Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years
news.xinhuanet.com
news.xinhuanet.com
Just think about that... when was the last time you heard of a company employing more than like 200k people world wide and this company employees 1 million at it's production facility in China.
Apparently living and working conditions aren't great, we all read the followups to the original suicides. From what I gathered they were extremely barren, but better than the alternative of sleeping on the street in that city. They made it sound like if you try and get by in the city on your own, and you are low-income, it is incredibly vicious (mugging, etc.)
What I find interesting is that as these people fight for better conditions and increased wages, Foxconn's reply is "Whatevs, we are getting robots to replace you".
In the next 3 years they are looking at rolling out 1 million robots to replace workers, I imagine slowly firing 50-70% of their workforce. The only way I see these people not getting fired is the Chinese govt, in an attempt to stem riots[1], requires Foxconn to keep most of them employed.
This is an interesting twist of the future... I suppose some part of me assumed that by 2020+ machines would be making most of what I use, but when I look at the scale of jobless people as a result of it, it really makes me scratch my head to figure out where we fit in the future.
Our only salvation seems, at least for now, to expand ourselves in creative professions that cannot be performed by machines (yet).
When AI finally becomes mature enough to model a human (I don't really expect that to be very far off. Our compute power is getting ridiculous) I imagine that won't be off-limits for robots either and our job as humans will be just to exist and experience... nothing more.
tl;dr - assume robots and AI get sufficiently advanced to do most everything physical and most things that are deemed creative... what IS our purpose here then?
This is a common economic misconception. If, by some lucky twist of fate, machines can make everything we may ever want, it'd be great! We can just all lie around and enjoy utopia.
I thought this was going to be a joke but, just like WoW and EVE mining, I see that it is actually happening: http://farmvillebot.net/ http://www.femfarmville.com/
... here is a meta though... what if that is what we live in NOW, hence all the talk about "is our reality a hologram?" recently.
Inceptioned! :)
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/06/robo_p...
"The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage. Morey eventually hits on the idea of having the robots help him to consume his quotas. At first he fears punishment when he is discovered, but instead the Ration Board quickly implements his idea across the world."
The industrial revolution was effectively covering the whole society, making a host of jobs obsolete in a matter of years, not only hand weaving. The same happened for the second industrial revolution, or the "green revolution".
Why should we expect this time to be different?
The automation revolution will be different because supply can suddenly outstrip demand by orders of magnitude. Wealth as we currently view it will essentially be limited by availability of natural resources rather than human productive capacity.
As automation takes over, there will be huge segments of society unable to maintain their standard of living. We need to begin to rethink our ideas of ownership of wealth and resources.
Take a look in the mobile industry. Is Nokia crumbling down and laying off a lot of people? Is RIM doing the same? Both former leaders in this market. Yes they are, but wouldn't you agree that what has come out of this is much better for everyone?
People need to stop looking at "saving jobs" in a time like this. The focus should be on "creating jobs". Let the jobs that need to disappear in order to have progress, disappear. If you're arguing against that, then you're arguing against the very nature of progress and evolution, whether it's biological, economical or technological.
For example in a time of "economic crisis", which happens about every 10 years or so, you should let that crisis kill the inefficiencies in the system! And then focus on taking advantage of it to create new businesses that are much more efficient and can deal with the new conditions, and from that you'll also have more jobs.
I've been reading your replies and thought this summed up what you've been saying in other replies. Exactly spot on that the framework for society we have no is not capable of handling/supporting what I'll call the artistic/spiritual re-revolution that may occur after machines take over all (for the purposes of this argument) jobs.
That being said we still need to be mining and creating raw resources to make the robots for the automation and the devices, so someone at the top will be holding a giant leash around that process and they will, in reality, have the power to exert whatever reality they decide on down onto all of us if we want our robots, automation and gadgets.
The real problem is that increasing automation only creates jobs for smart people, while destroying jobs for dumb people. Not everybody capable of building widgets is capable of maintaining a widget-building robot. We're replacing manual labour jobs with jobs that require a brain, but half the population still has below-average intelligence.
I think Kurzweil refers to it as the Singularity... but basically what happens when AI reaches the point where it can manage itself or advance itself?
This is certainly in the realm of "what if" because we haven't established if sheer compute power CAN get us AI that eventually becomes self-aware.
I sort of assume it can, but I don't like to make sweeping statements based on my assumptions. We might find some missing "human" link in the intelligence chain that stops computers and AIs from making that final leap once we get to that precipice.
http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/26/hear-that-its-the-singul...
