Labor shortages today will get worse tomorrow — Is Tesla Bot one of the solutions?
Since 1971 we have not had enough birth to replace the population. As long as less than 2.1 babies are born in each family, we will decline in the overall population.
Generally, we count generations in about 25-year intervals, so we know what happened in the last 50 years and how it impacts the number of people generally available to work.
The data shows that improvements in medicine and workplace safety have allowed all of us to live longer. That does not yet mean that we also work longer. In most developed countries people still expect to stop work and retire in their 60’s. If you conduct surveys of the younger generation they actually prefer to retire sooner rather than later.
One of the biggest reasons given when asked why people want to leave work are these:
- I don’t make enough money for the effort I am asked to make
- I am not given the respect I deserve
- I am not challenged in my work anymore
- I don’t like the way I am treated (or: I don’t like how my boss treats me)
- I am discriminated against for my gender, my beliefs, my appearance, etc.
- I want to do things I am passionate about and that’s not what I am doing here
- I want to be with my partner and my kids instead of working, commuting, and being shamed when taking more than 6 days of vacation at a time
The list goes on.
If we all want to do challenging work that allows us to use our talents to the best of our abilities, be happy with the results we produce, enjoy spending time with our coworkers (online and in-person), and still have a good family life with sufficient vacation and enough money to afford an enjoyable existence, a lot of things we currently consider the typical work and employment norms will have to change.
For a lot of these improvements that help build families (which might then also have more kids again), increase wages, and offer more challenging work, more training, and more flexibility will be needed.
For our residential real estate investing strategy that means we want to offer well-equipped, sufficiently large properties to our tenants, so they have enough room to designate a room to two as an office and still have a master bedroom and a child-bedroom.
It includes environmentally smart design and great internet so higher-value work can be performed without bandwidth issues or interruptions.
That begs the question what will happen to the kind of work nobody likes to do, wants to do, or pays so little that there aren’t enough hours in the day or week to sustain a desirable life?
It’s still very new and not assured that it will really develop into a solution but Tesla Bot could be one of those options.
The humanoid Tesla Bot is probably a very ambitious approach based on the enormous computing power and neural link capabilities recently developed by Tesla.
In some areas, we already see the advent of robots without necessarily realizing it.
How about organic farming where we don’t want to see the use of pesticides or other chemicals? That means weeding — but in a modern way:
How about hand-picking stuff that is really sensitive, like Raspberries, Tomatoes, Strawberries, and sensitive grapes
In logistics it’s already becoming the norm and we would never get our orders as fast as we do without them.
Maybe you need to consider some dangerous and hazardous tasks like:
Here is a list from the Association for Advancing Automation:
- Furnace Tapping
- Assembling Industrial Batteries
- Manufacturing Hazardous Drugs
- Palletizing in Sub-Zero Temperatures
We are just at the start of this development and though we are being told that the population of the planet keeps increasing, it’s not growing in the developed industrialized nations.
We will need help, both to realize our full potential and talents in challenging and meaningful jobs as well as developing help using robots that can take care of the simple and dangerous tasks in life.
Some people only see this as a technological revolution and love to watch videos about robots dancing. In reality, the demographics will require us to change and look for things that make the best use of our time, ideally form a comfortable home where we can raise a family with enough kids so we don’t go extinct.