I remember the same thought in the '60s and '70s with Tomorrow's World etc promising the huge extra leisure time. And of course goes back to the dawn of industrialisation and hence the Luddite revolts - which brings up the real challenge, which is how to create a new economic model. At present if automation means you only need staff 4 days a week then they will only get paid for 4 days a week (i.e. 4/5 their current salary), because that's the whole point - to improve financial productivity. If you're producing the same output for the same wage bill then you are in the same position as before, actually worse off because you've now paid for the automation as well. So a more socially responsible model is to increase output so the workers still work 5 days a week (and earn the same) but are now more productive. However, it could be argued (i.e. I personally would argue this, but I'm no expert in economics and I'm sure others would have good arguments against me!) that rather than using automation to increase production to produce more things we don't need in order to retain full employment, that we change the economic model so that the use of automation retains the same standard of living for us whilst reducing working hours. Sadly no-one seems to have come up with a successful, or maybe acceptable, model for that though...

This is a bit "been there, done that" for me - a few years ago I was involved with managing the introduction of similar changes (and LEAN) for a manufacturing company, we had to do a huge amount of work to reassure the workforce that we were not going to reduce hours or cut staff, but we were going to increase output for the same staff. Which we did (which saved the jobs and indeed the UK site from closure, the parent company would have moved production to a lower cost country otherwise). Of course it would have been great to have been able to take the other approach to reduce people's hours and pay them the same, but there's no way the parent company would have allowed that to happen, for two reasons. Effectively it would be an hourly rate pay rise for the same (or lower) skills which (rightly or wrongly) would not have been accepted, and it wouldn't have answered the key question of "why are we doing this in the UK when we could do this cheaper overseas?" (Again rightly or wrongly, but it is the question that will always be asked.)

Wish I (or anyone!) knew the answer to all this, it's a particularly important question for the future of UK manufacturing.

I must admit I hoping to go down to a four day week sometime next year, but will be taking the 20% pay cut that comes with it...nothing to do with automation making my role redundant (I'm sure people could find me 7 days work a week to do!) but because as I get older the idea of trading cash for a bit of travelling time and pottering time in my own workshop becomes more and more appealing! But I'm well aware I'm very lucky to have the choice to be able to potentially (just about) afford this, plenty can't afford to have this thrust upon them unless the economics change.

Really interesting subject,

Thanks,

Andy

I have already done the thing of reducing my working week to 4 days, and taking the 20% cut in pay.  On the plus side, the way the tax bands work, it means that I don't actually take a 20% hit to my take-home pay.  With the UK government freezing these bands, this should make a significant reduction in the amount of tax I have to pay.

The problem with the system we have is that people are expected to work 5 days a week.  If productivity goes up because of automation, that means the same number of people make more stuff.  You end up in a spiral where people are making more and more stuff, which people have to buy, and then throw away because they have too much stuff and nowhere to put it.

Simon Barker said:

You end up in a spiral where people are making more and more stuff, which people have to buy, and then throw away because they have too much stuff and nowhere to put it.

Quite! And have to be driven to consume because the economy is based on consumption. Come the revolution!!!  I count myself really lucky that I've always worked in industries (quite diverse industries) where the typical product service life is 25 years, and in practice can be up to 50 or more - very unusual for electronics.

My mother has always had an interesting perspective on this, she's 106 so grew up in the 20s and 30s in a seriously poor household, and its probably genuinely the least materialistic person I know - having been used to surviving with nothing she never felt the need for "things" as she used to put it. (Interestingly one of her sisters in particular went from the same background in a very different direction. Which I think is not uncommon.) As she's always said, there are lots of jobs that need to be done, so why are people having to work at jobs that don't really need to be done. A Nobel Prize in Economics for whoever can solve that one.

The exception of course is guitars. There is no limit to the number of guitars that need to be produced, as the correct number of guitars to be owned is N+1 where N is the current number of guitars one owns, (Some people claim it's bikes or motorbikes, but they're wrong). I almost but don't entirely, take after my mother...

Yes that was the lightbulb moment when I realised the tax implication, and found HMRCs really good online tax / income estimator.

