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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, 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.
Crime rates will increase until cost of living decreases.
If everyone loses their jobs, who will be able to buy the products?
Karl Marx saw this coming over 150 years ago
The final end result of mass mechanized production is that the available workers will far outnumber the available jobs, and this is the problem that communism was intended to solve.
Unfortunately, communism has earned a fatally bad reputation after being misused by so many dictators during the 20th century.
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.
The final end result of mass mechanized production is that the available workers will far outnumber the available jobs
That assumption is not borne out by history. If it were true, we should already have arrived at that point long ago, since it used to be that 95-98% of human labor was dedicated to agriculture, and the number is more like 2% today. How is it that anyone has work to do? We dramatically expanded some jobs and invented lots of new ones, many of which would be utterly baffling or even ludicrous to farmers of a few centuries ago. What will people do in the future to add value? If I knew that, I could undoubtedly make several fortunes. But what I do know is that they'll do something. Perhaps the economy will mostly be service-based, driven by peoples' desire to be served by people rather than machines. Perhaps much of it will be highly-specialized, custom-tailored creative manufacturing, producing one-off, hand-made items. Maybe a lot of it will be creative or artistic, a world of painters, storytellers, etc. Maybe it will mostly be about designing and rushing to market the next mass-produced faddish gewgaw (this seems very likely to me). Some of it will definitely be around the design, care and feeding of the robots, even if much of that work becomes robot-assisted.
What I do know is that as long as there are people there will be something person A wants from person B and vice versa, and with that basis for trade there will be an economy, and something akin to jobs.
this is the problem that communism was intended to solve.
That's revisionist history, ludicrously so. Marx never foresaw anything of the sort. He believed firmly in the labor theory of value, and as such all economic power derived from human labor, not from mechanical power. Communism was about combating the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few people who owned the means of production, at the expense of the masses who provided the labor (and hence the real value).
His view was misguided in many ways, not least in that it almost completely ignores the value of intellectual work; the guy who figures out the right way to apply labor to raw materials is fantastically more effective than the one who does it the wrong way, and in fact this applies at all levels of the chain, up to and including the allocation of capital. Communism is inherently horrible at effectively allocating resources since it lacks the price signals that bundle cost and relative value and communicate them in a way that enables efficient allocation of resources to maximize what people collectively perceive as good, which is why communist economies always fail, and will always fail, even in the presence of automated systems that produce and distribute all of the essentials of life to everyone equally, even if said essentials include what we'd call luxuries. Those essentials will become the baseline expectation, much like oxygen, and economic competition will be around something else.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Capitalism is a system designed to reward capitalists. Capitalists are those who have capital. Capital is money/resources/etc. It has nothing to do with maintaining a work force. Capitalism, in theory, uses greed of capitalists to produce the most efficient systems of production possible. More efficient production creates the most supply with the lowest prices.
In reality, Capitalism produces monopolies. Monopoly is the natural end state of Capitalism. The big fish eat all the smaller fish, until there's only one big fish left. "There can be only one." Then, monopolies, given no competition and driven by greed, drive up prices and artificially restrict supply, thus creating great inefficiencies. It's like a pine forest, growing faster than all the trees around it, only to poison itself with acidic leaf litter once dominance is established.
The capitalists don't care, because the proles can go eat cake or whatever. They're sitting on a mountain of money and resources and exist in a system where "greed is good." In reality, an economic system is ideal when it most fairly distributes resources those who need them. When 3 million people in your country are homeless, and Detroit is bulldozing 40 square miles of homes... your system of economics is completely fucked up.
Replacing workers with robots is not inherently bad. Under the right economic model, having robots do all the work while humans have 100% leisure time would be an admirable goal. The problems begin when workers replaced by robots have no means to acquire food/shelter/resources. One solution might be to raise taxes on the capitalists and redistribute that in some way to the "have nots" but then companies like Apple hide hundreds of billions of dollars off shore to avoid said taxes.
Apple doesn't need the money at all, while the poor starve to death. That makes Apple and other companies like Apple the most despicable group of people on Earth. It isn't just Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos or Larry Page. Companies are made by people and every single person working at Apple is contributing to the problem.
Your first responsibility is to learn the difference between its and it's, Mr Senior System Engineer/Architect.
The whole premise of Communism is reliance on the worker, and protecting the worker (probably not the best choice of terminology but saves paragraphs of explanations) because the worker is the only way for bureaucrats to exist. Communism requires people to be busy at work, and if robots make people idle the system fails.
Really? Quoting:
Communism (from Latin communis – common, universal) is a socioeconomic system structured upon common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of classes, money, and the state; as well as a social, political and economic ideology and movement that aims to establish this social order ...
... Communism becomes fully realized when the distinction between classes is no longer possible and therefore the state, which has been used as an instrument of class dictatorship, no longer exists. In the communist economy, production and consumption are fully socialized, and the processes for which are advanced into maximized automation, efficiency, and recycling.
I don't know, but from reading this, one could certainly conclude that firing bureaucrats and replacing workers with robots wherever possible ought to be very high on any communist's agenda!
Ezekiel 23:20
Because a system, once build, is more than just a sum of its parts. It has independent existence and motives. What that means is that neither communism, nor capitalism, nor USA nor China, are under human control, so why would they serve human interests, except incidentally? Yes, these systems have human actors making decisions, but these humans can only make decisions within parameters given by the system itself - a Foxconn CEO must do whatever it takes to keep Foxconn "competitive", and if he won't, he'll be replaced by someone who will, and likely severely punished. An American politician must accept a system-approved role - a set of political positions - if he wants to be elected. A dictator, while seemingly free, faces the same situation, except the punishment for disobedience is death rather than merely dropping out. Human beings, even those seemingly in control, are little more than agent-slaves of the Lovecraftian monstrosity they've conjured.
No one wanted World War I, yet it still happened. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted the world to end, yet they came within hair's width of blowing it all up during the Cuban crisis. Chinese don't want to breath a poisonous fume, yet Peking's air is just that. People regularly refer to "the market" like it was a living thing that needs to be appeased and soothed and definitely not something anyone can control - because, in some ways, it is.
Human beings aren't in control of their own nor the destiny of the world, and haven't been since civilization began. I suspect this is the real reason religions keep popping up: beneath the bizarre cruft all traditions tend to accumulate, they present a perfectly accurate picture of the everyday experience of living in a world ruled by utterly inhuman and mostly invisible forces. For example, "Free Market" is, for all intents and purposes, the god of capitalism, gets treated that way by everyone, has sacrifices performed to it, has temples and priests trying to predict its capricious whims, is the object of fundamentalist faith - I've had people define a human's very right to live in terms of body ownership - and doctrinal conflicts, etc. Someone who wasn't indoctrinated to the system from birth could hardly avoid classifying this all as a typical religion.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If people continue to breed as they currently do, we're going to be just fine. Birth rates globally are on the deline. As education (espcially education of women) becomes commonplace in a country, birth rates drop. We are in no danger of over populating the planet. Depending on the projection, "peak people" just might be within our lifetime.
With advancing technology. why can't everyone have a high standard of living? Technology & weath are not a zero-sum game. More people with education & skills raise the standards for all. (If you disagree, explain to me where all the silicon valley wealth was durring the stone age.)
Stop worrying about how big your slice of the pie is. Let's make the pie bigger for everyone.