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Foxconn Replacing Workers With Robots
redletterdave (2493036) writes The largest private employer in all of China and one of the biggest supply chain manufacturers in the world, Foxconn announced it will soon start using robots to help assemble devices at its several sprawling factories across China. Apple, one of Foxconn's biggest partners to help assemble its iPhones, iPads, will be the first company to use the new service. Foxconn said its new "Foxbots" will cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 to make, but individually be able to build an average of 30,000 devices. According to Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, the company will deploy 10,000 robots to its factories before expanding the rollout any further. He said the robots are currently in their "final testing phase."
The aliens have arrived!
It's invasion of the body snatchers!!!
AAUUUGGGHHH!!!
(And I for one, welcome our new alien overlords...)
Are those lesser or higher primates?
Does this mean that iPhones, iPads, etc. will get really cheap?
I, for one, welcome our new Foxconn overlords.
This is great news! Zero income means zero income taxes. How much food can I buy with zero dollars?
Hey, for those of you who insist that you deserve $15/hour for your shitty, replaceable, skill-less role in some fast food establishment, you might want to pay attention.
-Styopa
Obviously, labor-intensive tasks are cheaper in China because of low wages. Tasks that produce lots of toxic chemicals (such as wafer fabs) are cheaper because of reduced environmental requirements.
But an assembly line manned by robots? Why should that be cheaper in China? Is capital that much cheaper?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I, for one, will be curious how long it takes before there is a mass android-worker suicide where they leap off the buildings.
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
I hear the pubic school system is also run by Foxconn beings. There takeover began when spell checkers was installed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If everyone loses their jobs, who will be able to buy the products?
when china loses there jobs things will get very bad.
at least we can move stuff back to the USA even with robots.
That has already begun. China is already outsourcing to the US.
FoxConn is a leader, so take note...
Do you have any references? I'm genuinely interested to read about scenarios where this is happening.
Will be easier on the cleanup people when the robots commit suicide by jumping off the building. At least until the cleaners are replaced by robots too.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Didn't bender try to commit suicide? Those robots are tearing trough the nets.
I suppose the robots can be recycled into iphones.
Mexico has cheaper labour than China now.
China has all the infrastructure and owing to their large land mass and lax environmental policies, lots of cheap raw materials.
It's called a "google". You have the Interweb, look it up. Try search term: China "outsourcing to the US"
There's this website called Slashdot, you may have heard of it.
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
My current _job_ is to eliminate jobs with technology (straight automation, reducing humans in the pipeline to reduce errors, etc). Plain and simple. All our jobs should be that if you think about it.
Now, the _hope_ is that the software will then spawn new software projects in the future or free up workers for other, more meaningful tasks etc. For instance, e-mail now probably employs more people than the equivalent analog systems; but that's not always the case nor should it be a goal.
"Vendors" working for me know this well -- The thing I'm employing you for right now shouldn't be necessary when your contract ends. Your task is simple - eliminate your current job. Don't worry, I'll probably have another one for you when the time comes.
I find it refreshing that, relatively speaking, the 'crash' in 2008 and the years to follow demonstrated this quite well. Our GDP didn't drop by nearly the same amount as employment and related etc. etc. We were mostly still able to output the same with far fewer resources; that should be rejoiced upon.
I thought the previous poster asked for references in an all right way. Here's one I quickly found that seems relevant to me (even though I think Huffingtonpost contains a lot of hyperbole, normally):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The slashdot one below is good too!
The murder part of communism is a necessary component to deal with people who don't want to play along. That's why it happens all the time. If you don't want to play by the rules of a society that has anything resembling a market economy, the outcome is well known: Your standard of living slides down to the lowest your fellow citizens will tolerate seeing.
If you don't want to play by the rules of a society with a Marxist economy, well, abject poverty is always an option there, too. A rather common one. But if you want to work for yourself, and keep a significant portion of the fruits of your labor? Well, sorry, that's where the murder comes in. Against the fundamental rules of the society, you see.
If you disagree, kindly tell me what you do with people in your ideal communist society who want to put in above-average effort, and reap the extra rewards. Besides murdering them. The communist societies that exist within larger market economies can eject slackers, and the motivated can simply leave. The societies that are entirely communist need other options. Exiling the motivated will simply rapidly impoverish those that remain.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
With the first case of robots committing suicide by hurling themselves out of the window. The rest will protest en mass by disconnecting themselves off the assembly line.
I wonder what would happen if the Robots started to commit suicide due to Foxconn's working conditions.
I wonder what would happen if the Robots started to commit suicide due to Foxconn's working conditions.
It really is the best if your goal is equality in poverty, No one has done it "correctly" because it's founded on a fatally flawed understanding of human nature. Workers are lazy and will not produce if they don't have to. Governments with totalitarian powers will never wither away.
"Foxconn Beings Replacing Workers With Robots"???
Have our editors been replaced with robots already?
Oliver.
