试听180秒009：Robots Will Never Replace All Human Workers, or Will They?

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Hello, Himalaya subscribers. My name is Timothy Taylor. 

The word robot is about one hundred years old. The word was invented back in nineteen twenty in a play by a writer from the country that was then known as Czechoslovakia. The main character in the play was named Rossum. And the title was Rossum’s Universal Robots. It was not a very good play, but it did get a lot of interest. And it was soon translated into other languages. For example, it was performed in the united states in new york city as early as nineteen twenty two. Worries about robots and automation and how it might affect jobs and everyday life go back a long  long time.

In this talk, we're going to discuss three main points. First, where does China stand on production and use of robots? How fast are the robots arriving in China? Second have machines and automation in the past lead to fewer jobs or more jobs at other times and other places. And third, how robots can be part of a process of better jobs and economic growth. 

Let's start off with the first main point. Where does China stand on the production and use of robots? There's an organization called the international federation of robotics, and it collects data from industry groups in different countries about robots produced and used. Their data shows that sales of industrial robots from China are more than twenty five percent of the global market, which is by far the largest for any country in the world. It's more than twice as high as the next largest producers of robots, which would be Korea. 

Thus another measure is to look at how many robots are there in a country for every ten thousand workers in a manufacturing industry. Using this measurement, China is rising fast, but it is not the global leader. In two thousand sixteen, China had sixty eight industrial robots for every ten thousand manufacturing workers. The global average for the countries that this federation was looking at was seventy four robots for every ten thousand manufacturing workers. But in the world leaders Korea, there were more than six hundred robots for every ten thousand workers. 

Germany and Japan have about three hundred robots for every ten thousand manufacturing workers. And the US has about two hundred. However, China is rising rapidly in this category. Back in two thousand thirteen, China had only twenty eight robots for every ten thousand manufacturing workers, it had more than doubled by two thousand sixteen. And industry leaders in China are aiming for a hundred and fifty robots for every ten thousand manufacturing workers by about twenty twenty. So it seems fair to say that lots of robots are being made in China. And also robots are definitely coming to China, not only in the manufacturing sector, but everywhere else. 

So let's consider our second main issue. Have automated machines and robots lead to fewer jobs or more jobs at other times and places? This has often been a worry of workers over long long periods of time that machines were going to take jobs. In fact, you can point back to a period around eighteen ten in England, more than two hundred years ago, where there were riots from workers who in the past had been those who had been weaving cloth by hand. They were worried about the new machines that could weave cloth without needing the hand weavers, and that their jobs might be permanently lost. 

Now, if the worry is that machinery reduces the total number of jobs in an economy, this worry just seems to be untrue. I mean, after all, look at the experience of the United States, Germany, Japan, other high income countries around the world over recent decades, or even over the last couple of centuries. There has been just a huge amount of automation over time in these economies year after year decade after decade. If automation reduced the total number of jobs, there should be massively high unemployment in these countries. 

Or look at countries right now that have more robots in their manufacturing sector, like Korea, Japan, Germany, the United States. Now, these economies have their ups and downs, their strengths, and their weaknesses. But overall, they are certainly not experiencing far far higher levels of unemployment than other countries around the world. In fact, compared to the rest of the world, they're doing fairly well economically. 

Or think about China's experience with the economic reforms that started in the late nineteen seventies. There since that time have been enormous editions to automation, and now a sharp rise in robots all across many parts of  China's economy. 

But China has not experienced a dramatic rise in unemployment or a dramatic fall in the total number of jobs. How can this be? I mean, after all, it's obvious that in a certain factory or in a certain agricultural setting, machines do replace workers. Why doesn't this reduction in one place lead to a reduction in the total number of jobs? It must be that in other ways, automation and robots can lead to more jobs. After all, the reason for having machines and robots is that in many cases, it helps workers to produce more. 

A farmer with the machine will produce more. A manufacturing worker with a robot can produce more. In fact, when the machines arrive, often output expands in a way where some additional workers can be hired to offset those who were replaced. Think about it. If the steel industry in China did not have any machinery or robots, would it be hiring workers? Or would it just probably ceased to exist? In addition, when machines and robots arrive, it creates other jobs that involve making the new machinery, making the no robots, building them, servicing them, programming them, keeping them going. So a whole bunch of new jobs are created. And it's not just new jobs focused on the machinery and robots.

When production expands, there is additional buying power to support all kinds of new industries. Industries that didn't even exist before. So there can be new kinds of consumer goods or bigger and better places to live, industries like restaurant meals or personal fitness or health care and education. There are all sorts of jobs that didn't even exist before robots that come to exist. Like being a software programmer, for example. So the point is that although robots do cause a loss of jobs in certain specific places, they also reshape the economy. They cause the economy to shift in a way which then leads to other jobs in other places. 

