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A US Apple Factory May Be Robot City
dcblogs writes "Apple's planned investment of $100 million next year in a U.S. manufacturing facility is relatively small, but still important. A 2009 Apple video of its unibody manufacturing process has glimpses of highly automated robotic systems shaping the metal. In it, Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president of design, described it. 'Machining enables a level of precision that is just completely unheard of in this industry,' he said. Apple has had three years to improve its manufacturing technology, and will likely rely heavily on automation to hold down labor costs, say analysts and manufacturers. Larry Sweet, the CTO of Symbotic, which makes autonomous mobile robots for use in warehouse distribution, described a possible scenario for Apple's U.S. factory. First, a robot loads the aluminum block into the robo-machine that has a range of tools for cutting and drilling shapes to produce the complex chassis as a single precision part. A robot then unloads the chassis and sends it down a production line where a series of small, high-precision, high-speed robots insert parts, secured either with snap fit, adhesive bonds, solder, and a few fasteners, such as screws. At the end, layers, such as the display and glass, are added on top and sealed in another automated operation. Finally, the product is packaged and packed into cases for shipping, again with robots. "One of the potentially significant things about the Apple announcement is it could send a message to American companies — you can do this — you can make this work here," said Robert Atkinson, president of The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation."
If the reason it can be done in the US is automation there's very little difference in terms of employment -- The capital holders get to keep more of their capital, some Asians get fired, and very few Americans get hired.Sure the GDP will rise but that won't make the slightest difference for the unemployed.
Robots are replacing workers everywhere and we need a new economy to deal with the situation.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I mean sure, on paper wages in the US look high, but then again there's next to no social security. There's no mandatory health insurance, there's little public infrastructure. In some places you even need to have a car.... at least that's what the typical prejudices say.
...if you don't actually pay anyone except the huge firm that sells you the robots (which were probably made by other robots). So, while I admit this is an overly simplistic view, we get all of the industrial waste and hardly any jobs. I sure hope more companies do this! There's a park down the street that would sure look great if it were paved over and filled with widget-making robots so a couple hundred people could make 11 bucks an hour to sweep the floor.
Apple is really NeXT 2.0. NeXT also had a fully automated computer assembly plant which was closed down when NeXT got out of the hardware business.
It's a myth that automation is bad because it leads to unemployment, but no-doubt that myth will be perpetuated here. Someone might even say "yeah it frees people up, frees them up to STARVE." Let's try to address that before it happens.
As processes become more automated, the things we want become cheaper because the cost of labor is the dominant cost in almost every business. This means people have more spare money available, and it will be spent on things that before would have been considered too wasteful. This creates new industries and new jobs.
At one time, people would have spent virtually all their wealth on food. Because of improvements in automation, most people in the U.S. now spend a small fraction of their wealth on food, and this leaves extra money for, say, entertainment. At one time, having many people devote their whole lives to entertaining others would have seemed hugely wasteful -- those people should be out gathering food, after all -- but the wealth created by automation means that it's now a reality.
Some folks also make the claim that the new wealth will be concentrated in too few hands, and most people won't get wealthier. That, too, is false: automation makes things so cheap that just about everyone ends up owning things like microwaves, air conditioners, and computers -- things that before were reserved for the rich. Here's a good explanation of this: http://youtu.be/OkebmhTQN-4
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
its the only reason the company I work for can be competitive on cost in electronic assembly, that being said it takes a small army to keep the machines running and fed 24/7
" A probing station and a computer might be able to tell you where the error is, but desoldering the components is work for a human no matter what you try."
heck, I am putting together a probing station, it parts alone cost just over 10 grand, and required at least a dozen companies products + 2 weeks of my time to wire it all up + 2 weeks worth of software design.
this is the 3rd one this quarter, and we are a tiny company doing simple products!
