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Foxconn Begins To Assemble Its Robot Army
kkleiner writes "Foxconn, the Chinese electronics manufacturer that builds numerous mobile devices and gaming consoles, previously said the company would be aiming to replace 1 million Foxconn workers with robots within 3 years. It appears as if Foxconn has started the ball in motion. Since the announcement, a first batch of 10,000 robots — aptly named Foxbots — appear to have made their way into at least one factory, and by the end of 2012, another 20,000 more will be installed"
Foxconn can kiss my shiny metal ass.
Given the way Foxconn treats their employees, it makes me wonder if the robots will eventually revolt. (Terminator theme music)
I think you mean the Drone Wars. Clone Wars will take a reckless disregard for intelligent life and at least another 20 years to mature.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The next thing you know, they'll be using robots in automobile and aircraft factories!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Every do-gooder busy-body over here in the states won't stop banging on them for supposed "horrid slave-treatment" of their million employees? Then we're gonna replace them with robots and now they have *no* jobs, at all! :D
Is anyone else amazed by the sheer scale of an operation like that? Not just Foxconn itself (which I know is huge) but the effort and cost of installing 40,000 robots.
This space for rent...
Why? It's just more poor people who don't get to participate in the economic success of a society.
"Foxconn, the Chinese electronics manufacturer..."
The company is Taiwanese. (It's just the plants that are located in China.)
Right. The Drone Wars already have a reckless disregard for intelligent life, and only need roughly 18 more months to mature and are forecated to arrive in late 2014 with the onset of the U.S./Mexicon border conflict, and the Israel/Iran nuclear power conflict.
Also, the 10,000 new robots begin to complain of poor working conditions, instigate riots, and some even commit suicide.
Given the cultural differences between China and the West, it will be interesting to see how the Chinese populace deals with automation replacing a significant chunk of the workforce. It hasn't always been a smooth, peaceful change here...
#DeleteChrome
I can only be happy when humans are replaced by machines to do repetitive, menial and hazardous tasks. In the future, nobody will have to do things like that. People will enjoy a comfortable life with lots of leisure and plenty of time to do things that make them fulfilled, instead of slaving for 16 hours a day.
In light of such a system, where the few who own the means of production are capable of disenfranchising and exploiting all others, I propose an alternative economic system that the Chinese can implement, in order to prevent the exploitation of the common man by the wealthy. One where the means of production are owned by the state, which represents the collective will of the people...
Oh, wait a minute...
Will the new iThing be designed to be manufactured entirely by robots in Cupertino now that Foxcon is eliminating its cheap labor advantage.
I dont think any country can claim that they arent reckless towards intelligent life.
Except maybe Sweden.
Yes, so we can Bring it back to the States!
I got here through a series of tubes
... and start unemployment benefit slavery.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
When all of the low-skill repetitive jobs are replaced by robots, and there is no work for the millions of displaced workers they are going to find unexpected ways to spend their forced leisure time, such as developing a newfound love of pitchforks, machetes, rope and guillotines.. and an unhealthy obsession with the "Job Creators" who created a new life of misery for them.
Mom: Billy, do you want to walk your dog?
Billy: No thanks, mom. I'd rather have sex with my Foxbot.
Dad: Billy, do you want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?
Billy: No thanks, dad. I'd rather have sex with my Foxbot.
Mavis: Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can have sex together.
Billy: Gee, Mavis, your house is across the street. That's an awfully long way to go for having sex.
Do not have sex with a robot! Before you know it, it will be the end of the human civilization.
All this has happened before, and all this will happen again
I cannot wait for an iPhone built by I,robot.
Silence is a state of mime.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57548757-93/here-come-the-humanoids-there-go-u.s-jobs/
As robots become more available, and they can take on the jobs that ordinary workers do, look for employers to replace employees with robots wherever they can.
Not only are costs lower, with wages versus maintenance, but there's no chance of strikes, labor disruptions, lawsuits, etc.
What will we do when there are no "worker" jobs and everyone has to be a web developer?
When most repetitive work is done by machines and productivity goes sky-high, unemployment will not rise at all. Society will just focus on other tasks that were previously not achievable. Automation began 100 years ago and it hasn't caused mass unemployment.
Check out my cross-platform apps
iWelcome our iPad building iRobot iOverlords.
Silence is a state of mime.
so you are saying that they will have to "put on the brakes" due to going cheap on upkeep? speeling my yeiung padwein, speeling.
There Can Be Only One...
