>>12578689It does seem like it would reduce overall job count, but your missing all of the workers involved in creating the robot in your calculus. How many engineers/designers does it take to design the robot? How many workers does it take to create the myriad components that the robot is composed of, and how many to put it together?
>>12579791Yes.jpg. I'm joking, there's obviously potential for technological solutions to increase overall efficiency, but there's also the potential that you're just trading off jobs in Western countries moving boxes around (which require 'good pay' and 'safety, yuck) for jobs in China manufacturing chips, motors, framing etc to construct the robot and associated infrastructure (which can be paid comparatively less because the Chinese are dogs).
The assumption is that in a free market, competitive pricing will mean that generally the cheapest goods (read: requiring the least compensation for worker's toil) will prevail, thus reducing overall toil by the workers for a given level of quality. This does not hold when workers in different countries in a globalized economy have fundamentally different standards for their own quality of life. When a different people will accept being treated like dogs for their work, a free market will naturally try to exploit them as much as possible. Maybe it takes Jim in America 8 hours to move some boxes in a warehouse, and takes Chang an equivalent of 16 hours to build an appropriate portion of the robot for the same task, but you can pay Chang 1$/hour so that is the way it goes. It's not more efficient, it's just that Chang can be treated like a dog so that's what happens.
Of course, this is conjecture. The possibility of increasing efficiency and simply shuffling jobs around to people who accept being treated like dogs are countervailing factors which would require in depth analysis for any given product to decide what R&D is really 'achieving'. But, food for thought.