"A common misnomer about the Singularity and the idea of greater-than-human AI is that it will involve a conscious, self-reflective, and even morally accountable agent. This has led some people to believe that it will have deep and profound thoughts, quote Satre, and resultantly act in a quasi-human manner. This will not be the case. We are not talking about artificial consciousness or even human-like cognition. Rather, we are talking about super-expert systems that are capable of executing tasks that exceed human capacities. It will stem from a multiplicity of systems that are individually singular in purpose, or at the very least, very limited in terms of functional scope. And in virtually all cases, these systems won’t reflect on the consequences of their actions unless they are programmed to do so."
A: Be eliminated by our robot masters
B: Be kept around by our robot masters/colleagues because we are useful/equal
C: Have already integrated the machines into ourselves, or integrated ourselves into the machines
D: Laze about doing nothing of consequence, because robots do everything for us, and aren't self-aware enough to care
I'm rooting for C, with B as my fallback.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/29/138818388/the-frid...
If we have robots that can make widgets, how much longer from that until there are robots that are maintaining the other robots? Robots that are DESIGNING the next generation of robots?
The intelligence line which measures who can be replaced by automation is steadily rising and eventually (within our lifetimes, if you believe the singularity nutters -- I think they are wildly optimistic) it'll be higher than all of us. The riots will start a long time before then in either case.
New jobs keep appearing as we gain more wealth, who would have predicted jobs such as web designer or WoW gold farmer 20 years ago?
Just like the western world has moved to automated production, China will be able to do the same.
It'll be interesting.
I've spoken to people that feel our role will be to move back to an intellectual time of philosophy and cultural advancement while our mechanical counterparts take care of everything else.
As a side-note, part of the Animatrix compilation was an anime short by a famous animator that portrayed the future where we have throngs of robot slave labor. Just abusing, destroying, crushing and pushing them harder and harder, throwing them away as they are "injured".
It was a perverse vision to be sure and only made more perverse by the need to make the robots human-like and then eventually given them AI (in the anime at least).
All of these things will be unexpected challenges.
Will you cringe in 2040 when you see a humanoid robot fall from a skyscraper or accidentally have a tractor drive over it while moving something big?
These are the strange/unexpected/unprepared scenarios I think will catch us off guard.
Yes. We have to move "up-market" in the job market, just like the disruptive innovation theory says. But this will also create many more opportunities for us. Automation of work is not new. And in the few last decades that we've used it intensively, it has only led to the growth of country economies and to a more advanced society, with more opportunities for non-physical work.
Now, what happens when robots become "smarter" than us at everything we can do and can think for themselves? That's harder to predict right now. But it doesn't necessarily mean we'll become their slaves. We might still use them as our "tools", or worst case scenario we'll literally merge with technology to keep pace with them, but I don't think that will happen until nano-technology is mature enough (http://www.nanofuture2030.com is an interesting blog on this).
In a way we're already starting to merge with technology, just not physically yet. If we watch the trends in computing since the birth of the mainframe, computers have become ever more "mobile", smaller and more "personal", from Mainframe > Mini-computer > PC > Notebook > Smartphone.
Whatever the next big computing paradigm will be, I know that "device" will be more mobile, smaller and more intimate with the human being.
You seem to have a lot of faith in the average person's ability to move "up market". Personally I don't see this becoming a reality. Furthermore, the creative and knowledge jobs needed are orders of magnitude fewer than manual jobs to provide for the same amount of production in society. The welfare state will have to become the norm and getting to that point will require major social upheaval.
But I have faith in humanity's ability to adapt. It's not that hard to learn a new job. And I think automation throughout the society helps everyone's job become easier.
The way I see tools are becoming easier and easier, and the barrier to entry is lowered so more people can create websites, or do marketing, and so on.
I don't think your considering the situation where the tools can do the job completely. The major difference now between past production revolutions was that the limiting factor was still human labor. The tools made the jobs vastly easier, but it still required a human operator. When you can take the human operator out of the equation completely, you're on entirely new ground.
>the barrier to entry is lowered so more people can create websites, or do marketing
These are all jobs that depend on orders of magnitude larger industries to survive (marketers need a thriving economy to create added value to justify their cost).