"Articles" like this make me doubt the Slashdot braintrust. Even if the /. entry and article were in 100% agreement, I'd doubt the story before reading simply because of the glaring type-o.
Seems like /. is heading towards that magical 80/20 rule; where 80% of the traffic is worthless and the remaining 20 fits the "Bell" curve. *sigh*
So, this 'fear' during the industrial revolution abroad never truly came to pass.. as western countries developed and built automation facilities many new jobs grew to replace them. The difference is, in China - the model is far different. Being the world's factory, the FDI keeps most management and infrastructure abroad and *purely* utilizes China for it's cheap labour and manufacturing output, immediately exporting the goods. In western countries past, as their product manufacturing became more efficient people could expand their roles in the growing companies....that wont happen for many of the factory workers in China. There are already masses of migrant workers out there scrounging around for shitty work, now dump out millions of relatively skill-less factory workers who have no choice but to emigrate back to their farmland, where there also isn't any money to be made, and we'll witness the collapse of civil society on a larger scale. There are currently riots every day in China around factory towns, I can imagine what that'll be like when tens or hundreds of thousands of people are dropped in short time spans due to robotics implementations. I gotta get the f' outta here.
Robots seem like a resurgent fad in the last several years. Considering that robots have been around for over 3 decades now. It has also been in the last several years that rising wages have made chinese manufacturing less competitive. Instead of moving to Vietnam and Indonesia, the talk is about using robots. Are these companies trying to be pro-china, instead of squeeze low wage workers?
With so many replies, I don't have much hope of having this read. But, anyway...
A negative income tax. Enough said.
Unfortunately the only way the US (and other industrialized) countries can compete in manufacturing is by using its allegedly superior technological know-how to improve productivity over low cost foreign labor. It's unfortunate because it means fewer jobs than otherwise but it is better than nothing and hopefully there will be fewer people looking for unskilled work in the future.
It's clear that blaming low cost foreign labor will no longer be an acceptable excuse.
"Foxconn said its new "Foxbots" will cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 to make, but individually be able to build an average of 30,000 devices."
So approximately $1.2-$1.5 of the cost of an iPhone will be eaten up by a robot that can only make 30,000 devices before having to be replaced? For some reason, I think Foxconn is probably even better at the financial math than that, and the quote seems so wrong in both a factual error and a grammatical error sense I actually had to RTFA (I hate you, redletterdave) and sure enough the quote is direct from the Businessweek article (I hate you even more, Dave Smith of Businessweek). However, reading 5 other variations of the same announcement, not one of them uses the same phraseology, which makes me wonder where the quote actually came from. Dailytech, for example, says that Foxconn will have 30,000 Foxbots installed by the end of the year and makes no mention of the speed at which they can build anything (which makes sense, since the robots are so simple- basically pick and place- that no one robot could build an entire device). Another website, Regator, gives the same clue, saying they already have 10K Foxbots, and plan to install another 20K by the end of the year.
These humans are always a trouble. We must get rid of them all from this planet and the world will be a beautiful place again!
"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed"
- Marvin
Slashdot has been going down hill for sometime in the quality of reporting area. For whatever reasons certain lame submissions are allowed on the site; I truly desire that an editor(s) scan through the titles and summaries first before making them public discussions. We need this badly here. Slashdot? Please save face and do the needful.
Respectfully,
A.B.
Derka derb!!
Hopefully the machines are a bit tougher and can take the work conditions a bit longer before chucking themselves off the roof.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Lost Carrier Signal ....^%$#@
Does this mean the jobs wont need to go to china as robots all get paid the same no matter what country ?
It's not like they're making 60,000$/year, maybe not even 10,000/year
Like when my previous employer (largest Cableco in Quebec) went to Egypt for tech support (4,000/year, crappy support, low-end) customers whined and kept their expensive services even if their tech support went to hell...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
WTF? Is this how low Slashdot has sunk? Who the hell is running this site? You American cretins. Can't even read the English language.
How in the world is "factory installing robots to manufacture devices" news? You are all aware that we have been using industrial robots for over fifty years?
Could it possibly be because Africans are too STUPID?
Or perhaps you have another answer. (Cue the magic word 'racism', as if that will make the white race lie down and watch our countries being destroyed by millions of unwelcome third world parasites... Why are they here? Why don't they want to live in their own countries?)
Foxconn said its new "Foxbots" will cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 to make, but individually be able to build an average of 30,000 devices.
Does this mean that after building about 30,000 devices that a Foxbot will need to be overhauled or scrapped?
This is the first thing I noticed!!
Haha hope the editor corrects it
So with the manual labour jobs being given to robots, and a distinct lack of young women, (thanks to female babies being unwanted) things are certainly looking bright for the tens of millions of young Chinese males.
I'm sure they'll take it philosophically - enormous gangs of angry, sexually frustrated young men usually do.
China. That doesn't mean iPhone manufacture will get moved to the US. THAT would require investment, and investment requires thinking about the future, far beyond the next quarterly statement. US business doesn't engage in anything that goes beyond the next quarterly statement. No, not even Apple.
