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China Wants To Be a Top 10 Nation For Automation By Putting More Robots In Its Factories (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: China is aiming for a top-10 ranking in automation for its industries by 2020 by putting more robots in its factories, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) said. China's push to modernize its manufacturing with robotics is partly a response to labor shortages and fast-rising wages. But the world's second-largest economy still has far lower robot penetration than other big industrialized economies -- just 36 per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2015, ranking it 28th among the world's most automated nations. By 2020, it aims to boost penetration to 150 per 10,000 workers, IFR said in a statement, citing Wang Ruixiang, President of the China Machinery Industry Federation. To help reach that goal, China aims for sales of 100,000 domestically produced industrial robots a year by 2020, up 49 percent compared with last year, the IFR said in a statement at an industry summit in Shanghai, where the Chinese federation's chief was speaking.
The challenge with automation is what to do with the displaced workers. In Western societies, expectations for quality of life and income levels are already established as fairly high, which complicates discussions of replacing employment with a universal basic income. If you are faced with the transition from employment with a decent standard of living, to a UBI covering only the bare necessities of life, that doesn't look so attractive. While urban China is seeing the same trend, rural China not so much, and that's where many of the migrant workers that support the manufacturing industry are coming from. If your options are a life of back-breaking drudgery in the fields just to stay alive, or that same UBI, the choice suddenly looks a lot more attractive. The numbers are huge, but that is a scaling problem - if the numbers add up for one robot factory and 1,000 people, they will still add up for a million factories and a billion people.
It would be ironic if "communist" (in almost no sense of the word) China managed to pull off a UBI, but would also offer huge propaganda benefits for the Chinese Communist Party, and Chinese nationalism in general (a potent and growing force). For that reason alone I would not be surprised if the government is thinking along those lines.
Of course, then there's the question of what all those people do with their free time. Go ladders? Rioting in the streets to bring down corrupt local officials? Setting forth in rowboats to defend the nine-dash line?
Interesting times...