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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...)
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
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.
That's where the expertise, components, and shipping channels are.
If everyone loses their jobs, who will be able to buy the products?
The cost of labor is increasing rapidly in China, especially in terms of US dollars.
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
The lax pollution controls still make it cheaper to produce things in China though, despite the narrowing labor price difference.
Nothing to do with up-front cost, they have been programmed not to jump off the roof.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
That has already begun. China is already outsourcing to the US.
Even if wages and other costs were equal, the location advantage is substantial. It's not that it's cheaper in China, but that it's cheaper in the huge manufacturing hubs. You have suppliers and manufacturers for just about every single component you need without long-distance shipping, and a deep pool of design and manufacturing expertise working in the area.
That's not to say you can't manufacture efficiently elsewhere (we have plenty of recent examples such as the Raspberry Pi), but that the advantages has as much to do with the concentration of resources as with the cost of labour and regulations. And of course, as this inudstry becomes ever more automated, it no longer matters much for jobs where it happens any longer.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
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.
How are those *fundamentally* different from the people in my current society who want to take more than their allocated reward? Pretty sure we don't MURDER them.
Exiling the motivated will simply rapidly impoverish those that remain.
Calling them "the motivated" is a fallacy out of the gate. It has naught to do with motivation, and everything to do with them being criminals by the standards of the society.
I know plenty of people who are motivated to produce art, music, entertainment, and science for little to no unreasonable 'extra' reward beyond what they could otherwise earn for less effort. They do it because they enjoy these pursuits. You seem to discount them existing and suggest that the only reason anyone is motivated is so that they can "reap all fruits" for themselves. This is not the sole source of motivation, and it is arguably not the best source either.
Take a small commune of farmers, one farmer smarter than the others, discovers a technique to improve production -- shares it with the others, and they all benefit from increased leisure time. Why do you argue he would be NECESSARILY not motivated to do this? Because he doesn't gain an edge over his peers? That's absurd.
Communisum has a lot of real problems but having to "murder" people who are "motivated" is not one of them.
"Foxconn Beings Replacing Workers With Robots"???
Have our editors been replaced with robots already?
Oliver.
China has a massive manufacturing hub in the hong kong - shenhzen - guangzhou region because a huge collection of components are available there, with a large collection of factories and workers who can flexibly shift between factories to meet rapidly variable demand (particularly for somewhere like foxconn who work for many related businesses - oh, dell you can wait 48 hours while we throw together 100k phone screens for apple who need them right now, and in 48 hours we'll have enough staff brought on board to do both).
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jun/13/inside-shenzen-china-silicon-valley-tech-nirvana-pearl-river
If you're important enough and need enough made they'll shut down schools for you to get more workers. And the areas are small (relatively) stand in the centre draw a 100Km circle around yourself and you've got 120+ million in a giant megacity making stuff for the world. It's amazing and terrifying and a lot of other things all at once. Imagine what the industrial revolution London did to the world - only 100x bigger. And that's thing - while some of the advanced semiconductor components are made elsewhere still so much of the supply chain, glass, displays, the motherboards, the plastic etc. etc. etc. all in a tiny little radius all shipped out around the world in 3 days.
"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.
Ayn Rand may have been batshit crazy about some things, but she also was accurate on some of her observations of human nature. In that regard, she was very similar to Karl Marx.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Please stop with the anti-communist propaganda, it's not 1960 anymore.
Real communism doesn't even have a "boss"
There is no real communism and there never will be.
Hmm... you wouldn't buy some cheap knockoff, would you? If your phone costs less than $800, it's not "premium" or "VIP" or how do they call these things nowadays. So no, prices would remain the same because people are already buying phones at current prices, and even if it will go up they'll gladly pay for the magical "status item". Lawyers and marketologists could ask for a raised salary, though.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
There is no real communism...
True, there is no such thing as real communism yet.
and there never will be.
That's a pretty bold statement, especially considering that the industrial revolution (the thing that originally inspired the invention of communism) hasn't actually ended yet.
It's impossible to increase efficiency indefinitely without causing rampant unemployment at some point. Communism is a solution for a problem that hasn't quite happened yet (but it's silly to think it won't happen eventually).
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.
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
Communism is not to blame for the atrocities committed by the dictators who misuse it as a means of control. Many of the greatest ideas come from the worst of people. We as rational human being are capable of distilling the idea from its source and judging on the merits.