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Foxconn To Employ 1 Million Robots
hackingbear writes "Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency. Foxconn, the world's largest maker of computer components, which assembles products for Apple, Sony and Nokia, employing 1 million (human) laborers in mainland China, is in the spotlight after a string of suicides of workers at its massive Chinese plants. As labor regulations tighten up in China, human laborers demanding wage rises become replaceable."
I for one welcome our robotic overlords!
What happens when the robots start committing suicide?
No doubt they will pass the savings onto us... And iPads will be cheaper than a bushel of wheat, even if they are a bit crunchy
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
We've heard of Peak Oil. I wonder if there's Peak Employment? And have we reached it? There are so many SF stories of robots making people obsolete, of that being such a strong and recurring theme in the genre, that they have to be on to something.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Many of us on the left have long argued that socialism was the only way to deal with the consequences of rising productivity and automation: that in a world in which we have permanently moved beyond labor scarcity, the current system is unworkable.
My wife replaced me with a simple mechanism involving an electric motor and an offset rotating mass. It doesn't even need a microcontroller.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
it's still cheaper to maintain the robots in china, and it's still easier to dodge environmental rules in china, and it's still growing like crazy and the main target market for what you're making in the next few years.
And the chinese don't have two political parties playing chicken with government spending over debt that could be easily raised, budgets that could be easily put on a path to remedy and so on.
Oh and in china you don't need to provide healthcare, and wouldn't want to anyway, since if your employees die due to disease you don't need to replace them and no one will do anything if you don't try to help.
Cutting corners on paychecks and forcing workers to work/live in squalid conditions carries a stiffer price when you do it at home. When it's brown people halfway across the world, even slightly less inexpensive brown people, if human rights groups go in and see problems you can at least promise "a full investigation" and to hold your supply chain "more accountable". In the end it's about separating yourself from your labor to maintain plausible deniability.
The idea is that by automating menial tasks, humans can devote themselves to "higher-level" tasks and less menial jobs. But for those being replaced that transition will of course be a significant change because they need to find something else to do.
Here in Norway there is a number of people who scoff at service workers, academics and "desk workers" and claim that only the "primary professions" (farming, fishing, logging etc.) and industry are contributing value. However, those areas have been automating and "optimizing" for centuries and do not need as many laborers as they seem to think. Plus, every business that is in demand adds value, especially by the way economists count the GNP (where e.g. farming here contributes a measly 0.5% while the education sector alone dwarfs it significantly).
All you young'uns read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano when you've finally got off my lawn.
There's an 'interesting' economic problem and endgame in full automation too, most humans aren't 'earning' [except the ones twiddling the robotic controls, that can be done by other robots too] and so they don't have any wages to 'consume'. The utopian 1950s view of this was vastly increased leisure, flying cars and people in white togas. The 2000s view is probably a vast undernourished resentful underclass and maximised value for 'shareholders'.
Oh well, I guess the world just fills up with robot-prduced Barbies [tm] in big warehouses and the masses east kibble [tm], three meals, every day.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Translation: China is pro-business while America is full of Marxists who want to put business out of business.
Those "brown people" have never lived better in Chinese history.
Westerners see anything less than their (current, RECENT) luxury as slavery. China was a smoking ruin within living memory. Warlordism, the Japanese invasion, massive famines, etc aren't ancient history.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Translation: China is anti-human rights while America is full of constitutionalists who protect self-evident unalienable rights.
Well it could just be some managements, in some companies, in some counties, are looking beyond what will affect their next bonus check and are actually planning for the future.
And this could just have something to do with why their companies are expanding in a vibrant economy, while most most of the places you've worked at have economised for so many years for short term gains. Now having probably laid off half their labour force they are now wondering why no one can afford to buy their products.
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
China has no (enforced) environmental laws. Robotic factories in China can just dump their toxic waste in the nearest river. Robotic factories in the USA have to properly store and process it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Robots don't buy Androids. That would be like slavery.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
fixed that for you.
Their current jobs are likely very low skill. Take part A from box, put it in part B, pass to next worker. Repeat. Becoming capable of maintaining a robot will require a lot of training - who pays for that? And the entire point of automation is that you can replace ten humans with one human and some robots, so what do the other nine do? If China were actually a communist country, then the workers would own the means of production, so replacing them with machines wouldn't affect their income, just the amount of work that they had to do.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That is actually less true than you think. Many people work, hard, even though they don't need to. But while there will always be work to be done, we need to transition away from thinking that everyone needs to work: there are many people who should be paid *not* to work.