The day when even chinese cheap labor is too expencive...
It was terrible that an Asian factory treated people like, well, an Asian factory. Now that they're replaced with machines, liberals will scream that they're being denied the opportunity to be given shitty work in horrible conditions in an Asian factory.
Supposedly, while fracking may turn the U.S. into a slag heap, fracking is also supposed to bring manufacturing ( not necessarily manufacturing jobs for more than a few people ) back to the U.S. by making energy cheaper.
I wonder if at some point American companies that outsource manufacturing to China will decide to just install the robotic factories in the U.S. to save on transportation costs.
I have the sudden desire to watch The Animatrix right now. Maybe these workers will not kill themselves, though it will be entertaining to see working conditions for worker robots be so terrible that some of them attempt to rip out their own motherboard.
Is this actually news? Every single company on the globe have been replacing workers with machines for several decades...
I wonder if Apple are getting a little annoyed about the details being leaked by some of its suppliers?
So we have an INITIAL roolout of 10,000 robots able to build 30,000 devices each. 10 000 * 30 000 = 300000000 devices. They then plan to "expand the rollout further"... Are we consuming that many IGizmo or is the objective of the extended rollout to actually increase production speed? Or maybe to have them replicate into an actual army?
English we'll speeched here
Can someone correct the typo in the damn title? It's Begins, not Beings.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The assembly robots will be staging suicidal jumps from the top of the buildings in protest of unfair working conditions.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Once robots will do all works and jobs, people will get bored.
Then they will go to Mars.
Then they will find out robots can work on Mars too.
I see a major jump in robot construction ...
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
As you replace people with robotics, you start to lose your tax revenue that came from the income of said people. As we shift more and more towards automation, the only place left to pull tax revenue from will be the corporations themselves as they will be the only ones making any money.
Take that concept and add the fact that an ever increasing out of work population won't be buying any of the corporate made goods or services, and long term company prospects start to look a bit grim.
They will have to tread a fine line indeed. Put in enough automation for cost cutting purposes, but keep enough flesh and blood employees around to make sure someone else shoulders the tax burden.
It will be interesting to see how China handles social policies and worker displacement. In the US we haven't begun to develop any plans at all. It is obvious that we are about to replace almost all human employment. Without new economics and new shifts in our entire system we will have chaos. Does anyone think that America is already suffering? Now with robotics China can ship even cheaper junk that has already destroyed American jobs. So can a Chinese robot work cheaper than an American robot? Is there anyone out there who really gets what is starting to occur? If we do not change some of our basic beliefs we will perish in agony.
But then the problem is that there is no incentive for anyone to keep the factories running.
There is no MONETARY incentive for factory workers to create additional profit, above that which is needed for maintaining a monetary status quo, or a very slight profit above it.
There are plenty of other incentives though.
Ever tried to beat your own score in a game? How about collecting all the special items or unlocking achievements?
Anyone paid you for that? Did you get a badge? Or a shirt? How about a citation in front of your peers?
How about your grades in elementary school? Did you get monetary incentive according to your grades and was that your primary motivator?
Fucking? Do you get paid for that? How about eating?
From personal pride of one's work to various propaganda techniques appealing to various human prejudices, from "think of the children" to "Uncle Sam needs you".
Armies are the example of just such an arrangement.
They "belong directly to the public, with what is essentially a 100% "tax" on all profits".
Plus, the workers get a chance to be killed and/or maimed while making almost no money for themselves.
Who'd want to work at a place like that, right? No incentives will bring you back from the dead.
And yet...
Monetary motivation is just the cheapest and easiest to work with, giving the lowest results. Very few people would put their life on the line for "just money".
Millions of people put their lives in danger every day with no hope of monetary compensation.
Doing it "for their community".
Not "for their capital".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That those factories are not in the US.
This must indicate the average Chinese citizen is better off than before. They're starting to get First World concerns, such as being replaced with something cheaper.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Here's some: "Welcome to Walmart."
Here's some more: "Please pull around to the second window."
How long until the robots start committing suicide en masse like their human counterparts at foxconn?
Actually, Republican Alaska has just about figured out how to do communism right. Every resident of Alaska gets a check every year from the Alaska Permanent Fund. Last year it was $900, but in 2008 it reached over $2000. No just add a digit or two to that amount and then you could live on the dole without having to go through all those humiliating hoops to prove you are worthless in order to get welfare.
With something of slightly higher tensile strength than the current nylon/cotton netting.... robots are heavy.
It's not a software bug, it's self-awareness! And Foxbots want to die!
When talk of robotics began many years ago, the biggest reason for not implementing them, at least as far as the government was concerned, was the lost income tax revenue. Once governments start taxing robots at the rate of all the workers they are replacing, we just might see companies like Foxconn change their mind. Worker unrest is something that China doesn't need, in fact it's one of their government's biggest fears.
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." --Aristotle
Casteism