Simon Barker said:

You end up in a spiral where people are making more and more stuff, which people have to buy, and then throw away because they have too much stuff and nowhere to put it.

I don't think that there is anything new in this. The utopian future where machines do the menial work and we play golf (or the guitar) does not exist.

At risk of being political, the fatal flaw in Ms Truss's strategy was that growth could only be obtained in two ways: (1) higher productivity, which cannot happen overnight, or (2) more people, but we sent them packing almost three years ago. What hadn't occurred to me was what Simon says - somebody has to buy the stuff.

 Andy Millar  Simon Barker 

it will be interesting to see how the 4 day week pans out. While 6 month studies here in Ireland with some of the high tech companies prooved positive, I cant imagine their finance teams want to pay folks for 8 hours of work they did not do. Alternatlively, it could mean working a 10 hour day 4 days a week. Not sure how that will pan out as far as quality of live goes. The point about Jobs in the article was very interesting.

"The world economic forum estimated. that by 2025 technology will create 12M more Jobs".... in the aggregate. https://bit.ly/3VhzHVO

A similar sentiment was relayed in the Guide to Implementing Industrial Robots – IET. There is a new edition of this document being drafted in 2023. If anyone has found similar references on the long term job creation as a result of new technology I would be delighted to hear and add to the guide mentioned above.


#robotics

Alan Rossney said:

Alternatlively, it could mean working a 10 hour day 4 days a week. Not sure how that will pan out as far as quality of live goes.

It is (or at least was while I was working there) very normal down here in Plymouth UK to have 4 1/2 day week working, finishing Friday lunchtimes, with longer working days and shorter lunch breaks. Most of us absolutely loved it. Where I worked, every so often our various parent companies would try to move us to 5 days working, for consistency with the other UK sites, and we'd have to explain back up to that external management  that if they wanted to keep our staff the one thing they mustn't touch was finishing early on Fridays!! What we found was that it gave different benefits to different people - surfers could get to the beach, shopaholics could get to the shops when they were quieter, diy-ers could get to suppliers that didn't open at the weekend, people with children had a little bit of time to get things done while the children were still at school, and of course getting away for the weekend was much easier.

By chance I was talking to one of my colleagues yesterday, I knew he worked a 4 day week, but I hadn't realised until yesterday that he was partly achieving this through longer (8.5 hour) days (our standard week is 37.5 hours). But then he doesn't have young children, and does have other caring responsibilities which make having three clear days available really useful. For those, say, with young children this could be less useful.

As a separate thought: robotics may or may not align to allowing more flexible working practices. My only direct experience was, as touched on above, introducing a robot assisted production line into a previously fully manual assembly process. It hugely increased turnover per head, but to make it work at its best (and, to be fair, to meet demand) it meant we moved to 24 hour working on that line which we had never had on site before. This actually probably decreased flexibility for that team - we had to try much harder to ensure there was always cover available to keep the line running at a steady tick rate to suit the robotics, it was much harder to lose cover one day and make up by increasing it the following day. In fact in the 2010s we were basically right back to a 1920s Henry Ford style production line! It would not have been an issue with a fully robotic system, but it's a point to bear in mind for a semi robotic system. 

Might be worth considering / mentioning in the update to the "Guide to Implementing Industrial Robots"? (Our case study was far too small to be interesting in itself, but I wouldn't have thought we were unique.)

Alan Rossney said:

"The world economic forum estimated. that by 2025 technology will create 12M more Jobs"

Interesting article, however my personal view (based on no research, only experience and strictly amateur looking back into history) is that jobs will remain at around the same level whatever happens or not in the technology - if AI reduces jobs then new jobs will be created in other areas and vice versa. Because with our current system without jobs people can't eat, so the job market adapts and we create new jobs basically to keep the money flow the same. Huge swathes of roles have disappeared or vastly shrunk over my career (42 years so far) through massive technology changes: typing pools, secretaries, travel agents, tea ladies, assembly workers, farm workers, miners etc etc. But employment levels have stayed more-or-less the same. (I'm talking longer term of course - the short term impact, particularly on skilled workers, can be huge and devastating, and I wouldn't want to underplay that.)

