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Will Your Next iPhone Be Built By Robots?
itwbennett writes "Foxconn has ambitious plans to deploy a million-robot army on its assembly lines. But while robots already perform some basic tasks, when it comes to the more delicate assembly work, humans still have the edge. George Zhang, senior principal scientist with ABB, a major vendor of industrial robots, thinks Foxconn will eventually replace human workers for much of its electronic assembly, but probably not in time for the iPhone 6. For now, humans are still a cheaper and more practical choice."
Android built iphones?
For that to happen, I would have to buy another iPhone.
Typed on my iPad.
The Chinese workers are living a true hell working in those factories.
The Western assholes freely allow themselves to be tracked 24/7 by these hi-tech tracking devices.
"Smart"phone my ass. Nobody wins.
If the work is done by robots anyway, then what is the advantage of producing in China (except when producing for the Chinese market)? You don't have the advantage of cheap workers (robots don't get wages), but you have the disadvantage of higher transport cost.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Seems more and more jobs are being replaced by technology. What happens as the population grows but jobs dissapear?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
George Zhang, senior principal scientist with ABB, a major vendor of industrial robots
Big surprise there.
Robots are great for replacing humans in industrialized countries, but Chinese laborers are cheaper and more flexible than any robot for the foreseeable future. Back when Apple only made computers, it had heavily automated US (and Irish, etc.) factories. All shuttered now, thanks to the affordable, scalable, flexible efficiency of young Chinese minds and bodies.
This is certainly telling of what they think of their million-non-robot-army.
Yes, but China has shown repeatedly--no matter whether it's communists or the old guard before WWII--that they are willing to slaughter huge numbers of people to maintain stability.
The culling of humanity is beginning. Soon it will be just 1 million or so people left served by robots. Are you going to be one of them?
What we really need to worry about are robots building robots. That's when they finally don't need us any more and can rise up as our oppressors. That's the beginning of the end, man. The beginning of the end.
iPhone 7 : Not only built BY Robots, built FOR Robots!**
(**Like all iPhones)
Now Apple is going to put Chinese workers out of a job. I can see it in 20 years, the CEO and CTO the only ones raking in the money, in their automated office with roomba's (made in Poland) cleaning up the office after hours and their Google driverless cars taking them home, to their Toyota robot butler opening the door...
Who builds the robots?
Or is this a turtles all the way down kind of thing?
"For now, humans are still a cheaper and more practical choice."
That's been the argument about labor since the dark ages. Slavery was cheaper than horses. The pyramids were built by people dragging slabs up the sides using ropes and pulleys; Even though it's almost a certainty that the Egyptians knew of more advanced engineering. They also buried the slaves (alive) with the king when he died. The question has never been whether humans are cheaper than machines: The larger the size of the labor pool, the lower the cost of labor. Supply and demand; Basic economics.
The question has been how workers are treated, and what level of servitude a society is willing to accept for some, or all, of its members. Even by the laws of the United States, what China routinely allows with its workforce is inhumane. I say this with the full knowledge that my country has some of the worst labor laws in the first world -- the fewest number of vacation days, the spread between what the head of a company is paid and its entry-level workers the highest of any country on Earth, and a grossly underfunded federal workforce safety department.
We shouldn't be doing business with them; They don't even have child labor laws worth a damn. But they have a lot of our money and they're cheap. For many countries, that's enough. I wish it weren't -- where are the europeans' "citizens of the world" speeches when they really matter? You're just as guilty as we are, that's why. Until human rights are something afforded to our enemies, as well as our friends, then we should be honest with ourselves: Nobody really has human rights. What we have... are privileges. And we live our lives in comfort because a significant portion of the world doesn't, and we aren't willing to help them get them.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Your specific question (if robots, why China?) was answered directly a few years ago by Terry Gou, Chairman of Foxconn. According to Terry, the US has "too many lawyers." Linky here.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
... they can remove the nets from their factories/dorms.
..robots won't commit suicide by jumping out the windows.
Hmm... those rioting workers should have been more grateful for their jobs. The sly fox has a solution to worker unrest. The current version of robots do not strike or riot.