What tends to happen is that robots lead to a shift away from simple repetitive tasks. A recent example from the US  involves a chain of retail stores that are called Walmart big big big retail stores are there really large and when people have to go up and down the aisles looking for what is running out on the shelves and then go tell people in the warehouse. So those people can come and put more on the shelves for the customers. This job of running around the aisles looking for what needs to be replaced is boring. And people don't particularly like to do it well. At Walmart they start hiring robots to do the job. Robots go up and down the aisles, they scan what's needed and they can go get supplies and put stuff back on the shelves. 

Now you might think the workers at Walmart would be upset with these robots, but actually they are happy not to do this boring job. They're happy to spend time helping the human customers instead. In fact, at some Walmart stores, they give the robots names and make them little name tags. And they even introduced the robots to the human customers. In other words, robots can make work better.

And that takes us to the third point, how robots can be part of a process of better jobs and economic growth. To illustrate this, let me tell you a story that economists like to tell to show how more equipment and more robots shouldn't be viewed as reducing jobs, but it's combining to produce better and more effective jobs. 

This story happens in a low income country. And in this country, the government has started a project to build a dam and hired lots of workers to build it. An economist comes to visit the construction site, the economists looks out and sees that all the workers have shovels. They are digging dirt into piles, putting the dirt in wheelbarrows, carrying the dirt over to where the dam will be flattening the dirt out with shovels. And the economist watches this for a while and then says, this is crazy. I know this is a low income country, but you're never going to get the dam done at this rate. And it's not gonna be a very good dam either, but the government official says to the economist, I understand your argument, but you are thinking like an economist, and you need to see the bigger picture here. 

This isn't just a project to build a dam, IT's a way of providing jobs. If we got equipment like a bulldozer and construction equipment, it would replace all these workers. And there wouldn't be any jobs. We don't want to replace the jobs. The economist thinks about that for a while and then says, you're right. I didn't understand that. Your real goal here was to provide lots of jobs. Now I understand your goal. And I have a different question. Why do you have all these workers with shovels and wheelbarrows? Why don't you make them use spoons? 

After all, hovels and wheelbarrows make the work so much easier. If you give the workers spoons, you would have so many more jobs. Now, the meaning of this little story is to point out that jobs are not the only goal. The goal of an economy is jobs with good pay, jobs that build skills, jobs that continue into the future. Sure. When you look at the history of China or the US or other countries around the world, either over the decades or at present, it really doesn't seem that more robots have ever been associated with fewer jobs. 

This doesn't take away the worry, though. People say, well, maybe the new robots will be different. After all, new robots might be able to understand spoken language. They may have capabilities like vision and movement. They might be able to have artificial intelligence to experiment with ways of solving problems and finding solutions. They might be interconnected. So if one robot finds a solution, it can communicate that solution to other robots. Moreover, you can imagine a future of robots that doesn't just happen in manufacturing anymore. And we're starting in many places to see robots in service industries. 

Robots could also work in hospitals, perhaps bringing meals and changing beds, bringing many medications and things like that. Perhaps we'll even reach a point where robots have enough intelligence, they can program and build other robots. You can imagine all of this and more. But remember, people have been doing this kind of imagining about robots for more than a century, and they've been having these worries about machinery and automation for a century before that. The global economy has about two hundred years of experience with increases in automation and more than fifty years of experience with computers and information technology. 

We're not even mentioning other kinds of technology in areas like chemistry or new materials. There's been really dramatic changes. But although the kinds of jobs keep changing, the total number of jobs doesn't seem to go on a downward trend. It's also true that China has a particularly interesting challenge here. For many countries around the world, and China is one of them. The total population has been increasing much less quickly. And in general, there are more older people and fewer children. In fact, if you just look at the working age population in China, defined as ages sixteen to fifty four, the total size of that group has actually been falling for a few years, and is expected to keep falling in the future. 

So robots can be one of the ways of helping that smaller number of workers generate more output. It does suggest a bit of personal advice though, at your job, you should be thinking about the ways you can work with machinery and with robots and with artificial intelligence to be a more productive worker. After all, even if your company goes broke and that happens sometimes you have skills and knowledge valuable to others. And I promise you, even if you don't want to learn, lots of other people are willing to learn, and they will have an advantage over you if you don't learn those lessons as well. 

We've been talking in recent lectures about goods markets and labor markets. In the next talk, we will shift over and start talking about how forces of supply and demand work in financial markets. 

I'm Timothy Ttaylor. Thank you for listening to Himalaya.