There's two ways to do the introduction of a robotic workforce.

One is the direct replacement of the human, with a robot that looks like a human, works like a human etc. This is so you don’t have to re-tool, or rethink the process involved in production.

https://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/consgoods/nhrrobot.html

Another is to completely re-design the way that you look at the thing that needs to be done, looking at the objective and fulfilling this with the advent of a new technology:

https://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/consgoods/nhrautolowberth.html

The above is based on the platinum 10 minutes and the golden hour learnt from battlefield trauma medicine. Basically if you can get even basic medical assistance to a trauma victim in the first 10 minutes their chances of survival increase dramatically, if you can then get them to an advanced facility in under an hour they increase even more. So by using a new technology; a robot rescue/medic, and a low berth you can get to them quickly, apply medical assistance and then freeze them all in the fastest time possible you are hitting all the right things for the best outcome; i.e. patient survivability, and not having to worry about getting medics into the field or the use of ambulances (either wheeled or airborne), and if you can then use that technology to do something else as well (i.e. replacing ambulances for normal medical emergencies) you then fundamentally change the way that that process works in society. Think about what the advent of mass production did to the transport industry, and then think about what automated transport will do to the transport industry.

So when you are looking at replacement technologies in processes for an industrial society, you can either look at replacing existing labour with something cheaper (or more efficient), as Jeff suggests, or you can look at completely re-designing how you achieve the objective you want and doing it in a completely different way.

Best regards,

Ewan

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxxx@simplelists.com <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> On Behalf Of Jeffrey Schwartz
Sent: 23 December 2019 18:01
To: tml <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
Subject: Re: [TML] Manufacturing jobs in the future?

It's a question of what's the best return on investment for the tool being used.

If it costs 15cr/hour in labor, plus taxes and bennies and such to bring it up to 25cr/hour to have a human, then you're looking a 50kcr/year per human working on the line.
If you're running 3 shifts, that's a minimum of 150kcr/year for a "work slot"

So... can you buy a 'bot for that job for under 150kcr/year?
At TL10+, probably.

The exception is going to be jobs where there's some reason a 'bot isn't usable.
In a lot of cases, that's going to be problem solving - jobs where there are complications that are hard to code for. With Machine Learning, that's going to go away over time.
I can think of situations where the local government doesn't want a machine doing the job. One that comes to mind is dealing with the RUS in the sewers. A bot that can traverse the sewers and execute 100 kilo Rodents is an autonomous warbot. I can see the government having issues with GM having a couple hundred of them patrolling the lower levels of the factory complex, either because the Ratcatcher-3000 might get loose and decide that some humans on the street are valid targets, or that the gov't is nervous about GM having a company of mechanized infantry.

The other possibility is there isn't a union or minimum wage.
Those companies will work out the bare minimum it takes to hire a human, Say 3cr/hour, no bennies, and the company provides room and board, so the employee pays 20cr a day to the company store.
That works out to about 2000cr/year in worker cost, and 3 shifts makes 6kcr/year.

That's a much slimmer margin for a workerbot, but if you do the standard Traveller amortization over 40 years, that's still 120kcr budget for a bot.... so still hard to justify humans as employees.

But...
What if the bots are a new thing? That means there's still workers, but they're either being phased out, or wage-dropped and they can see the writing on the wall. There's a generation who have pensions as part of their work contract, so they don't care, they're going to take early retirement and be done with it. But the people who are PC's ages, they know they're stuck in a job that's going to be phased out in the next few years, and during that time they're going to get a pay cut every year.

On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 11:31 AM Peter L. Berghold <xxxxxx@berghold.net> wrote:
>
> I think I may have thought of a huge problem with how I describe some
> of the dystopian worlds in my universe.  Initially I had this idea of
> worlds that are wholly owned (either openly or subvertly) by
> corporations and the world and its inhabitants are exploited to work
> these huge factories and/or mining operations.
>
> On these high population industrialized worlds a very definite caste
> system is commonly employed with really poor people (think company
> store) living in densly populated housing on one end of the scale with
> the company executives on the other end of the economic scale.
>
> I began to question this a bit.
>
> 1) would this system work or would it collapse under its own weight.
>
> 2) would a system like this "wear out" a world using up resources
> until they were played out.
>
> 3) In a case where there are robots/androids used would manufaturing
> jobs even exist? If not what use would a high population be?
>
> Again I'm using you folks as a sounding board. I'm being a bit anal
> about my writing trying to minimize "handwavium" in the stories.  I
> want all the story elements to make sense.
>
> The high pop/industrialized worlds are a catalyst for characters in
> the story to leave.  In one part of human space there exists a star
> spanning government that is organized as a representative republic
> such that the worlds can do just about anything they want to do as
> long as it fits within the rules formed by the founding articles of federation.
>
> One of the paths for young people is to go into federal service (not
> just military, essentially any of the service related character types
> in Traveller) and they by charter are not supposed to be stopped by
> their planetary government from doing so.  (In fact I've started one
> story around that.)
>
> Knowing this group is populated with sharp minds what do you folks
> think?
>
>
>
> --
>
>
> Peter L. Berghold                                 <xxxxxx@berghold.net>
> Professonally: (retired) IT Professional (DevOps, Puppet, Perl...)
> Advocations: Dog Training, Beer Brewing, BBQ, Cooking
>
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