China’s recent booming economy is largely due to multinational corporations shifting their manufacturing processes to there to take advantage of low wages, little or no environmental regulation, high unemployment which means desperate worker pool, no real unions, and the list goes on and on. However corporations active there still have to deal with human labour. both skilled and unskilled, and all the costs that implies, and they still have to worry about political issues, both in China and their home countries.

Multinationals have come under a lot of attack, and rightly so, in Europe and North America for their exploitation of human resources in third world countries and their closing of factories in first world countries. I can easily see them shifting factories back to North America, but those factories will be fully robotic employing only a handful of people to manage the systems. Politicians who are in the backpockets of these multinationals will proclaim loud and strong that they’ve brought industry back to America, glossing over the fact that there are few jobs created out of it. Unfortunately, at least at first, people will buy that story for the same reasons they bought the lies about Iraq etc. You can only form a reasoned opinion on something if you have ready access to all sides of the story. Media consolidation ensures the difficulty of ever getting that rounding of information for the vast majority of people. Most people rely on newspapers , radio and tv for their information, not the internet and those media are overwhelmingly conservative.

It will be win/win for the corporations. Their lobbyists in DC will ensure that they get enormous tax breaks for moving back, they will have few labour costs once factories are operational, and the public will be hoodwinked. Ultimately this will blow up as people have to have jobs in order to buy the merchandise that’s produced in these factories but that’s long term planning and publicly traded companies are forced by the demands for ROI by their shareholders to only look at the upcoming two or three quarters. Anyone daring to step forth and point out the lack of clothes on the new emperor will be treated the same way as those who question Bush’s politics. They will be called communists, traitors and all sorts of blackguards. Dissent will be crushed.

How do you think China, with something like one quarter of the world’s population, will react as one of the major economic engines fueling their economy starts to disappear?

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