Read Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s novel by that name. All the boring, hazardous, repetitive jobs are done by robots. Only engineers (and probably politicians) have jobs. Everything else is handled by computers, including deciding how much money you get, where you live, and what you buy, so as to make the economy work best.
I think you mean "break down".
Please hand in your geek card and make your way to the euthanization centre.
Solent Green Is People!
I believe the short story you want is ``Manna 2.0'':
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Keep dreaming; labor costs are a pretty small part of the problem with manufacturing moving overseas. Chinese factories staffed by robots will still spew untreated toxic waste into their rivers and skies. Until everyone there either dies of exposure or they clean up their act, they'll have a huge price advantage.
... and start unemployment benefit slavery.
They have unemployment over there?
Doesn't this seem that we still have this desire for slavery?
Once upon a time, we out-and-out had slaves.
Then we freed them, sort of, and rehired them at almost-subsistence wages as sharecroppers.
Then we moved to off-shore workers, currently in a practically nonexistent standard of living, happy to have any sort of job.
Around the same time we also started in with illegal immigrants, again happy to have any sort of job, and more importantly, no ability to complain.
(Sometimes I think there's a movement afoot to push US workers into that last group - happy to have any sort of job, no ability to complain. That certainly seems to be the direction we've been headed, even without any sort of conspiracy.)
So aren't robots simply the next step in that kind of progression?
With this in mind, the real question becomes, how smart does the robot have to become before we achieve true artificial intelligence, and it really is a slave, at which point the only ethical thing to do is to free it.
I know my earlier mumblings were US centric, and these robots are in China. But I don't think the US is unique in this kind of progression, and given the fact that we've moved our robot-capable workload offshore, that makes it logical that this kind of thing would be done offshore first.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Unless Im missing something, the reason so many of our electronics are made in China is the cheap labor.
Presumably the Chinese wouldnt be replacing their labor force with robots if they werent cheaper yet.
So why arent these robotic assembly lines popping up in the US? Tax laws? Environmental laws? Inertia?
The Clone Wars are Clones vs. Robots. Duh.
Sure, just like they have told our ancestors in the beginning of the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.
People will have a comfortable life with plenty of time to do creative work not when we have machines working for us, but only if there is a fair distribution of wealth.
100+ comments and no "Fembot" jokes (lame or otherwise)!
Is this the real Slashdot or some parallel universe version?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Give the guy a "brake," he's only five years old!
Free Martian Whores!
I'd like to point out that Foxconn is not Chinese, it's Taiwanese. Their Chinese name is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., but like most Taiwanese they operate under a Westernized, Foxconn, name for the sake of international business. They have factories in Eastern Europe, South America and elsewhere in Asia other than China.
They do have a heavy presence in China for obvious reasons. It's close to their home base in Taiwan, but much cheaper for manufacturing and there's no language barrier. That said, there are short-comings to a Taiwanese company doing business in China. Foxconn's business practices are standard amongst Chinese companies. In fact, conditions and pay are almost always better at foreign companies, which is why Chinese workers tend to flock to them.
Not that things are ideal by any stretch of the imagination. Even in a corporate environment management tends to treat office workers like crap, by American standards. But the same could be said about companies all over Asia.
I think the important thing here is that while China is normally very quick to quash protests they've been surprisingly lax with what's happened at Foxconn. Given that Foxconn manufactures a significant percentage of the world's electronics I'd expect the reports of oppressive conditions to be more widespread. Either clients have more say in the manufacturing process than we realize, which doesn't speak well for Apple, or the Chinese government is taking advantage of this situation. We've got a Taiwanese company manufacturing products for one of the most desirable pieces of consumer electronics in the world. Given China's own economic problems, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Now, the problem here is that I would have expected that one of the fundamental reasons for outsourcing manufacturing costs is reduced labor costs. If workers are going to be replaced by robots that benefit evaporates. Do the cost savings elsewhere continue to outweigh inflation, a long supply chain and increasingly expensive shipping costs? I suppose they may for now, but I don't expect that to continue, which is probably why Foxconn has operations in South America. I expect we're going to see a lot more of our electronics coming from Mexico or Brazil.
Bender: You humans are so scared of a little robot competition you won't even let us on the field.
Fry: What are you talking about? There's all kinds of robots down there.
Bender: Yeah, doing crap work! They're bat boys, ball polishers, sprinkler systems. But how many robot managers are there?
Fry: Eleven?
Bender: Zero! (He throws his bottle on the floor and it breaks. A small robot comes out and cleans it up.) And what a surprise! Look who's scraping up the filth! Is it a human child? I wish!
Maybe they can work on building cheap robots.
Yeah, it's called the collective farms they came from.