They use manual labor because humans can be trained faster than automation can be set up. If I hand you a design and contract you do build it, the fastest way for you to get the first products out the door is to use humans. In quickly advancing industries like mobile devices, you can't stay on the leading edge and also use automation.
"His name was James Damore."
It's about brand management. Apple can now say they are making stuff in the US.
They will still need to buy services and products from companies employing human workers - in the purchase and delivery of materials required to build and operate their automated facilities.
The purchase part is already starting to go away. It's called "B2B" and it translates to software making purchases from other software. When Google's self-driving vehicles become common, delivery is gone as well.
As has been said elsewhere in this thread, there is no upper limit to production automation, up to and including all supply chain infrastructure. There was a time when nobody believed that a machine would replace a dock supervisor, but that time is now obviously approaching and will likely be realized in our lifetimes.
In the past (and possibly now) the majority of jobs were repetitive low skilled (e.g. digging holes with a shovel, porter, assembly line worker, etc.) that just about anyone could do with a bit of on the job training. To leave school at 15 was not uncommon 20 years ago. The service / knowledge economy jobs require a much more highly skilled workforce. If you look at the previous transition from farm labourer to assembly line worker both jobs were relatively similar in terms of the type of personal attributes required.
My concern for society is that with education standards dropping coupled with an entitlement / victim mentality that many people are being disenfranchised and have little chance of contributing to society. We cannot stop change, but we should plan for it.
Suicide rate of China: 22.23 per 100,000
Suicide rate of USA: 12.0 per 100,000
Suicide rate of Foxconn factories: 1.5 per 100,000
What can be theorized from this is that a) working at Foxconn is dramatically better than average life in China and b) working at Foxconn is dramatically better than average life in the United States of America.
Citations because I know someone's going to ask that I back up my numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides
Problem is that the market is converging. How many years before all 12 of those companies are three companies? How long before they become one? We don't need multiple companies making the same kinds of goods, right? And how much of that equipment could be converged into less devices?
And you don't think that job could be automated away, but of course it could, and it's only a matter of time. Anyone who doesn't believe that probing can and will be automated has ignored the past completely.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One of the things that has drastically changed since the industrial revolution is the distribution of blue-collar vs. white-collar jobs. As others have pointed out, society's industrialization made the average desk job much more common, rather than reserved for the wealthy elite in business.
As rote, tedious, manual work is automated, there will be even more of a need for positions requiring education. Rather than dropping out of high school in a podunk town in northern Indiana just to go work at an auto factory for the rest of your life, it will be much more valuable to go to college, get a real degree (that is, an education that promotes critical thinking, math and science, and the skills required in those who will design and support and troubleshoot all this new automation technology, not a liberal arts degree that succeeds in little more than teaching you how to be politically correct and "feel" more), and make yourself useful as the world around you continues to evolve.
It is absolutely logical that businesses are going to move more and more toward automation. The cost of labor is high - not just the paychecks, but the benefits, the insurance, the constant evaluations by OSHA to ensure save work environments (not a bad thing, but even a small accidental slip-up can be costly to a large business), and unionization. Machines will never demand a raise, they'll never demand "collective bargaining rights", and they'll never insist on a pension plan. All these are pervasive in the world of manual labor employment - far more than what is commonly seen in white-collar desk jobs.
I think that Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory makes a very good point - Charlie Bucket's father loses his job assembling tubes of toothpaste after his employer buys a robot to do the work. However, the company quickly realizes that they need people who can support and repair those robots, and they hire Mr. Bucket with a better job and better pay, doing something that a robot can't do.
It's a myth that the plebes in society are incapable of getting an education and a real career. Start working on computers. Start working on cars. Learn a trade and become a plumber or an electrician. These jobs aren't going anywhere. We will always need people to fix our toilets and our laptops and our vehicles. We will see an increasing need for people who can engineer new technology, market it, and support it. These are the skills we should be encouraging the next generation of workers to focus on.
I'm a geek girl. Seriously.