I wish there was more discussion about this during the election. Certainly many jobs have been lost to NAFTA and resulting exporting of manufacturing jobs...but so many jobs were just lost to automation. If NAFTA was cancelled, some jobs would come back, but many most would just come back to a US robot worker.
I'm sure the costs depend on position and constantly based on technological progress, but I imagine it is something like this:
$ US Human Wage > $ US Robot Cost > $ Overseas Human Wage
I imagine the two right-hand categories swap around given technological progress, but the logical conclusion for most jobs would likely be:
$ US Human Wage > $ Overseas Human Wage > $ US Robot Cost
Yeah. Protectionist trade policies are going to be great for software engineers. What was a bad investment in automation software when it replaced a $1/hour job starts looking like a good investment when it's a $15/hour job it's automating away.
We've already seen this with jobs that are impossible to outsource, like retail. That self-checkout machine may have been expensive to develop, but it's a lot cheaper than employees. (The machines aren't perfect, but one employee can now check out 10 customers simultaneously.)
In some ways, nothing will change in America. The jobs were already gone, so nobody is going to lose their job to a robot. That said, it's time to start coming up with a real plan for unemployment. We aren't taxing automation. We aren't considering a world where labor demand is less than labor supply. We have no plan for the future, and the future is not going to be coal mining and making cheap flip flops for Wal-Mart. We are going to have to fund basic income, or some sort of welfare system without a social stigma. (All the foreign investment driving up housing prices isn't helping either.)
Of course, we aren't immune either. Most software isn't actually needed; as we improve off-the-shelf software, custom software will be in lower demand. (Ever pay anyone to write you a custom image manipulation program? Nope. Photoshop is fine. Really not sure why we aren't "done" with HR databases or shopping carts yet.) And, of course, machine learning will help fill in the one-off customizations that are sometimes necessary. And, maybe it's going to start creating art, music, literature, and whatever else we consider "uniquely human". Pretty sure I'll be dead by then, but someone should probably start planning. You thought "peak oil" was a problem... but we're already past "peek labor".
Which they won't be. The average American can't seem to understand that trade negotiations are just that, negotiations. Each side gives up something they would like to have for something they'd really like to have.
Additionally, protecting American labor isn't inherently good. Maybe these companies decide to bring back a few hundred $40k/yr manufacturing jobs, but offset the cost by outsourcing a few hundred $60k/yr office jobs.
Alternative headline: eyeglass manufacturing still onshore.
Not discussed: where are the machines made, where are they supported from and where is the actual production expertise? When lessons are learnt about manufacturing where does that wisdom accumulate?
My opinion (just an opinion) is that these factors matter a lot more at a national level than whether people or robots end up shaping a lens.
Alternative headline 2: a small number of jobs kept onshore by robots, most walmart manufacturing still overseas.
Seems to me like walmart is supporting workers by investing in manufacturing tech to keep them competitive with offshoring. From this perspective, the article has an unwarranted negative spin.
To be fair, in a more supportive company the workers would probably be retrained rather than shed. It looks like walmart are encouraging internal placements for them but it can be hard to tell how sincere such efforts really are.
Between 98-04 the us lost 4 million jobs to China in the same period China lost 18 million jobs to the... robots. In my mind outsourcing is really just the step before automation. I think next election is going to be about exactly that and wouldnt be surprised if a candidate is going to have basic income as one of their key promises.
There are specialty processes and materials, but even multi-focal lenses are fully automated production. Stamping out and polishing cheap polycarbonate was already a razor thin margin at the lab end.
Polycarbonate isn't a common material for glasses. It's very soft, so it needs an anti-scratch coating, and it has high dispersion so the chromatic aberration is very bad. It's only really good for safety glasses where the high impact resistance is important. Most cheap glasses are made from allyl diglycol carbonate (eg. CR-39) which has the best optical properties of any material commonly used for glasses.
I'm sure the costs depend on position and constantly based on technological progress, but I imagine it is something like this:
$ US Human Wage > $ US Robot Cost > $ Overseas Human Wage I imagine the two right-hand categories swap around given technological progress, but the logical conclusion for most jobs would likely be:
$ US Human Wage > $ Overseas Human Wage > $ US Robot Cost