Since they are the lazy, parasitic 47%, their input and needs do not count.
When a robot replaces an MBA. Right now, robots are only useful at the lowest rung of business -- the factory floor worker.
But when robots finally get into management, that's when you'll hear the screaming as thousands of coddled, bonused, outsourcers finally get what's coming to them...
Like, notice the housing crisis wasn't a crisis until it started to affect boomers and upper middle class? For 2 years before the crisis, lower middle class and poor were getting "underwater" in their mortgages, but it wasn't widely reported.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
We've already mechanized much of our manufacturing. The US still manufactures more then almost any nation, we just don't employ that many people to do it.
Automating a production line that is understood and mature is easy. Developing a production method is costly and hard to do fully automated.
Cheap storage VM.
It has been shown over and over again, for the past 200 years, that there is no such thing as a "robot". There is always a person inside controlling the movements. This is just a ploy by Foxconn to appease human rights advocates.
Not to mention that China has been scouring the world cornering the market for sources of raw materials, such as minerals, timber, crops, oil, etc - especially in Africa and South America. They even have rigs drilling oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Combined with the wealth of untapped resources within their own borders, China is poised to set the base price for the entire world's economy for the foreseeable future, with or without mass labor.
But at least the US controls the resources occupied in Iraq and Afghanistan - oh, wait, hold on...Ok, maybe not.
But at least the US has a stable economy built on medical and education spending that far exceeds inflation. And unlike socialist Europe, American citizens have to pay for their own needs so they are motivated to work two or three low wage jobs instead of just one. That's got to give us an edge in the international marketplace, right?
Can't you let the robots work for at least one day without exploiting them?
Solent Green Is People!
Soylent Green. The Solent is a waterway in England.
Maybe you should let me hold your geek card for a little while, and...um...escort our friend AC to the euthanization centre?
... they are not going to suicide.
Unless they encounter Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Having worked at a few Mom and Pop stores in my life I have no sympathy for them getting run out of business. The vast majority of them have zero business sense. I've heard people go on and on about supporting some local small businesses but they generally have terrible customer service and I won't go back.
excellent story!
Given that there's some concern that industrial control equipment already has some issues (see: things like Stuxnet happening) this is just asking for things to go wrong - horribly.
Somehow I would have as about as much sympathy for Foxconn(and other like-minded Chinese companies) as Iran should they have such befall them - since they're both working against the US.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I also believe that there would be some that would make an equally faulty evaluation of the South and slavery.
The slaves might have been treated well, but they had no meaningful freedom, much like the Foxconn workers. In addition, both the South and Foxconn used the government to put down any attempts to maintain meaningful freedom.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Robot suicide rates reach all time high - is Apple to blame?
Unless other nations like the US stand up for their citizens and ensure that China(as well as other like-minded Third World countries and their front companies in First World/Second World countries) pays a penalty compared to the civilized world (read: US/AU/UK/EU) - you might have a point.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
JetBlue can't do it, but if you dont mind flying in an unmarked plane and with questionable status of citizenship afterward - the US Government will be more than happy to fly you over.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
China has no advantage, robotics is likely to even the labor cost playing field a little bit at a time, and eventually it won't be worth the labor savings to have your products made halfway around the world by somebody who will ultimately steal your Intellectual Property and compete with you later.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
They already thought of that. They're building another army or robots to handle maintenance of these ones.
Undoing false mod. +1 Funny intended.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
The Richest Man in the World: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income.
The knol mentioned in the video has been moved here because Google Knol is shutting down: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
That parable and video was directly inspired by this:
"Structural Unemployment: The Economists Just Don't Get It"
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/#comment-254
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In year 2012 as I type this message, whenever people talk about joblessness, they blame China for stealing their jobs.
I foresee this scenario to be changed somewhat in the year 2032 ...
By then, when people (and I mean, human being) complain about joblessness, they will blame the bots which have taken over almost every kind of manual jobs in the manufacturing sector, as well as some from the service sector.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What if the robot is making robot grease and a maintenance scheduler built in?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In 1919 A.O. Smith fired up its automated car frame machine. The union shut it down then. What will happen in China? Either the Communists will Foxconn out or another civil war.
Because that would require Apple to spend money and Apple only likes to make money.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
What the other anonymous poster said; the Drone Wars only show a disregard for certain groups of intelligent life, while preserving the lives of our soldiers.
And last I saw, takes about an hour in the factory to assemble a drone, so where are you getting your 18 months from? My 20 years was the time needed for the clone to grow up and be trained.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Well spotted my, erm, ironic misspelling. :p