Slashdot Mirror
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."
Same as my, er, Android phone. Schedule a reboot every five days.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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!
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."
The suicide rate for workers in Foxconn was something like a quarter of the Chinese national average. I've never seen suicide statistics for the general factory worker population in China, but without this information there is no evidence that working for Foxconn is a risk factor.
Translation: China is anti-human rights while America is full of constitutionalists who protect self-evident unalienable rights.
fixed that for you.
... 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!!!"
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 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.
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.
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).
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.