Foxconn Boosting Automated Production in China (digitimes.com)

Foxconn Electronics is automating production at its factories in China in three phases, aiming to fully automate entire factories eventually, according to general manager Dai Jia-peng for Foxconn's Automation Technology Development Committee. From a report on DigiTimes: In the first phase, Foxconn aims to set up individual automated workstations for work that workers are unwilling to do or is dangerous, Dai said. Entire production lines will be automated to decrease the number of robots used during the second phase, Dai noted. In the third phase, entire factories will be automated with only a minimal number of workers assigned to production, logistics, testing and inspection processes, Dai indicated.

Comments

I wish

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish there were more articles on automation in other areas besides manufacturing because most people think of assembly lines when automation occurs when that's a small fraction.

Legal research is automated. Much farming. Bookkeeping. And even software development.

It's great that productivity is increasing and having message loops and other boiler plate code generated is a blessing, but what are people who are displaced to do?

Speaking as one of them, retraining is a Fairy Tale. No one hires a middle aged entry level person. Oh! I retrained because it was impossible to get another job as a software developer at 50 - when I did get feedback, it was always "You don't have the skills." Yeah, whatever.

Kids - go into Medical. Luckily my wife is in medical and in her 50s, she has no problem with getting jobs. She is aghast at the stupidity of tech. She thought I was a lazy sack of shit until it came out in the news what a hard time we in tech have - aging out, H1-bs, offshoring, etc....

And I advise young people, unless you are in the 99.99th percentile - you have been offered full academic scholarships to MIT, Yale, Harvard or even Stanford - stay out of tech.

Re:I wish

[shmlco]

It's estimated that up to 45% of the jobs that people in the US currently do today are up for automation in the next couple of decades. That's 45% of the workforce, and if you're one of the those dislocated you're not going to just be able to switch to another field, because people there have also been dislocated and they're also looking for work.

If you took a list of jobs, ranked by the number of people who do each one, you'll have to go all of the way down to number 33 on the list to find a new job that didn't exist 100 years ago: computer programmer.

Sure, there have been technological advancements and "new" jobs, but most "new" jobs aren't new at all, because by and large the general categories have remained the same: driver, delivery man, manager, secretary, assembly line worker. It's just today that the assembly line worker snaps together circuit boards and screens as opposed to stamping car parts or sewing together buggy whips.

The cabby of today was the carriage driver of yesterday, and, if Uber has it's way, replaced by the self-driving car of tomorrow. In fact, Uber has publicly stated that it's looking to replace all of the cab drivers in NY (51,000) with autonomous vehicles in the next decade.

Major trucking companies are looking to replace their biggest expense (drivers) with autonomous trucks (trials are running... today). There go 3.5 million truck drivers.

And if all of those autonomous vehicles hit their safety numbers, then accidents decline dramatically. That's fewer mechanics and body shop workers, fewer insurance claims adjusters, fewer ambulance and emergency room workers and staff, fewer police needed for speed traps, fewer cooks and truck stop workers, and so on, in every town and city across the US.

Pretty soon you have massive dislocations as entire local industries collapse and -- even worse -- as the industries that depended upon the incomes of those workers collapse, which widens the circle even further. (Can't run a restaurant serving food to people who can't pay for it.)

All told, here in the US we're looking at employment disruptions measured in the tens of millions, and all of them occurring within the next decade.

The Great Depression had an unemployment rate of 25%. What happens when that number hits 45%?

I'd advise that everyone watch the following video, Humans Need Not Apply

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I'm not a Luddite, but I am worried that our civilization is going to go through a few major tectonic upheavals in a relatively short period of time.

Re:Get ready for more glued-in/soldiered on parts

[ShanghaiBill]

Interesting that the outsourced "cheap labor" is now on the receiving end of being outsourced to robots.

The labor isn't so cheap anymore. When my company started outsourcing to China in 1998, we could hire assembly line workers for $3/day. Today, it costs ten times that and it takes much longer to staff up. There are still locations with lots of cheap labor, like Vietnam and Bangladesh, but supply chains are weak in Vietnam and non-existent in Bangladesh. You can sew blue jeans there, but assembling electronics is not going to work so well.

Places like Shenzhen and Pudong have the widest and deepest supply chains in the world. If you are running out of 0.5mm screws, you can just send a guy on a bicycle over the screw factory, and he will be back in an hour. If is better to bring the robots to where the parts are than to try to move all the parts to where the labor is.

Re:Get ready for more glued-in/soldiered on parts

[DogDude]

This doesn't mean that at all. Automation can produce just as much customization as non customization. I think you're imagining dumb assembly lines. These are very adaptable, programmable production lines that can create lots of customization. Each and every widget can be customized pretty easily, in fact, with less error than human production.