[Animats]

Note how small the ratio of robots to workers still is. 2 robots per thousand workers in the US, 8 per thousand in Germany. Those are still below 1% yet having an effect on wages. What happens at 10%? 20%? 50%?

Few people thought in 1980 that there would be more computers than people in their lifetime.

[saosebastiao]

Counting robots is really hard compared to counting humans, because they are so varied in what they do. Does a robot that does two people’s jobs count as a robot? What if it only assists with a job? Do we count them at controller boundaries? Planner boundaries? It could be argued that an entire Kiva installation counts as a single robot, because it has centralized control.

[varjag]

Most mid-1980s technology books expected majority of production jobs taken over by robots any moment soon (and the rest going to ninja-like Japanese workers).

Of course what happened is the jobs went to China.

[Top19]

Lol I appreciate your comment about the Japanese ninja-workers. Reading business books from the 90’s, it is astounding how many people feared the Japanese and thought they would be the end all be all. Of course it ended with them going into a depression much worse than even our Great Recession. Michael Crichton, who wrote “Jurassic Park”, also wrote a book called “Rising Sun” right before that about just this topic. In that book, the velociraptors were the ninja workers you describe.

[Animats]

"Rising Sun" was made into a movie.[1] It has some of the early MIT Leg Lab robots in it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film)

[Top19]

Oh man forget about these / that movie! As another aside, current really David Halberstam’s “The Next Century”, published in 1991, and his main focus in the book, after Eastern Europe, is Japan. All of this is laughable now (though some say Japan will be a superpower due to the military it’s built up to counter North Korea after NK falls), but makes you wonder, what threat do we all believe in now that will really turn out to be a paper tiger in the years ahead?

EDIT: quote from the book...”the Cold War is over, the Japanese won”

[bigbugbag]

> Of course what happened is the jobs went to China.

where they are in the process of being taken over by robots.