Foxconn boosting automated production in China

India is actually better positioned than most, what with their sea of IT infrastructure outsourcers and maintainers.

It's Africans who will likely get screwed again.

Poor Indians lack a lot of things that people in the developed world take for granted: sanitary water and sewage infrastructure, toilets, electrical infrastructure, lighting, refrigerators, washing machines, clean heat sources for cooking... All of these things can, in principle, be manufactured by AI instead of by human labor. The Indian government currently aids the rural poor by providing (e.g.) water pumps and electricity to farmers below cost. In the future the Indian government could import AI systems to build pumps and solar panels faster, better, and cheaper than human labor, thereby accelerating the provision of useful goods to low-income Indians.

The main purpose of a refrigerator factory isn't to provide people with jobs, it's to provide them with refrigerators. If manufacturing goods becomes a lot easier and faster due to AI, that's going to raise India's material standard of living faster than if manufacturing still required a lot of human labor. Poor agricultural workers can skip over that whole generation-or-two process of leaving their villages for the city to work in export-driven factories starting from the low end of economic value. They can just enjoy the latest and greatest output from AI systems (assuming that their government cares at least a little about them, and I think India's government clears that low bar). In countries that industrialized in the past a lot of rural-laborers-turned-factory-workers preferred the landscapes and social ties of the countryside and only came to urban factories because of desperate poverty. If low-income nations have a chance to raise the material standard of living for the rural poor without mass migration to cities, because AI means you can provide abundant goods with very little human labor, that's a blessing for the global poor, not a curse.

You might as well mourn for all the economy-growing switchboard operator jobs that low-income nations are being deprived of by going straight from "no rural telephone service" to "automated cellular networks for rural telephone service." Why don't they first wire the countryside for landline service and employ humans to manually connect calls, following a strict historical reproduction of the USA's development path? Because a strict historical imitation of the USA's development would slow rather than accelerate the overall process of raising the standard of living, that's why!

Keep reading.

"There are 10 lights-out (fully automated) production lines at some factories, including table one in Chengdu, AIO (all-in-one) PC and LCD monitor lines at a factory in Chongqing, and a CNC line in Zhengzhou. ... Foxconn has deployed more than 40,000 Foxbots, industrial robots developed and produced in house, at factories in China."

The Chengdu plant makes iPads.[1] Foxconn refers to "table one" because they usually don't name their contract manufacturing clients.

Apple used to have robotic assembly lines in Fremont, CA.[2] Then they switched to cheap outsourced manual labor.

[1] http://micgadget.com/12674/the-inside-story-of-the-new-foxco... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk306ZkNOuc

At some point the robots and AI will take care of us, similar to how they did in The Matrix, or I,Robot. I'm sure we'll be fine.

What happens when no farm workers are left behind to buy farm produce? /s

Presumably the factories won't keep producing things if they're not selling them.

What we need now is the AI consumer.