I'm guessing there must be some proper research around this somewhere - not so much looking at whether particular technologies will increase or decrease jobs, rather on how the job market adapts to changes for whatever reason such that full employment is (at least up to now) always retained? I do feel that these types of articles (which again have been around back to at least the 1960s and I suspect well before that) are a bit of red herring: actually AI may directly reduce jobs, but it's unlikely to matter - society seems to be likely to find a way to pay people to do other, maybe completely unconnected, work that is currently non-existent or poorly resourced (although again it be reassuring to see some real research behind this!).

I suspect the real challenge is, and has always been, that for workers who've somewhat built their sense of self around a particular role ("I'm a xxx, that's just what I am", and in some cases "that's what my family have always done") it's very difficult to dismantle that and move in a new direction. Which is what any new technology does make happen. I notice in the current issue of the Guide it is mentioned that robotics may replace lower skilled jobs with higher skilled jobs, equally I'd suggest it should mention that the opposite can happen (e.g. I've seen this happening with automating manufacturing testing, replacing skilled test engineers with test operatives, but there are many many other examples). And in either case it doesn't alter the fact that those roles have been lost - it's of no comfort at all to someone that they are redundant but the good news is that the company is employing someone higher/lower skilled to replace them. (Or that their job is being downgraded.)

So the challenge for the companies involved is avoiding sounding like that all too true scene in The Office:

"Well, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that Neil will be taking over both branches, and some of you will lose your jobs. Those of you who are kept on will have to relocate to Swindon, if you wanna stay. I know, gutting. On a more positive note, the good news is, I've been promoted, so... every cloud. You're still thinking about the bad news aren't you?"

"There's no good news, David. There's only bad news and irrelevant news"

AI and robotics have huge opportunities to improve society, we just need to keep well aware that the immediate impact on individuals can be very challenging and I feel we have a responsibility to be aware of and manage these (or at least raise awareness that they need to be sensitively managed). Within that evidence based bigger and long term picture which may be an overall positive one.

P.S. I used to be an analogue design engineer, remember those, back in the olden days? I still keep it on as a hobby, along with woodworking and occasionally messing around with steam trains...I always tried to make sure my kids never expected that any job or role would be "for life", but equally that realisation is scary.

Cheers,

Andy

Hi Andy Millar thanks for the considered response. I like your observation that 

Andy Millar said:

society seems to be likely to find a way to pay people to do other, maybe completely unconnected, work that is currently non-existent or poorly resourced (although again it be reassuring to see some real research behind this!).

there was a good article in E&T which suggested new roles that would be created around the introduction of robotics as follows;

Algorithm auditor, empathy consultant. Health data analyst, Automated electric vehicle fleet manager, simulated voice user experience engineer or licence auditors. [1] 

There was also an interesting publication "future-manufacturing-engineer-report" by ImechE and IET encouraging lifelong learning to allow folks to pivot towards new technologies and roles required in industry. It also gave advice on what skills would be needed for industy, energy & transport changes needed. It highlighted some of the skill sets that engineers will need in the coming 5 - 10 years. 

[1] Engineering and Technology oct 2019 Vol 14 issue 9

#Robotics

Andy Millar said:

It is (or at least was while I was working there) very normal down here in Plymouth UK to have 4 1/2 day week working, finishing Friday lunchtimes, with longer working days and shorter lunch breaks.

If you are going to invade the UK, do it on a Friday afternoon!

As far as RN was concerned, POETS allowed people to get home for the weekend and to some extent was recompense for weekend watch-keeping and time at sea.

A veterinary friend of mine once asked how many hours nurses work in a week. My answer was 37½. His reply was, "That's only just over a day and a half."

Every man women and child owes at least £35k each in the UK.

Down to government debt, which will.need to be paid at some point. There is no way a 4 day week is going to work until the debt is repaid. This is a massive burden on leisure time and life worth.

Yet we're signed up for more and more debt with the Green revolution.

Trillions and trillions. 

Jon Steward said:

Every man women and child owes at least £35k each in the UK.

When was the Government ever not in debt?