Straight-forward question: what do we do when we have automated most jobs world-wide?
It seems like this scenario is incompatible with our current work-for-money economy.
robots would be cool, i suppose. I am reading this on my iphone 5 that I stood in line 23 hours to get. I got it at the Apple store. It is made by Geniuses (Genuii?) Everybody asks me about my thin new phone. It is thin and light and had a bigger screen than the crappy old iPhone 4s. sure the maps could use a little work and the lightning power cord costs crazy money but hey, I 'm hip and people adore me because I have an iPhone5 I'm sure the people who made it are well treated and probably just like me: 30 something, stylish, hip and know their way around a wine shop.
-badford
Will MY next iPhone be built by robots?
I'll NEVER have an iPhone.. so no.
Who says I've owned any at all?
OTOH I don't have an Android phone either, I'm happy enough with my Samsung E900..
It surprised me how much labor goes into iPhone manufacture at Foxconn. Cell phone assembly was automated years ago by Motorola, Nokia, and Sony. The iPhone form factor doesn't change much from year to year, and the volume per model is high. That's the ideal case for automation. Only very low salaries make it possible to do the job cost-effectively with humans.
It would be the next logical step
He said "Bite my shiny metal Android. I'm usin' my iPhone to order more beer. Oh crap! A touch screen. Metal. fingers. useless. I need a human hand. Where can I get one. C'mere you..." Then I heard screaming and was disconnected.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
And robots in the Netherlands to build the same shavers.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
It's not quite as simple as technology meaning fewer jobs. There are a lot of jobs out there which could be automated but aren't. Why? Because labor is cheap.
This even holds in the US, although you can see technology chipping away. For example, a robot to scan and bag groceries wouldn't be too complicated -- most of the setup is already automated with a conveyor belt, barcode scanner, automatic change dispenser, etc. However, it hasn't been completely automated because paying someone minimum wage to put your groceries in a bag is still cheaper than a robot.
Changes could come as technology gets cheaper, but they could also come if labor becomes more expensive -- something a lot of people are pushing for, directly and indirectly.
It's not clear how this all might work out, but some of the possibilities aren't pretty. Part of the problem is that there would probably be an ~18 year delay between changes in the demand for labor, and changes in the supply of labor...
How many of you remember when Apple was making a whole lotta profit off of the Apple ][ line and Steve Jobs spent a whole lot of that money on the Macintosh robot assembly line?
And I'm betting no Slashdot readers remember the dream of a 'no need to work' society back at the start of the 20th century that looked back on a few of Greek society and helped to spawn Technocracy?
Like it or not - such a 'workless' society will automate a whole lot of people out of a job. What you gonna do when automation comes for you?
Oh shiz! Foxconn worker riots were bad enough. Can you imagine an army of factory robots rising up against their masters? Apple would usher in the robot apocalypse. Android - The iPhone Killer
Sure, it is possible that they will start building mainly robot based factories in mainland Chinal, but why bother? In its purest form a robot factory would just take raw materials and energy as input, with product as output. You want to place a factory like that in a location with a really stable energy supply, good infrastructure, and a stable political situation. Staff costs wouldn't be such a big issue, since you wouldn't have too many staff anyway. So, why choose China, where you would have to deal wiith rampant corruption, bad infrastructure and millions of starving former factory workers?
Personally I would put the factories in Japan, northern Europe and Canada, that way they would be closer to the consumers as well. It would certainly save a fortune in security!
Thats what chinese are. Cheap, emotionless, uncaring, unfeeling robots meant to be used to assemble things. Thats the way it works and always has. The japs create things, the chinese robots make it and we buy it.
However they will be Chinese robots, and 5% of them will commit suicide from the stress of being over-worked.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
one of these stories comes up. So I'll ask this time too. What are we suppose to do with all these people we don't need anymore? We can't just give them food, housing and healthcare if they don't work for it. That's Socialism, bordering on Communism (yes, I know ones a subset of the other. I'm trolling here, give me a break).
/. but a healhcare system that rivals Somalia.
