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Foxconn's Robot Workforce Now 20,000 Strong
itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall Foxconn's plans to staff its factories with an army of 1 million robot workers to offset rising labor costs. Well, now we have an update on those plans. Speaking at the company's shareholder meeting on Wednesday, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou said that there are 20,000 robotic machines currently at work in Foxconn factories. Ultimately, these robots will replace human assembly workers and 'our [human] workers will then become technicians and engineers,' Gou said."
Foxconn has no choice. If another company's cost of manufacturing a gadget are lower, then that's where the production will go. Anyway, increasing production efficiency is always a good thing. That's where all human progress comes from. The biggest improvements in population, lifespan, quality of life and human condition in general, the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, were both based on the ability to have fewer people do the work that used to take many.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Where do you find 1 million gainful jobs to replace all of the inefficient human labor they're replacing?
I don't mean to be trite but the answer is, with other companies doing other things. Believe it or not seeing China beginning to automate production is a very positive sign for Chinese workers because it means that pay rates are increasing. If you have unlimited low cost labor there is no point in automating many tasks. But wages in China have been steadily rising to the point where China is now sometimes not competitive with other places. That means they will have to begin to automate some work to remain competitive. Automation being installed is an indicator of rising wages. I'm not even slightly exaggerating when I say it means that millions of people are being pulled out of poverty.
I see this logical fallacy again and again that replacing labor with automation is a zero sum game. It demonstrably is not. The computer you are reading this on has replaced millions of clerical workers who now do other things. Automation replaces some labor but frees it to do more than it could before. Washing clothes used to be a hugely time consuming task but we developed tools (automation) to wash for us and we spend our time on other things. Is it better that we spend our time having people type things repeatedly on typewriters or should we use a word processor and print it once? It isn't that there is suddenly no work, it's that now people have time to accomplish tasks that there wasn't time to accomplish before.