It seems like we're doing the same thing the finance industry did with the housing market: past history showed that housing prices always go up, so we'll assume they'll keep finding a way to go up. This completely ignores the fact that this time is vastly different than past situations. There has to be some upper limit here. If we want to assume we'll just keep going up and up (the knowledge work ladder), you need an argument that explains why there is effectively no upper limit.
It was accompanied by massive social upheaval, but it didn't lead to either a crapsack post-apocalyptic unemployscape nor a prefect utopian leisure world. Not from our point of view anyway; you'd have to pluck a 7000 or 300 year old man from his world into ours to find out what he makes of our progress.
Read "Manna" by Marshall Brain for a vision of the caste system that may happen
FOxconn views moving to using robots as ideal because the costs of recruitment of workers went up not increases in wages. In other words despite increasing wages they have a hard time finding workers to fill the factories. So not the 'replacing workers' like you claim.
The field of "automatic programming" is one of the major areas of artificial intelligence research today.
In this sense we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
It doesn't mean it will replace humans, but it does mean it will kill a lot of current jobs, just like the Internet is killing many jobs now, but creating 3x more in return. Having a robot powered economy means consumerism will explode and there will be a lot of new jobs being created.
Obviously this will upset a lot of things and people in the short term as they need to change jobs, but I think most people are already starting to get used to switching jobs often. The country leaders will need to think long-term here, but seeing how US thinks about "saving jobs" right now, I wouldn't be surprised if they introduce some laws against robot manufacturing in the next few years, but hopefully they won't.
If they push this, it could create a new golden era of growth for USA. If they don't act fast, the Asians will do it first, and they'll continue to remain the leaders in manufacturing (which will probably end up happening).
But just in case the unemployment rate continues to rise will you do me a favour and calculate what the tax system should do if you have a couple of hundred rich people who own all the robotic factories, farms and trucks and 80% of the rest of the country on 'government handouts'. I'm just saying that we should think about this problem just in case we accidentally manage to replace all the jobs with computers and robots.
I agree with the parent (of your post) that jobs will just change and people will switch to other jobs that provide a better return.
But let's assume that this isn't the case and a few hundreds of people own the robots that are doing _all_ of the work (even founding startups). I'd say that this would be the perfect case:
We don't need to work to survive, but we would have plenty of resources that allow us to work on things that make fun (of course most of us are doing this anyway). Of course it's pretty clear that for this to work we also would need to change the political and economic systems considerably, but this is not a bad thing - they change all the time.
What do you mean by this? Are 90% of people farmers now?
> I'd say that this would be the perfect case:
Actually in that case I'd say people would be consumed by politics and trivial bs and destroy themselves in a generation. It'd be very similar to today, except rather than spending all day minus 8 hours on youtube they'll just be on there all day.
The point is that our society rations limited resources through money. When resources are no longer limited, and no one can earn any money through employment, we'll require a completely different social and economic system for distributing resources.
For this reason, automatic web services probably have a larger potential for destroying jobs than robots. Hopefully nextparadigms is right that more jobs is created than destroyed by this process (I have no idea). Previous shifts seems to have worked out alright.
Just because farming will be replaced with robots, doesn't mean those people will sit home doing nothing. They will get other jobs instead, and pay taxes from there. If the farmers themselves are buying the robots, then their companies will pay the taxes, since they'll have a business then.
Fast forward to today, and we have to have done alright by replacing those jobs. As long as robots are not smarter than us and can't think for themselves, I believe there will still be plenty more jobs in the future to go around. There could literally be invented hundreds or thousands of jobs by the end of this century.
Robots making iPhones is not some kind of huge milestone that could put humanity on the verge of collapse. Automation already exists for making cars for example. The net result of that was positive. This is just another transition.
The way I see it, the economy is set up to provide us with necessities (food, water, shelter), entertainment (physical devices, creative output), and to connect businesses to each other, to more efficiently provide for previous mentioned things. Food, water, shelter, and physical devices the robots have a lock on. And most B2B industries will become obsolete because everything is dirt cheap to make anyways. You'll still need people to design devices and people for the creative output.
The problem here is that creative output scales massively. It's a stretch to imagine an economy based solely on creative output. And you're still left with the problem of distributing the necessities. Only a handful of corporations will be responsible for producing the necessities. No one will have any "money" to buy them.
This is the pattern we need to break. The problem is that the only economically feasible system in the long run is some kind of welfare state — at some point food will become so cheap that we have to give people free food — but it's absolutely politically infeasible to even talk about the ways that might be good.
