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Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More Robots
jfruh writes: Foxconn, which supplies much of Apple's manufacturing muscle and has been criticized for various labor sins, is now moving to hire employees who won't complain because they're robots. The company expects 70 percent of its assembly line work to be robot-driven within three years.
Foxconn Factories' Future: Fewer Humans, More Robots
Manufacturing Future: Fewer Humans, More Robots
this, is pretty much what we have all known for quite a long time. as tech gets better, menial jobs become useless to humans because robots do it better.
Also water is wet. news at 11
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Right, but the conversation that's being had around this is what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore. Sure, we can say that the economy will catch up, but that might take 50, 60 years. In the meantime we'll have 2 or 3 lost generations who live in terrifying abject poverty. It'd be nice if this time around we did something about that...
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Yes, and now that the rentiers will make even more money for no labor, the displaced workers are doubly fucked.
As a general rule, it's a good idea to have some compassion for your fellow members of the species.
I bet these robots won't stop at replacing humans. Pretty soon, even the pick-and-place and wave-soldering machines will be out of a job.
It's already happened in America. Most manufacturing jobs have either become automated or outsourced. Most people work in the service industry. Same thing will happen in China.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's about time that the average Chinese laborer had a high enough standard of living that robots are cheaper.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
so why is Foxconn always seen as some evil company doing Apple's bidding?
Mr. Tycho Brahe observes: We must, as conscious beings, observe when we are told things that are strategically lathed not to inform us but to make us fight with one another.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It used to be that new technologies created new jobs as it destroyed old ones. But that's merely a historical pattern, not necessarily a law of nature, and it may end.
It's kind of like Moore's Law: it's held so far, but nobody knows if it will keep.
Many conservatives feel that if the gov't doesn't meddle, new jobs will come from somewhere. However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm pretty sure that's the management.
Just last week I had a strong disagreement with someone who said robots were not ready to effectively replace humans. He's spoken to industry people personally and they told him robots were not ready yet.
And he ignored the numerous examples I linked him where robots are already replacing humans-- and damn fast too.
This could be about half a million skilled employees who were making $5000 or less- yet robots are replacing them because the robots are less expensive. How can a 1st world employee hope to compete?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I've been to Foxconn factories in Shenzen, and there are clearly opportunities for deeper automation. However, this will only be possible when the underlying hardware design has been designed for automation.
At the PCB level, pick and place achieves amazing automation and performance with smaller than rice-grain size components used in modern electronics. That is a given.
At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs. There are flex cables, adhesive, torque sensitive screws that all rely on a human to be able to manipulate and then quickly respond to misalignment. To automate this, the design constraints placed on the Industrial Designs need to change. For low and mid-range products where form is not at the level of Apple integration, this will probably increase the automation. For the high end where every mm counts it's unlikely that there will be a high level of assembly automation.
However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.
That's because it's nearly impossible to predict specific future technologies with any accuracy. A century ago, no one could have even dreamed of the job I currently have. A decade ago, "mobile app developers" didn't even exist, at least not in any real quantity.
Regarding the demise of Moore's Law. I'd like to share with you a quote from a year 2000 paper entitled "The End of Moore's Law?"
The industry’s newest chips have “pitches” as small as 180 nanometers (billionths of a meter). To accommodate Moore’s Law, according to the biennial “road map” prepared last year for the Semiconductor Industry Association, the pitches need to shrink to 150 nanometers by 2001 and to 100 nanometers by 2005. Alas, the road map admitted, to get there the industry will have to beat fundamental problems to which there are “no known solutions.” If solutions are not discovered quickly, Paul A. Packan, a respected researcher at Intel, argued last September in the journal Science, Moore’s Law will “be in serious danger.”
Most new chips are at 22-28 nanometers now, 14nm chips are gearing up, and 10nm is in the pipeline. It's always amusing to read those types of papers with the benefit of hindsight. Even now you can find 2014 papers saying that 28nm is the last node in Moore's Law.
Most people suck at predicting the future.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
At 7nm, you start to near the point of 'the atoms are just too big.' Hard to engineer your way out of that one.
Although the way it's written is brutal and arrogant, I think it is the closest to what will happen. The more I look at it, the more it seems the future will look like "the Dancers at the End of Time" by M. Moorcock. It is either that, which means a brutal decrease of the unneeded population, or the end of technological advancement or the end of humanity.
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By calling them robots instead of machines, the article writers are playing on emotional strings of people, trying to provoke a larger response than otherwise. Imagine being horrified because the robot "Spinning Jenny" will steal all our lucrative spinning yarn jobs! Imagine the panic! The horror! We've been having this trend for a very long time in the west. Manufacturing moved to service industry and most people found new jobs. The reason not all people found jobs is because of wealth hoarding by the top 1%. This is a known economic fact. It has also worsened and happened to coencide with the changes in production(some out-sourcing, some automation with machines). Once wealth is properly redistributed and old welfare models are changed to a guaranteed income model that's much more efficient, we won't be having any problems. People want to contribute and will continue to do so even if their livelihood is guaranteed. Everyone wants fulfillment and a better life and how would they get it? By working, of course! "But, but... communism!". Get over yourself. This is the way it has to be done. We can't allow very few people to ridiculously wealthy at the expense of a very large number of people. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".