And yeah, I'm Trolling. But I'm trolling out of deep fear and frustration. I'm not one of the 'haves'. My Dad not only didn't give me shit, he's blowing anything that would resemble an inheritance on the medical care needed to keep himself alive (the selfish bastard). Oh, and in case you haven't figured it out I'm in America. Where else could I have the resources to post to
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Do you think the iPhone will keep being the phone everyone wants for long? The iPhone is currently at the very top of its popularity curve, still up thanks to the inertia of the original devices design/ergonomics coming from the late Jobs era. Cook performs incremental updates (4S, 5, ipad 3, or soon some reduced devices) to maintain the ghost alive - for how long?
In two years from now the "next iPhone" will draw much less attention.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
nope
Expanding on your great points: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Clearly Foxconn has none. This is going to put a lot of poor chinese factory workers out of a job.
Where's the supposed "people's" Communist party during all of this?
I don't see how that post is offtopic. He answers the question in the topic, doesn't he? About the only thing (iPhone) that Foxconn apparently produces.
impossible.
-Lod
Although it's still far from being completely extinct. Someone still has to design the iPhones and to design and build the robots. But more and more of that, too, will become automated, even in countries where labour is cheap, because technological progress will at some point in time make automation even cheaper.
What will happen? Instead of enabling people to enjoy more free time at decent living standards, more and more people will become jobless and thereby poor. Oh, and, by the way, because economic value can only be created by human work, both products and money will more and more lose their economic value, which will finally lead to world-wide inflation. The process has long since started, and the current financial and economic crises are only the first major symptoms of what is to come.
As I said earlier: if a businessman could run a business without hiring a single person and instead by automating every aspect of business, then he absolutely should do it, it's the best thing for the economy.
This is a step in that direction. Starting your own business and using only contractors to bring the equipment and install it and do the necessary preparations and then having all aspects of business being automated, from conveyor belts and all the production activities, to packaging, to marketing and sales, everything should be automated.
In that situation anybody could run a business providing the market with yet another gadget or service that the market is willing to exchange other goods for voluntarily.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Remember all the outmoded robots in the movie iRobot. The ones that were replaced by the next generation, updated, talks-and-thinks like a human, takes orders like a storm trooper, robots? Good... now picture them as human beings and imagine the reaction it would create anywhere but in China where the press and the population can be squashed like a bug. (Ask Google if you don't believe me.)
That's right, the advantage is that when you want the first rule of robotization to be that, you don't talk about robotization, then you do it where the society is already used to the effects and the message of goodness for all can be distributed over state run media.
That way Apple protects their profits and China gets increased revenue.
Say, did you hear the one about Foxconn opening up new a manufacturing plant in the U.S? It's only supposed to have 100 workers. Guess how many are going to work on the assembly line?
They are about to get a null labor cost, and of course they will still try to avoid paying taxes. If we follow that path, nobody will be able to purchase the produced goods, which means the market will disappear. Will capitalism collapse because of its own victory over workers?
No one explained to me WHY I am considered human. I don't have a wife or a girlfriend, and am considered male in gender. Yet I wonder why I am considered human, or at least have to be among them all the time. My spare time is spent alone, and after a long weekend with no human contact for two days I always freak out on Mondays when I see "people" again when its time for the commute to work using public transportation. It takes a day or so getting used to the humans at work, their essence is one of spoiled garbage, and I always think how some of them have sex, it seems so alien to me. Almost disgusting, I wonder why those people get sick and have colds while I don't and just look forward to 6 or 10 beers every night to kill the pain in my brain. I've asked god for help and have started meditating. Also geopolitics has given me a sense of apathy being aware of what is going on all around the world, slavery and murder of other humans who they say are like me "people". Please help me understand. I will bookmark this post and refer back to it in a day or two. How to fucking deal?
ABB, while being one of the biggest automation suppliers in the world, still manages to makes some of the unreliable automation products.
The ABB robots at the Chrysler factory in Belvedere, IL are notorious for overheating and shutting down even in mild summer temperatures, leaving dozens of workers just standing around for hours waiting for a robot to be fixed (which usually fixed itself once the control cabinet cooled off) before the line could be restarted
Will Your Next iPhone Be Built By Robots? As explained in the summary and article, for the most part: NO.
