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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.
And yet Trump keeps telling his rubes that jobs are coming back. They are not coming back. Workers will be replaced by robots. How he's going to force companies to manufacture in the USA without adding legislation (because he said he would reduce legislation against corporations) is beyond me...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
And I want that '95 Chevy that you are buying from me to run like the best Ferrari you can imagine. Automation is what you do when machines are cheaper than people. And China isn't running out of people any time soon.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
why use china robo factory when you can do the same in the USA with quicker and cheaper shipping + less risk of the 3rd shift making cheap knock offs.
Part of the cost of automation being less than labor is you create unemployment. This is fine--it's how progress works--and the displaced labor creates a gap between prior cost and new cost, which eventually leads to lower prices (prices don't keep with inflation, in part because it's impossible to hold all prices at the same buying-power equivalent in an economy where the relative price of everything constantly shifts thanks to population expansion, money supply increase, and productivity gains all interacting, and the buying-power total doesn't go up until the price of something goes down).
If you create 0.1% unemployment, no big deal. That gets washed away as the workforce turns over; give it a few months to a year and there's no evidence of that blip--save that we're all a little richer. Those people got new jobs, because we're buying more stuff thanks to that 0.1% difference, and somebody needs to make and move that stuff.
If you create 40% unemployment, that's a problem. Things got cheaper... okay? Who is buying all these cheaper things? Never mind that the money hasn't moved down into the hands of the unemployed (400 times more excluded than when they were just 0.1%); the people still working just found that nearly half their work isn't needed anymore, and you know what that means: they get laid off, too.
It's economically feasible when the cost of new technology is lower, and when the risk proposition across growth spans that technology in an uptake not significantly faster than re-employment. The economy has to respond to lower costs by offering lower prices, which businesses don't do unless they're pressured (e.g. competition, desire to get 5% on 100,000,000 units instead of 15% on 10,000,000 units, etc.). The universal competition--that consumers have limited money, and that every product bought is taken from that pool, thus all products are in competition with all other products--takes some time to launder the changes and produce a fresh, new economy.
China has labor shortages and might just be in a position where the reduced labor shifts chinese labor around such that the outcome is 2% or 5% or 8% unemployment, rather than 40% or 80% unemployment. If it cuts their production costs by 20%, that's a hell of a draw for import labor--China's financial position becomes that people will trade them something (to be determined at a later date; here's money as an IOU) for something China can produce cheaper than the buyer. In the mean time, places like America suddenly see a 20% drop in the price of all kinds of goods, and can buy more; this means we need more shipping, more retail operators, more people at VISA managing your accounts, and so forth. It means poor people spend a smaller chunk of their income on clothes and cell phones (which they probably need today), and more on food (which puts demands on local refineries, chemical producers, municipal water systems, John Deere, and farmers). It means more jobs here in America.
China would get richer and America would get richer just by China reducing the cost of manufacture, at least in a projection where China doesn't create an unemployment crisis in its own country.
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Who is going to buy all this stuff if they don't have jobs?
And there lies the heart of the problem: purchasing power is coupled to having a job.
As technology marches forward, that coupling has to be let go. Or at least loosened. The majority of the population needs to have some purchasing power even if there's no job for them. Think basic income.
The alternative: (almost) everything automated, production equipment (including robots) in the hands of a few corporations & the billionaires at their top, with the rest of the population jobless / out of money (and in the extreme case: out of housing or food). Great recipe for say, a nice little civil war. As it has been several times in history.
The automation itself isn't a bad thing, it increases productivity so we can have more nice things or do fun stuff more of the time. But the fruits of that increased productivity should be divided somewhat evenly over people. If it ends up in the hands of a few you have a recipe for disaster.
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...
Universal health care and low cost education are needed in the USA.
and we need to get rid of the 2/4/6 year piece of paper education that we have here.
racist
Fuck you. This has nothing to do with race, it has EVERYTHING to do with China's human rights record and news stories EVERYONE (except you apparently) have been reading for YEARS about how workers are treated in China. So how about you shut the fuck up, asshole?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Because if we manufactured here in the US then we can't burn billions of tons of high carbon heavy grade crude sludge to power those container ships that fill the pacific with a slowly swirling morass of plastic for sea birds to choke on, etc;
Carry on...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range