How will the rapid development of robots affect social employment

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-- Feb.28,2018

Keyword: robot  Source: Robot News

Robots are in a situation of rapid development

In 2015, the Chinese government put forward the development plan of "China made 2025", which gave the robot an important development position. In 2016, the state proposed the "robot industry development plan". It was proposed that by 2020, the robot would become an important support for the development of high-end manufacturing industry. In fact, the above planning is only conforming to the new trend of the development of China's robot industry. Since 2013, the growth rate of industrial robots in China has been the highest in the world. Between 2010 and 2015, the density of manufacturing robots around the world increased by 32%, while China increased by 230%, much higher than the world average. Based on this reality, we have to think about this problem today. What is the impact of the rapid development of robots on social employment?

How will the rapid development of robots affect social employment

How will the rapid development of robots affect social employment?

 It was just a few hundred years ago that people were worried that the industrial revolution would leave a large number of workers out of work. The worry about robots replacing people with productive labor will lead to a large number of unemployed people. But history has proved that the new technological revolution did not lead to the widespread unemployment of workers, but the division of social functions again, making the operation of the industry more efficient. Usually, installing a robot will inevitably reduce the demand for human resources. If the production efficiency is improved and the cost of production is reduced, enterprises will be able to expand the scale of production and create more jobs. As a result, the replacement of the robot is actually a job that reduces both efficiency and added value. Especially for the dirty, dangerous and hard working environment of the factory environment, it has a very realistic demand for robots to replace people to complete the task.

Since the industrial revolution, the development of industry is to achieve technological innovation driven by economic value, so as to reduce the demand for people by using advanced equipment and systems. The application of each new technology will reduce the direct manual labor input in the production process. And the successful experience of the manufacturing industry tells us that technological innovation will create more jobs in the service industry. The development of robot industry, enterprises reduce the operation of low tech jobs on a large number of deployment and application of the robot system, but also create new technical content, high returns lucrative new jobs, such as the need to manage the robot system maintenance and system programming, these new jobs not only let people the value has been fully embodied, and can get the salary higher rate of people.

In other words, better product quality and lower manufacturing cost will drive enterprises to expand the market and let more people buy products, thereby stimulating market demand. Just imagine, if the car is made by technology 50 years ago, then the reliability of the car will be reduced and very expensive, which will naturally affect the sales opportunities and cause the whole market downturn. Then look at the current, in the production of mobile phones, tablet computers manufacturing enterprises. If robots are not used for human beings to complete processing and assembly, the cumbersome assembly process will consume huge labor costs, resulting in the final production of products that may not be accepted by ordinary consumers because of the high price, thus hindering the development of the whole market.

All the time, there has been a widespread view of the influence of robots on employment. But the Harvard Business Review survey found that if a post was fully automated, the post would eventually disappear. But if the process is partial, then employment will actually increase, as efficiency increases and it may affect demand. During the period from 1995 to 2005, the IT revolution led to a 0.6% increase in labor productivity in Europe, the United States and Japan, and a 1% increase in the overall growth rate. This suggests that if the increase in productivity is sufficient to promote demand, the result may be an increase in employment.

On 2017 the International Federation of robotics released by each robot manufacturers the production and sale of a robot will create 3.6 new jobs, these positions located in the robot R & D, production, service, quality management, sales and other fields, creating new employment opportunities for the market. This shows that there is no intrinsic opposition between "robot killing employment" and "robot creating employment", but the former focuses on shorter and more specific cases, while the latter has broader vision.