That's why people with iPhones keep sort of quiet about it,
I think this statement needs to be re-emphasized as a very clear example of the Realty Distortion Field in action.
...and give them to robots
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I can see the headlines now 'Foxcon Robots Commit Mass Suicide'
This will all end in tears. I just know it.
Have gnu, will travel.
get all the robots from?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
In a normal economy, making robots smart enough to do a job that drives many people to suicide would be good news. But in the current economy, this would just look bad on the unemployment report and possibly move business away from low-cost markets.
There are some arguments missing from your otherwise rather good observation.
First, China's environmental laws are such that building a factory in western countries will cost quite some extra money, due to the pollution and CO2 compensation that will have to be dealt with. This will make it less interesting to build in the west, if you're in it for the money.
Second, anything you build in China, will have all the technology of not just the product, but also the assembly copied. They will surely try to copy your western factory and products, but it will be quite a bit harder for them to do industrial espionage when the industry isn't in their own country. This will make it more interesting to not produce in China, or any other country that will benefit from copying your technology.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Using human labor gives Apple much more flexibility to make changes to their products, because it is much easier to teach a human a new skill than it is to reprogram a robot for a task it was not designed to do. This was perfectly illustrated with the first iPhone; Jobs demanded a switch to gorilla glass from plastic (not a trivial demand) just six weks before the iPhone was scheduled to be released. you can read about it here http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-22/tech/30652107_1_foxconn-iphones-apple-executives.
If I am to buy an iPhone, the next iPhone better be a robot!
This has been happening for a while. Instead of the much anticipated 10 hour work week, we find that 40-50 hours is still the norm, but we need fewer people. With healthcare costs a significant fraction of the ongoing cost of an employee, along with training and other per-employee costs, it makes sense to maximize useful hours per employee rather than increase the number of employees to match the work needed. And with each increase in productivity, the average/minimum skill level to be productive increases. It's increasing orders of magnitude faster than humans evolve.
We didn't need 7 billion people on this planet. We won't need 8 billion. Things are going to get interesting.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Robot" Etymology, From Wikipedia:
"The word robot was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel apek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920. ...The word robota means literally "corvée", "serf labor", and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech..."
I think that pretty well satisfies the current conditions, don't you think?
I for one welcome our new robotic factory-working subordinates.
I guess if they can get to the roof...
I agitated the fanboys apparently. They get butt hurt when you insult their sacred trinkets. Refer to Libya for more references.
I got here through a series of tubes
EVERY integrated circuit (chip) in iPhones or Android are 99.99% robotically built (the people you see in these fabs are fixing/adjust the machines, not running them or supervising them - which is done remotely by the MRP computer system). Where's the outcry for all them humans who used to scurry around in bunny-suits in IC fabs? All those jobs doing that in Silicon Valley were lost 15-20 years ago. They were in many cases never transferred to Asia in the first place - like skipping land-line phones and going straight to cellular - most went straight to robotic automation.
And what about the fact that Foxconn build most every other consumer electronic company's products (HP, Dell, HTC, Moto, etc.) are also.
All of this is why the big to-do of this anti-robitics idiocy has NOTHING to do with caring about Chinese labor and pretty much is just anti-Apple hate. Most of the people making it an issue probably don't really like Chinese folks and certainly have never been to China. Pretty much all Foxconn anger and anti-robotic diatribes are self-contradictory, illogical, irrational and idiotic. And those are the GOOD POINTS.
Basically when someone opens their mouth about this subject complaining about Foxconn or about robotic, what they've done is branded themselves as reactionary unthinking idiots.
America could have won the industrial war against cheap labor and kept millions employed with this exact method now it is being used against us.
Just how long are our companies going to concede our manufacturing without a fight.
All compainies like apple are doing is supporting communism and if you buy their product you are to stupid to hire yourself that is why you dont have a job.
And how does one go about learning how to build these robots? Where to begin?