This shit is scary. People don't know what's going to hit them.
(media.scored.co)
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On one hand I agree with every point.
On the other hand, entire industries will go the way of the dodo, just like the watchmaker and buggy-whip manufacturer.
People who are skilled with tools or (gasp) design will have transferable skills can easily retrain, but not all of them.
For example the advent of synchronous, variable torque, variable speed eclectic motors has turned electric motor manufacture from something involving a hundred dollars of bent bits of iron and copper to sixty dollars of electronics and forty dollars of iron and copper. Before it was all mechanical processes and a hundred year old designs. Now it is an electronic manufacturer who also does a little bit of coil winding.
You are literally watching the electrical motor industry vanish.
You're conflating an auxiliary industry with the primary industry.
Buggy whips died, transportation transformed.
Unless someone or something invents a mechanism by which electricity may be transformed into kinetic energy without a physical device which moves, this won't happen.
You are misunderstanding me.
Electric Motor Manufacturing, for more than a hundred years, has been primarily concerned with bending iron and copper into the correct shapes, then piecing them together into a functional motor. A good example of this would be the Universal Motor, which is a very old design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_motor
There are no electronic parts in one of these.
Another example would be the brushed motor.
https://www.linquip.com/blog/brushed-dc-motor/
Again, no electronic parts required.
These are being replaced by smaller, more efficent brushless motors which have electronic controllers that are both very sophisticated and cost more than the (now smaller) physical motor.
The Electric Motor industry is being transformed into a small, auxiliary industry which services the electronics manufacturer.
Brushless motors with sophisticated electronic speed control are fundamentally different to the motors of old, and they offer vast advantages. More to the point, they are less expensive when considering Total Cost of Ownership.
All predicated on forever chip fabs.
Your comparison to watch making is terrible, but your analogy was better served by "buggy-whip", even though it's also wrong.
Watchmaking is a significant industry to this very day, at both luxury and common ends. There are probably more watches today than in human history. As for buggy-whips, you're looking at it purely from a abstract category. The business that makes buggy-whips, stops making buggy-whips if it's not lucrative, and makes... whips. Or, it re-tools to exploit it's component parts: it becomes a leather strap factory, or it becomes a stick factory, or it re-tools into some other part of the equestrian industry.
And you think that not one person who worked in building electric motors would get a job in maintaining electric motors? You don't think that the skillsets in electrical motor design wouldn't still be useful? You don't think the knowledge of electronics could still allow them to have gainful employment? Hell: you don't think the basis of managing a department couldn't be transferred to another industry not specializing in electric motors?
The point is that the labor doesn't just fucking die. That is a socialist perspective of reality: in order to keep "jobs" at a maximum, innovation (as a deflationary pressure) must be kept at a minimum. All that does is guarantee that the whole industry that adopts this becomes totally non-competitive and fucking dies. Like steel in Cleveland, rubber in Akron, or Coal in Wales: the rejection of deflationary innovation is what causes an irreparable collapse; the pressure itself is not a threat. It is not that there is "no need for steel, rubber, or coal". It's because those places became protectionist hives that refused to innovate, and when they were finally forced to compete on a freer market, they still weren't de-regulated enough to adapt, and just fucking out-and-out died.
Socialism and Protectionism did more permanent damage to local industry in America than the firebombing of 85% of the country did to Japan's industries.
To further illustrate this point: I work in an iron-based machine shop. The lathes and fabricators are entirely controlled by a computer, and do all of the cutting of the metal entirely on the basis of their listed job. According to official stats, that job has been automated.
But it still takes an operator to actually punch in the instructions for the job. It takes an operator to replace drill bits as they wear out. It takes an operator to actually load and unload the metal. And it takes an operator to do fine detailing of the metal once it has come out (removing burrs, polishing, checking for defects, etc).
And at least on the gearbox line, they have to come to me and I have to assemble them by hand. Since there is no machine that can fit seals and ball bearing rings. There is no machine that can fit gears and axles. There is no machine that can slot and wrench the bolts. And we air test the gearboxes for leaks, which requires a human touch. And if we got something that could automate the air test? Cool, now I am spending about 30 seconds to find the defect instead of running through a check list for 5 minutes, which lets me do more work.
The only jobs getting automated are ones that dont matter in the grand scheme of things. Which is why you have so many white-collar workers suddenly freaking out about AI.
Correct. Deflation doesn't destroy economies, it purges them of rot.
Like a cleansing fire in an overgrown forest.
Be the pinecone.
Gizortnik,
Right here you conflate skills with industry. Then you go on to make astounding proclamations that totally miss the point.
You can buy a buggy whip today. I am sure about seven people in the USA sell them. As for the industry, it has gone the way of the dodo.
As for Watchmakers, the craft, it is today basically recreational. A person that design, machine the parts then assemble them into a working watch is more or less a unicorn. There are a few factories that make watch movements, but they don't do a real lot of design work, as they use mostly tried-and-true standard designs. Unless a company (like Omega) is very high end, they use standard watch movements which they buy by the thousands to assemble into watches.
There was a revolutionary watch movement design in the 1980s. The Swatch movement made use of self lubricating polymer parts. They were developed in response to the "quartz crisis"; which was the availability of inexpensive, reliable quartz crystal movements. The swatch movements required no bi-annual disassembly and maintenance, nor did they need batteries. They were "accurate enough" for daily use, and they were priced to compete with digital watches.
In general the efforts failed. While Swatch made enormous strides as a fashion brand, mechanical watches are more or less an anachronism, and they have gone the way of the pocket watch. Yes they maintain cachet as a luxury item, but they are worn as a status symbol to show that the owner can afford to waste money to own them and keep them in good working order. As an industry watch manufacturing still exists, but the craft of the watchmaker has vanished, replaced by standardized electronic components. The watch movements have been, in general, subsumed by the electronics manufacturing industry.
As for transferable skills between the electric motor industry, which is also being subsumed by the electronics manufacturing industry ... well there are not many skills in common. If you want a blow by blow breakdown as to why, I'd be happy to explain.
The point is that this is a revolutionary change. A mechanical engineer who has a second specialty in mass production and building production lines isn't going to find much work in an electronics factory unless they can retrain to program, understand and service robotic pick-and-place machines.
Just as the vacuum tube and all of the specialist glass manufacture basically vanished at the advent of the transistor, so too is happening to the brushed electric motor.
The modern synchronous brushless motor has more in common with a precision servo drive than it does to the venerable universal motor; and more to the point it is cheaper in the long run.
Yes, people will retrain. Good. Yes skilled professionals will have transferable skills. Great!
A revolutionary change will have repercussions far and wide. It is what the Boston Consulting Group calls a "Shake Out" of the market.