Government support for the integration of ever cheaper and more efficient industrial robots is good news for factory owners in China, who are facing a weak global economy and a slowdown in domestic demand. But the benefits of the robot revolution will not be shared equally across the world. Developing countries from India to Indonesia and Egypt to Ethiopia have long hoped to follow the example of China, as well as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan before them: stimulating job creation and economic growth by moving agricultural workers into low-cost factories to make goods for export. Yet the rise of automation means that industrialisation is likely to generate significantly fewer jobs for the next generation of emerging economies. “Today’s low-income countries will not have the same possibility of achieving rapid growth by shifting workers from farms to higher-paying factory jobs,” researchers from the US investment bank Citi and the University of Oxford concluded in a recent report, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be, on the impact of technological change.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1dbd8c60-0cc6-11e6-ad80-67655613c2d6.html

Statement is so bullshit and full of capitalist lie.
Industrialization is not made to generate low qualification jobs. It is made to produce means of production and consumer goods. Robots where they can be used are more efficient from energy and resources point of view. This means that for people it is left more energy end resources to do other stuff. And this is very good, it means that life will be better.

About washing machine

The number of humans not being able to compete with machines at any paid job is rising at increasing speed, and society has not yet found a plausible answer on how to sustain a pleasant environment when let's say 30% of the people no longer find anyone who would be willing to pay them for anything they can offer.

Capitalism society did not find answer... :-)

As complaining that people now do not work hard in dirt at fields, work in cold dirty factories and washing places is just mad. People do not need this jobs at the first place.

Idea that automation must introduce new jobs is even more mad. Automation is made to save resources and most valuable resource - human life time spent on shit.

All capitalism can do is to make more night clubs, sex chat services and similar shit for this people. Capitalist looks for profits, not for people good or requirements.

Above citation suggests that "not allowing a massive reduction of working hours" is the result of some conscious, sinister plan.

I do not think it is. It's rather the result of the natural human greed - in different forms.

Let's assume in our land of Utopia, person A and person B both work for 4 hours a day in the same profession, both earning the same, just the right amount for them keeping their accepted standard of living.

Now person A thinks of what he could do with twice the money, starts working 8 hours per day. Due to unchanged demand, but higher supply, the value others are willing to exchange for the work done will decrease. So now person B will make less money, his standard of living decreasing below his accepted level. Person B could start also working 8 hours a day, but would only gain the value in exchange that he had when both A and B were working 4 hours per day.

The regime of Utopia could try to counter this by either disallowing "working for more than 4 hours a day", but that would lead to the ugly situation that whatever productive thing people would do in their free time would fuel a "black market" - you would have to impose a nightmarish regime of permanent surveillance to counter conspirative barter deals.

The regime of Utopia could also try to fix salaries, as in "you will earn the same no matter what or how much you work". But that would lead to an obvious downward spiral: Now person B finds there's no disadvantage in working only 2 hours per day (chilling out another 2 in the workplace, if some presence was required). Person A will certainly not want to work 6 hours to compensate for his colleagues lazyness. So supply decreases, demand stays the same, but prices are fixed - welcome to the dystopia of empty shops and lack of supply.

And those are just the most simple scenarios where Utopia starts to fail. There are more difficult ones, like person A and person B work in different professions, and disagree on the value of each others work. Now person A wants some result of B's work and B wants some of A's work. Who's to decide at which rate A and B may exchange their results? If the Utopia regime fixes this to something like 1:1, not-fun-to-do jobs (like, let's say, disposing of animal corpses) just won't be done.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for governments setting up rules to make the "labour market" a reasonably fair one, but I do not believe there any simple solutions - if only because it's human nature to be greedy, unfair and mostly interested in one's own advantage.

Robots introduce another aspect into this, but certainly not making things easier. Now it has become conceivable that a relatively small group of people can get anything they need and desire from mostly automated production, and a large group of people have nothing to offer that could compete with the automated work, while at the same time they have nothing that they could trade in for "robots of their own" who could supply them with what they need and desire.

All visions of Utopia fail where they expect that suddenly humankind collectively stops to be greedy and becomes altruistic. Not going to happen - we are the result of billions of years of evolution where some degree of greed and selfishness was a prerequisite to pass on one's genes.

My point re: washing machines: Robots have been around for some time, they don't have to have humanoid. Also they can be very simple and help people super amount.

But remember, just because we have Microwave ovens, food doesn't get Microwaved by itself!

Actually I think ruling class has huge issue. Currently all benefits to society are paid for by middle classes, (think health care, power, industry etc). Imagine how successful electricity would have been without middle class buying into it, or PC?

So what happens when middle class disappears?

What (actually) happens when wages in south east asia rise is stuff like this: Adidas moves production of shoes back to Germany - where of course, instead of ten-thousands shoe-sewing workers, a few hundred robot mechanics will be the only work-force required.

This makes looking at effects of automized production easier (as it happenes in the same country as consumption of the product), but it's still, of course, not happy news for people who have no work to offer that others would be willing to pay for.

That factory in Ansbach is certainly only a pilot project, planned to produce 500,000 pairs of shoes per year, which indeed is not much in comparison to the 300,000,000 pairs adidas sells per year. But plans are there already to build similar factories in other target market countries in 2017, and there is no technical reason why they shouldn't scale well for mass production. But yes, it will take several years to replace manual sewing.

How does one buy stock in Robots?

Global sales of industrial robots soared by 29% last year to hit a new record of 380,550, according to preliminary statistics released by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). The 2017 sales were worth around $50bn.

The biggest driver of this increased demand has been China, where sales were 58% higher than in 2016, and 138,000 new industrial robots were installed during 2017. By comparison, sales in Germany were up 8% on 2016, with around 22,000 robots being sold. In the US, sales rose by 6% and 33,000 new robots were installed. During 2017, South Korea installed around 40,000 new industrial robots, while Japan added around 38,000.

Together, the five biggest markets – China, Korea, Japan, the US and Germany – accounted for 71% of all sales of industrial robots last year. The next five markets in order of size were Taiwan, Vietnam, Italy, Mexico and France.