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The "real" challenge technology presents isn't that it replaces workers, but rather displaces them.
The robots perform tasks that humans previously performed. The fear is that they are replacing human jobs, eliminating work in distribution centers and elsewhere in the economy. It is not hard to imagine that technology might be a major factor causing persistent unemployment today and threatening “more to come.”
Surprisingly, the managers of distribution centers and supply chains see things rather differently: in surveys they report that they can’t hire enough workers, at least not enough workers who have the necessary skills to deal with new technology. “Supply chain” is the term for the systems used to move products from suppliers to customers. Warehouse robots are not the first technology taking over some of the tasks of supply chain workers, nor are they even seen as the most important technology affecting the industry today.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/scarce-skills-not-scarce-jobs/390789/
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Wednesday April 29 2015, @06:12PM
The article focuses on the question of "are their skilled jobs available that are currently unfilled?" I don't doubt that such jobs exist.
The real question is "are there skilled jobs available that it makes sense for people to try to fill?"
Putting in the time and effort to learn how a given particular piece of technology works makes sense only if the return on that investment is long-term positive. Yes, there may be jobs available. How difficult is it for workers to gain the skills to fill those jobs? How much more do those jobs pay over alternate jobs that are available that do not require those skills? And, most importantly, how long will those skills be of benefit? Will they be obsolete at the end of the current technology generation? Or is there a long-term career opportunity around these skills?
Learning the principles of CAD drafting is a skill with long-term job potential. Learning how to repair VHS tape rewinders is not.
It's not enough to observe that there are unfilled jobs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2015, @06:42PM
Learning the principles of CAD drafting is a skill with long-term job potential.
I'm sad to say CAD is worse than IT, at least locally. Everything using CAD, from straight up CAD to tool and die jobs (as if I'd qualify for that LOL) all require like 3 years of experience with a specific version of autocad / solidworks / mastercad, often for extra laughs they want 3 yrs on a version thats been out less than 3 yrs.
I took drafting in high school and always figured it would be a permanent backup vocation, like if I couldn't get a job in IT I could get a job drafting stuff. LOL thats harder and more ongoing work than finding IT jobs! Maybe 50 years ago a dude could just walk into a drafting office and start scribbling out prints but the market is fractionalized into little market-lets.
A good analogy is OP in the article probably needs to hire a village people lineup of a millwright, a tool and die machinist, a certified welder, an industrial maint electrician, and maybe a PE of some sort to supervise them and generally stop them from setting themselves on fire. Thats all he really needs to build any damn thing with robots, much less maintain an entire manufacturing facility. If he needs extra hands (and they probably will) then grab some apprentices. On the other hand if he insists on BullshiteRoboticCompany Certified Master Robot Rebooting Engineer certificate holders, then he's probably going to have trouble hiring them, they're gonna be expensive, and he's going to need like 25 of them to do the same work as the four dudes I listed.
I will say based on my drafting experience at school that if someone has "the knack" and can visualize stuff in 3D then teaching then CAD is pretty trivial, just tedious, but the classmates who could memorize every autocad command were pretty useless if they didn't have "the knack" of understanding WTF they're trying to draw. Much like programming, we never hire on the skill of knowing WTF we're doing or understanding the system, but interviews are really interested if we still remember some weird corner of precise perl regex syntax from 10 years ago. So $1 is that the first matching pattern from a regex or is $0? I think its $1 and thats totally worthless knowledge in a post-google world where I'd look it up if it matters.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday April 30 2015, @03:17PM
In my experience, they phrase it that way, but they don't actually want that. They'll give you a question asking you to write Java code to do some task, but if you ask they really couldn't care less if you get the Java syntax exactly right. In fact, you can usually just go ahead and write pseudocode, they're just looking at how you think about and break down the problem.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Thursday April 30 2015, @12:56AM
In the end, everything is temporary. You've still got to pass the time you've got.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.