Socialism is not necessarily the coordination of all economic activity by a centralized national state. It is the end of the artificial distinction between political citizenship (where we have rights, and everyone is equal) and economic function (where you have no real rights except the "right" to compete, and we are not equal.) This artificial distinction was useful for a time, but I believe it has outlived its usefulness.
... I think we will call this the beginning of the "Post Labor Age." We've had the industrial revolution, the computer revolution and the Internet age.
>> I seriously think that we CANNOT keep society intact and life civil without changing the way we look at "earning a living." We already have so many "make work" jobs in our economy -- to keep people busy. I'd say that only 5% of us even do something necessary.
And before you tell everyone how NECESSARY your job is -- consider that marketing, accounting, legal and sales are all about "distributing" or influencing people to purchase. Tax complications, keep many accountants employed. Haggling with insurance companies for a Doctors office.
Once automation is able to replace most construction, and expert systems most accountants and boiler-plate legal work -- the amount of money that goes to those who OWN these smart factories of the future will be greater -- and the demand for labor, less.
The planet just hit 7 Billion people and it is estimated, we are using resources that would require 1 and a half earths to fulfill (an estimate of the "load bearing" capacity of the planet).
>> AS harsh as we are now in the USA to what we call "deadbeats", I think we are a generation away from most people being useless -- intensive education of the brightest, or the OWNING of resources and patents will only employ a small percentage of the population.
It could be a golden age -- or a Darwinian nightmare -- it all depends on how we deal with this as a society. I fear that the Wealthiest, are too busy trying to create a police state and already look upon the teaming masses as useless eaters.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
two political parties playing chicken with government spending over debt that could be easily raised,
You say that as if raising the debt ceiling is desirable?
, budgets that could be easily put on a path to remedy and so on.
That part, I can agree with. Congress COULD create balanced budgets, if they just set their minds to it. For starters, they could roll back their own salaries to about the level of 1960, then start working on rolling back all other federal employees. Of greater importance, though, would be eliminating lobbyists - big business, small business, special interests, foreign interests. Damned congress critters should be representing the voters, no one else! Breaking the ties between the military-industrial complex and the government should be job one.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I guess I can look forward to reading stories about robot suicides in a year or two...
#DeleteChrome
And just think of the money you'll save on suicide netting!
Seriously though it is time for we humans to face a cold hard fact of reality, and that is the days of trading labor for capital are over and there is NOTHING that the capitalists can do to change that. We are playing IQ musical chairs with larger and larger amounts of people simply never getting a seat because thew reality is the machine can do it better than any human ever could. The machine won't get tired, won't get sick,, don't get hurt or need overtime.
The jobs that just 30 years ago would have employed a large piece of the population can be done today by the amount of people that would fill a small HS gym with seats left over. The average person has an IQ of 105 so you simply can't make the entire population rocket scientists, and I would argue that like housing the next bubble that will be bursting will be the education racket, with large masses of our youth buried under crushing debt they will never be able to pay destroying their credit rating and further depressing the economy.
So we are gonna have to make some hard choices here: Do we create millions of "make work" jobs, the equivalent of putting paper A into slot B just to justify paying the masses? Do you go on the road we are currently on, with an ever growing gap between the haves and have nots pretty much guaranteeing an Arab Spring in our future? Or do we pay people NOT to work the way we pay farmers not to grow crops?
Because we have already lost industrial, one of the last places for those with a strong back to work, and is there any job at your local MickeyD that couldn't be done by an automated assembly line? Of course not but the fast food industry is a classic example of "make work" where the only reason they haven't automated is because the state is covering for their pathetic wages in the form over government assistance. If the corporate handouts were to end (which with declining tax revenues thanks to the rich using scams like the "double dutch" and the honest folks not having jobs will have to happen sooner or later) then the fast food industry WILL become automated, just as Wendy's now uses call centers instead of hiring someone to work the window at each location.
We are just gonna have to face the fact that like slavery and suffrage the days of trading labor for capital have run its course. Unless we want to become Luddites and smash the machines we WILL have to find a way for the masses to survive. While I'm sure many teabaggers wouldn't mind going back to the 1840s where the poor died in the streets that simply isn't gonna happen, look to the Arab Springs to see what happens when you ignore the masses for too long. It is time to accept capitalism is dead and move on, to ignore this fact is to proceed at our own peril.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You need to look a bit further back in history to see when we shot ourselves in the head. Back in the 70s and 80s when robotics first began to be introduced into manufacturing, there was considerable resistance to it in the West because it displaced blue collar workers. We prioritized their jobs over market efficiency. Consequently in the 90s and 00s when a certain country stepped forward who was willing to play hardball in the labor market, a lot of those jobs ended up moving over there.
