South Korea Becomes First Country To Replace 10% of Its Workforce With Robots (tbsnews.net)
- Reference: 0175589013
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/12/04/003227/south-korea-becomes-first-country-to-replace-10-of-its-workforce-with-robots
- Source link: https://www.tbsnews.net/world/south-korea-becomes-first-country-replace-10-its-workforce-robots-1005896
> A new report suggests South Korea is the first country to have [1]replaced 10% of its workforce with robots to tackle its shrinking population due to its low birth rate, reports Independent.
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> For every 10,000 employees, South Korea now has 1,102 robots, making the country number one in the world in using technology instead of human labour to do tasks, according to the annual survey by World Robotics 2024.
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> South Korea now has twice the number of robots working in its factories than any other country in the world. Only Singapore has been close to South Korea regarding robots, with 770 of such technology per 10,000 workers.
[1] https://www.tbsnews.net/world/south-korea-becomes-first-country-replace-10-its-workforce-robots-1005896
Quite misleading headline (Score:2)
How do we know each robot replaced one human? Could it be that it takes five robots to replace one human job? Or vice versa ?
Or more optimistically, could it be that each robot enhances one or more humans? Or that the improved productivity having all those robots allows for even more humans to be hired than without the bots?
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Or it creates an entire industry of design, manufacture, support and operating the robots, creating more jobs that the robots displace.
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If there wasn't a net savings, the robot wouldn't be worth building. The whole point is to replace people with them, so any robot that requires more than a fraction of a human's time is impractical from the very start.
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You say that like there aren't big corporate interests running the show.
The robots probably replace low/un skilled labour, and will never join a union, or care about workplace health and safety.
There are nowhere is near the 1st (Score:3)
Do a Google search for the phrase "70% of middle class jobs lost to automation". You will find an article and a study that goes with it talking about just that.
And that's just raw automation it doesn't include things like process improvements. I started years ago supporting a desktop software application. High speed internet got us the ability to remote into a customer's computer and took calls that used to take two to three hours and turned them into 30 minute calls, 15 minutes of which were spent getting access to the computer.
Later we switch to a web-based application and moved away from complex mainframe applications drastically reducing the skill needed to support the products. Before long I had to move on to other things because that work was just going away. It was compartmentalized and simplified until what little was left of it could be shipped overseas and done by teenagers.
We have a massive amount of automation going on and we just don't think about it or talk about it. And the first thing you're going to automate are high-paying jobs. The GDP goes up but the jobs go away. And the only one getting a piece of that action are billionaires.
If you doubt me and I'm sure you do go to YouTube and look up how literally anything you buy is made. And take note of how few people are involved in the production of it. I have a video card where the ad copy on the box proudly proclaims no human being was involved in the production of the card. Or go look up how the old steam controllers were built where they just poured parts into a machine and out came the controllers.
We are running out of work. As a mental exercise try to imagine explicitly and specifically what jobs are going to replace the ones we keep automating or replacing with process improvements. Don't give in to the temptation to come up with a vague answer. If you do that your blood pressure is going to go up several points along with your heart rate as you panic.
We are not ready for a Star Trek post-work Utopia. We still get really angry if somebody who isn't upper class doesn't have to work to survive.
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"We are not ready for a Star Trek post-work Utopia"
And in the meantime
"Here ye be violence!"
It's going to get extremely ugly before it has a chance of getting any better.
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How fucking awful must a study be for rsilvertroll to refuse to link to it? That's a rhetorical question: the troll is too lazy to link to anything.
But if one does the search that he suggests, one finds a paywalled article. If one finds a way around the paywall, one finds it cites [1]this NBER working paper [nber.org], which says ... nothing remotely like "70% of middle class jobs lost to automation".
Which is not surprising, given that everybody would know if we lost 70% of middle class jobs (since 1980) for any reason
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w28920
What a coinkydink (Score:2)
Calls grow for South Koreaâ(TM)s president to resign after martial law chaos
[1]https://www.cnn.com/world/live... [cnn.com]
Maybe not related but, yikes!
[1] https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/martial-law-south-korea-intl/index.html
Unemployment must be sky high, with all those bots (Score:2)
Oh wait, it's https://www.macrotrends.net/gl....
Maybe there is a future for human employment, even in a world where robots (or AI bots) do all the grunge work.
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Let's try that again.
The rate is less than 2%. [1]https://www.macrotrends.net/gl... [macrotrends.net].
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/south-korea/unemployment-rate#:~:text=South%20Korea%20unemployment%20rate%20for,a%200.19%25%20increase%20from%202019
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OK I give up, I need a bot. Less than 3%!
Replace the political parties (Score:2)
I say we replace 100% of political parties with robots, both in SK and the US. Can't do any worse than they already have. Because God damn things have been a shit show this year!
Re:Martial law (Score:4, Informative)
The coverage tends to basically say the president wanted to do stuff and the (opposition run) parliament was like no, not that and then the president declared martial law claiming the opposition has been infiltrated by North Korea.
If that's the case the deranged theory seems to stand.
Re: Martial law (Score:2)
See...the last time martial law was imposed anywhere in the US at scale was when Lincoln declared martial law in Maryland and had all the secessionist state legislators rounded up before they could vote to have Maryland (a slave state) join the Confederacy. And there was the unpleasantness immediately after the war ended.
And you've got to admit, declaring martial law *after* the rebels seceded and were shooting at federal troops is kind of a foregone conclusion. Declaring martial law preemptively just ain't
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Don't worry. The Doge of Trumpistan promises a peaceful transition of power.