Naturally there's going to be a limit with the current silicon-based technology. At that point, we'll probably see attempts to work in other directions, such as moving into the realm of 3D, using new materials like graphene, silicon-germanian, or even pure germaniam (which could allow for lower voltages, and thus less consumption, tunneling, and leakage), or other techniques that no one has even contemplated yet.
It should be interesting to see whether they'll succeed or not, and what that will mean for the tech industry either way.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yes +1 to you. I was going to post the same kind of thing, so instead, I'll add to what you said. Automation frees us from doing the work ourselves, but its only now increasingly larger numbers of people are starting to see the end game. Like it of not, automation will eventually free everyone from work. We have been brought up to believe in a career even to the point where many sacrifice large parts of our lives for our career (often in the hope of making our lives better by earning more etc..). But that way of life is coming to an end. Within the next few decades the global get ever richer game is going to have its ultimate winner or winners, who take all. Its an inevitable consolidation of wealth that any kind of legislation will only delay or play into the hands of someone else in the world winning the title of the worlds richest person. The rest of us have always been pawns in this game, but that's not mattered to most of us because we just need money to live.
We need to look to ways to live as this game plays out its final moves. None of us want to be pawns for someone else, but we still need money to live and for many, its only the hope of raising enough money to even just partly escaping the life of a pawn that drives us on to put so much of our lives into our career. When a career is no longer possible, how will we escape or even dream of escaping the finacial burdens that control and shape so much of our lives?
Actually, reviewing U6 and discouraged workers, we are at record levels of unemployment. Close to 25% of the working age population isn't working. They are going on disability early, retiring early- but many 16 to 54 year olds who worked in the past are not finding employment. I know several people in this category.
It is much rougher for 30 year olds than it was when I was 30. Some retrain and then the job they were training for is swamped by so many applicants that wages are supressed.
I was hoping retiring boomers would take up the slack but I read 80% of them have no under $20,000 savings and will not be able to voluntarily retire. Plus boomers in good slots are simply continuing to work and have no intention of retiring and letting those slots open up to younger people. By the time this group dies or retires at 77 to 82- the generation behind them is nearly at retirement age- never having had the good earnings years the generation before them had.
Advances in AI will make it possible to replace large swaths of 'smart' and 'creative' jobs by 2050. And they won't even consider that to be "real" AI by them. Whenever we get a real AI, it will be a massive paradigm shift. Robotics already have superhuman performance when "plugged" in . So an easily clonable AI combined with super human bodies obsolete humans overnight.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There's still a lot of space in the vertical direction.
Oddly, we seem to have managed to get past the introduction of the assembly line without the sort of problems you're predicting - humanity is still here, its population is still growing, and technology is still advancing.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs. There are flex cables, adhesive, torque sensitive screws that all rely on a human to be able to manipulate and then quickly respond to misalignment. To automate this, the design constraints placed on the Industrial Designs need to change.
I think you underestimate how far sensor technology has come and will go, here for example is an example of automated salmon processing. Obviously there's a lot of natural variation, do we need to bioengineer a more robot-friendly salmon? No. They're measured out by a laser and intelligently cut. Head/tail/other cuts are dropped out to go on another processing line. Each cut is grabbed by a robot with robot vision and placed in pouches to be sealed. Skip to 3:12 if you just want to see that last part. Fillet-making machines are still in the research phase but there are examples of that too using X-rays to scan and find the pin bones. If they can deal with all that, I'm sure they can apply the right torque to a screw.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Oddly, we seem to have managed to get past the introduction of the assembly line without the sort of problems you're predicting
Have we?
humanity is still here, its population is still growing, and technology is still advancing.
Whee! But, with a tip of the cap to Greg Graffin, progress is not intelligently planned. If you're playing a strategy and you use up the resources in early play then you're going to have a bad time.
Granted, life is more complex than a game with a fixed tech tree. Who knows what technology we'll invent tomorrow, right?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At the assembly level it isn't so easy to automate with a lot of the designs.
The designs will simply change to make manufacturing easier, and the designs of the robots will change to meet them partway. It's not like this problem can't be "solved", it just hasn't been solved yet.
Sooner or later, the whole phone will just be laminated into one brick which can only be taken apart with exotic chemicals so toxic that you need to keep them sealed away from all that is holy. And then, the terrorists^Wcorporations will have won... but regardless, there will be no need for human assembly, or really any involvement at all. Designs and materials and of course some of the completed parts go in, devices get pooped out on the other end. At least the phones will finally be waterproof.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fish gutters are more impressive than simply doing portioning with straight cuts ... but these machines have years to earn their costs.
For mobile phones you'd be designing new manipulators all the time, we don't have something as generic as the human hand which can work magic with relatively simple tools. We'll get there, but not in 3 years.