If we'd opted for efficiency over jobs in the 70s and 80s and pressed full speed ahead with automated assembly lines, the cost of robotic labor in the West might have been low enough to compete with human labor in China. Those manufacturing industries might have been able to stay here, along with jobs operating and maintaining those automated manufacturing facilities. This is the risk you take when you prioritize anything over efficiency - that someone else will swoop in with a less costly and/or more efficient process and steal all your business from you.
Foxconn is now shielding themselves so another developing country cannot do to them what they did to the West. If they stuck with human labor as we did, as their wages rose another developing country could undercut their labor prices and steal business from them. To prevent this, they're getting the robots in place now. That'll make it difficult or impossible for another developing country to undercut their manufacturing costs, thus guaranteeing those manufacturing industries stay put in China.
They see the writing on the wall when it comes to mundane, repetitive tasks performed by humans. The inexorable march of progress in AI and robotics means that long-term, blue collar manufacturing jobs worldwide are a dead end. It may take 30 years, it may take 100+ years, but the inevitable outcome is that all manufacturing labor will be done by machines, not people. It's simply a waste of our time to be doing such mundane tasks. This should have been obvious in the 70s. We should have embraced automation back then and set up re-education programs to teach assembly line workers how to operate and maintain the robots. Then maybe those manufacturing industries might never have moved over to China in the first place.
Well considering the fact that NEVER in our history have we been at war and NOT raised taxes and we are currently in THREE wars...I think I know what the problem is! I'm not rocket scientist but 800 MILLION a day blown down rat holes shooting at brown people could be a large part of the problem me thinks.
Add to that money sinks like the Gerald Ford Aircraft carrier (uneeded, Enterprise was recently refit and is in good shape, not to mention we already have 11, more than quadruple what anyone else has) and the F35 which is insanely over budget and still isn't ready? The teabaggers may want to blame this on the poor but if we got rid of the 700+ overseas bases (uneeded, we can get to anywhere on the planet and drop bombs with our long range bombers and aircraft carriers) along with the three wars pissing money down a rathole and use our troops at home to deal with the giant leaking sieve of a border I think they'd see significant savings.
Of course that wouldn't fit into the ultimate right wing fantasy, the mantra of "Give teh rich more MONIES! Nom nom nom" which they've been pushing like trickle upon for 30+ years and ran the country into the shitter with. Sadly studies along with common sense shows higher taxes on the wealthy increases employment and growth since if they get taxed if they kep it they are more likely to INVEST it into business rather than hoard, which takes it out of the economy and is "dead money". But instead we'll hear it all blamed on those dirty peasants and their little checks putting food into their dirty little mouths. The cure? Why "Give teh rich more MONIES! Nom nom nom" of course!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I wonder how many people might kill themselves for having been replaced by a robot and have no job rather than killed themselves over nasty working conditions. I doubt the possibility really isn't that unrealistic.
I agree with breaking the ties between the military-industrial complex and government, but if you CUT federal salaries I don't see how you can manage to keep any competent employees. You already make about twice as much by working in private industry.
Members of congress make less than $200k per year. Their campaigns (admittedly not out of their own pockets) cost millions of dollars, and most of them were millionaires before running. And anyway, eliminating their salaries completely would pay for about 15 minutes in Iraq.
Guarding your pocket change is pointless when big business has the key to your safe.
Three wars? You forget that US drones are also currently bombing Pakistan and more recently, Yemen. Or is it not a war when a drone does it?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No, China is pro-business ... and America is pro-rich. No one is terribly interested in putting business out of business as a goal in and of itself, but if it drives 1% more wealth to the top 0.1% in the short term the US will do it.
If you want to see socialism in action look at Sweden, if you want to see capitalism in action look at China, if you want to see money captured politics in action look at the US and the EU.
It buys you time AND it buys you oil.
I agree with everything you've just said, but I want to add something. The Luddites were faced with a similar situation when hundreds of craftsmen were replaced by tens of factory labourers, but there was a critical difference in that automation at the time could never entirely replace even a very low skilled worker. The tools were better, but there was still no prospect of humans being made obsolete. The Luddites were an organisation demanding that factory owners should be taxed to pay for supporting the craftsmen that had been replaced, and to pay for their retraining. Despite the reputation they got, they were in many ways a very forward thinking and modern organisation, seeing the need for a social safety net in a changing society. Some factory owners actually did do the retraining thing, and those factory owners didn't have their equipment smashed. They weren't solely made up of rabid anti-progress maniacs (although I'm sure there were plenty of those too)
One reason (of many) to stop this nonsense.
Buy local.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I largely agree with you except the premise that it was unavoidable. The thing with machines, unlike humans, is that they can be shipped from one area (country) to the next. Aside shipping, they won't have to think about moving, get compensation for moving, have wives and kids in a school they like.
So while, in the 1970s/1980s, if we fully automated, it may have slowed down the move to China, I'm not sure it would have stopped it. In the past, factories located where the existing resources were close (steel mills in PA/Ohio and the like since it had coal for energy) and as well as the skilled labor lived. If you take the labor portion out of the equation, it makes moving that much easier. But, China having lacked infrastructure at the time, I do see your point as plausible. But it still didn't mean they couldn't move to Canada/Mexico/etcetera.
What I do see is the factory era is largely over. What brings jobs locally will be the "last mile". You still need electricians/painters/contractors to make use of the product pushed out by the factories. While Germany weathered China extremely well (it got taken over only a few years ago by China as world's largest exporter), it still has a magnificient apprenticeship system.
Apprenticeships are usually these last mile jobs. While America is all over the college system, it doesn't recognize that most people simply aren't cut out for academic/engineering jobs nor is that even desirable to pigeonhole them into it.
http://www.economist.com/node/18929361?story_id=18929361&fsrc=rss
One thing I should note, I would say because of apprenticeships, you have a lot more skill in skilled labor in Germany. Another plus. Plus, they don't get into their 20s impoverished through "education".
Until humanoid robots that can do housework/contracting come onto the scene, it's one area here we Americans should really consider. Hands on education aka apprenticeships, that the employer provides (there are still certification processes) vs. theoretical training in colleges for 2/3 of the populace.
Three wars? You forget that US drones are also currently bombing Pakistan and more recently, Yemen. Or is it not a war when a drone does it?
We're America so we group all those peripheral encounters in with the smallest non-peacful action currently taking place. We think of them as accessories (even though they usually turn out not to be very fashionable).
If you make it so that a person's job just involves deciding whether to push a button or not, some wiseguy will offer to take push 1000 buttons for the same wage.
;).
And so on till there is the same level of pain and suffering
Isn't the average person's IQ 100, by definition of IQ?And if you had a population of rocket scientists and designed an IQ test for them, the median IQ would still be 100.
An IQ test tells us nothing about a population, because its parameters are defined by that population. You can only use it to measure the deviation between a specific individual and the whole population.
Dilbert RSS feed
lolll...is compartmentalized capitalism focused on advancing the interests of the state. The PRC has this trick: You can make yourselves wealthy, but if you attempt to make yourself wealthy at the expense of the state as they do in the U.S. and E.U., then you're fitted with some of that uniquely Chinese jewelry:
A bullet behind the ear.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
if you CUT federal salaries I don't see how you can manage to keep any competent employees. You already make about twice as much by working in private industry.
Private compensation has been stagnant for years (yes this is all sweeping generalization, just insert the usual caveats) and effectively backwards for the past half decade with inflation, while government employees continued to receive job security, nicer benefits, guaranteed pay raises, and cost of living, destroying the validity of that decades old perspective.
It used to be you took a government job for the security and sacrificed pay. That is no longer the case.
--- Mercutio was right.
As WrongSizeGlass pointed out I was lumping those in with Libya as "collateral actions" which is how they are written off on the budget, with missiles at 1.5 million a pop on average being shot like left over bottle rockets on July 5th.
But if you want to see where we are blowing money like shit through a goose it AIN'T the poor, who haven't be given a cost of living increase in years and I wouldn't be surprised if they never get one again. No it is the military industrial complex with their friends the teabaggers and their "give teh rich more MONIES! Nom nom nom" demanding ever lower taxes like it is a God given right even while they cheer three wars. Apparently wars are great as long as THEY don't have to pay for them and can profit nicely from their stock in Raytheon.
But I figure a few more factories get sent to India, a few more demonstrations of the illegals burning the flag and demanding the non Mexican people get out of the west coast, and we'll be having us a nice race and class war. Most folks are barely hanging on now, and when the bubble bursts on the education and retirement mess you will have teeming masses of starving pissed off people. As the Mexicans have shown the melting pot no longer exists, it is "fuck you gimmie what I want" and frankly most folks in the flyover states wouldn't piss on a rich person if they were on fire.
Things are gonna get ugly folks, I figure we have less than a decade before the hyperinflation hits from the presses cranking 24/7 and when folks have to pay $50 for a loaf of bread the shit WILL hit the fan.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And, just to head off the inevitable "it's not free!" arguments; of course not. It is paid for by taxes, but it is considerably more cost effective for everyone concerned (workers, businesses, the country as a whole).
All evidence points to it being of a significantly lower quality. Maybe not the average care, but the 'peak quality' health care in the US is far better. The challange is to spread that care more widely, not plow it under so that all anybody gets is free contraceptives.
With potentially 1million 'consumers' out of the mix i wonder what effect this will have on the overall economy growth of China.
I realize its not a HUGE percentage of people and sure they can still export and make a handful very wealthy, but with that many people out of work again, the local economies will have to suffer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I take it you don't know anyone who works in Government. All of the ones I know have had wage freezes foe years. Or did you just hear this while inspecting FOP news's colon with your head?
Brilliant, so really low paid legislators then become just another reason only a really rich person can seek office. GOOD THINKING! How about instead force them to have no corp ties(board members, significate stock holdings) at the time of running for election and 10 YEARS after? This crap of retiring from government to take consulting, or board positions at the compaines that they helped benifit while in office, is well kind of a conflict no brainer. A HIGH salary(make it 300,000 or more) combined with strong no conflict rules would actually do something like what you are suggesting. The absolutely piddly amount of money you would save otherwise would pale in comparision with cutting off any hope of office for a normal person. This goes down to state and city positions as well.
Technology has failed democracy. The first form of government that has the bio- or nanotechnology to make a politician's nose light up and cause their ears to flap when they lie or are acting on behalf of someone other than the majority of their constituents wins.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
You say that as if raising the debt ceiling is desirable?
No what he's saying is that raising the debt ceiling has occurred only like 102 times. Under, the last five presidents it has been raised 17: Reagan; 5: H. Bush; 4: Clinton; 7: W. Bush. He's saying that Congress is playing chicken over something they've historically done easily.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
China was beating out robot and hi tech tool assisted manufacturing because they were using humans as much like robots as they could. Undercutting places with high startup costs, high costs in adapting to change, and expensive maintenance -- which cut the number of well paid workers but could not beat the exploited low cost human workers.... until NOW....
Robotics will eventually win the global RACE TO THE BOTTOM. Meanwhile, our economic system depends upon constant growth when we have limited resources and limited consumption. We will eventually not be able to buy enough CRAP we don't need to keep all the meaningless jobs related to producing and selling that CRAP. Productivity increases will make sure that happens... Sure everything could be disposable and that would prolong everything until you run out of resources... then you have to create affordable recycling to prolong it a bit longer...
Of course we just have to progress even faster and further into our war against the natural order of things so we can understand enough to avoid all the downsides our advancement creates. Its quite possibly a catch-22 situation where we never get to the point of 'utopia' because each step forward pushes the goal further off by creating more problems to solve. (or it may be possible, but take millennium and the surviving the journey may be improbable.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Since the 90s we've been feed a line about globalization and free trade, one which I used to believe in, that manufacturing jobs moving out of the US would be replaced with more valuable knowledge jobs at home, and that free trade would foster peace and prosperity throughout the world. Sort of the seeds of The Federation.
Something else is going on. All those knowledge based jobs are also being offshored. And now we hear that the slave labor wages paid to workers offshore, isn't cheap enough. We've been at war for a decade (it's our stupid decisions that make it so, but still, the world is hardly at peace). In our own country, workers try to destroy unions for hard to understand reasons -- maybe they feel everyone should suffer equally rather than realizing they've just sold themselves out.
I don't see what we got out of globalization. A small few became fabulously wealthy, but as a nation, we've gotten jack, and now even those overseas who benefitted are getting the shaft.
I don't know what the solution is honestly, but what we have now is not it.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I just don't get it. Here we have the teabaggers trying to RUIN the credit rating of this country, which will cause rampant inflation, yet I still hear poor folks saying "It is Obama's fault".
Because the Fox News crowd has convinced poor conservatives that to vote democrat is to support the evil Socialist, Gay, Junkie, non-White, non-male, Atheist, etc. etc. etc. Lib'rals. And supporting the Lib'rals would be the end of the world for these folks...
'Your brain is God.' -- Dr. Timothy Leary
If you US citizens are sane then you have to raise taxes for the rich. You should look at the EU. We can provide health care for everyone hat half the cost of the US on a per person basis. Have a look at the OECD report on that subject when you don't trust me. While in Europe the game is "We do not leave anybody behind" the US model is "If everybody cares for himself, then it is cared for everybody". I personally find the first option better.
The US needs to set its priorities right. Which means you have to invest in people and not in Wall Street. And may be you should tear down Fox News and start a democracy with more than two big parties. Maybe it is time for you to look over that Atlantic Oceans and look how Europeans do. There is a lot to learn.