The only "problem" that is see with this is when these shifts are on a massive scale and happen in a very short term. Because it has the potential to leave a lot of people unemployed before there is an alternative for them. So Governments might be able to help there with free training programs for jobs that are in demand and on a growth trend.
If I look at the trends in the past, to me it seems automation has always led to more jobs. In the industrial revolution, 25 million jobs were lost, but 44 million were created. So you should always look at it from that point of view. The industrial revolution led to the progress of mankind, and it did kill a lot of jobs back then, but it also ended up creating a lot of new ones, too.
The problem is when we carry it out. As my ancestors discussed, we're going to reach a point where there just aren't more jobs. Or rather, a point where the value of the work done by robots essentially for free is so great that it completely dwarfs the value of whatever minor service labor is still done by humans, making human labor essentially valueless.
And thus the logical end result of mechanization, and one I'd argue we're starting to see already, is a world in which a) nearly everything, including food, is produced "for free" by largely self-sustaining robots, and b) nearly everyone on Earth has starved to death. That strikes most of us as, you know, just a little bit sideways.
I say do away with money. No money, no taxes. I won't need money. My robot will provide the things I need.
Since I said that much I better elaborate. Here it goes.
Most major countries do their thing. One thing is to be competitive. A company in China is employing 1 MegaBots. They will produce more and less expensive products. Another country might eventually employ more robots. Short of war there is no stopping it.
Lets say there is no war. Eventually everything is automated. What will I do? Well, I like sitting here doing relatively nothing. I also like messing around in the garage. I like going on walks with my wife. I don't like working.
Who will control the robots? Elected people. They will also be unpaid. They will run and be elected because they like to do such things.
No money. That's the key.
Who gets what? I would hope that greediness would be frowned on. No one wants to be frowned on. And social standing (getting along) will be everything. And that will not be a function of how much money I have.
That's my 2 cents.
Replacing humans with computers is easy in a lot of cases, but far from all. Human workers will simply have to take those jobs that are difficult to get robots to do.
They tend to be better paid too.
This is from a study made by McKinsey for e-G8 this year. I can't seem to be able to reach the direct link so here's the Google cache:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
And their PDF:
http://www.eg8forum.com/fr/documents/actualites/McKinsey_and...
There may be survivor bias (Is that what it's called?) involved in that figure. Not enough details in the report that I could see.
Impressive reference hunting though
In the same period, worker numbers have decreased by 31%, implying that US manufacturing is already beginning to replace workers with robots.
It's also worth pointing out that China has only exceeded the USA in output this year, and then only by a few percent. Given that China relies heavily on cheap manual labor, whilst USA employment in the manufacturing industry has plummeted, the USA is already betting heavily on robots.
Sources: http://mercatus.org/publication/us-manufacturing-output-vs-j... http://articles.boston.com/2011-02-06/bostonglobe/29344173_1... http://www.manufacturingdigital.com/tags/us/china-vs-us-manu...
There are a lot of things that have changed in US factories in the last 35 years but I don't think widespread use of robots is one of them. But I can't find references :-(
You are more right than you know. This sentence is ten years or more out of date.
I don't blame you for writing this sentence, because journalism is nigh-100%-broken and absolutely nobody understands the following facts. But:
The USA is and has been a "strong manufacturing country". US industrial capacity has risen steadily since 1970. Until this last recession started, there was no year since 1970 where that capacity had gone down:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/ipg1.gif
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/
(The Great Recession is, obviously, a problem, one large enough to show up on this chart. But it's a problem for China and other countries as well.)
The problem is that US manufacturing employment has crashed. Here's a chart showing a 30% drop in the last decade alone:
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001?data_tool=XGtab...
Why is this happening? Increased productivity. Why has productivity soared in this way? "The robot workforce revolution".
And why do people persist in maintaining that US manufacturing is "not strong" in the face of very obvious evidence that it is strong? Because there is mass suffering due to mass unemployment, and it is easier to blame "robots" than to blame the humans that mismanage the economy and allow needless suffering to persist.
Because a lot of today's stuff, e.g. iPhones, LCD monitors are made in China.
And speaking as someone who used to work in the business of building electronics parts in the USA, parts that were then sent to Malaysia for final assembly: Lots of things undergo final assembly overseas because that's one of the least automatable manufacturing processes, so you save a lot of money on hand-assembly by paying lower prices for workers. But that doesn't mean that all the parts of your "made in China" goods - or of the machines that are used to make them - are made overseas.
And as Apple's accountants will tell you the profits are not in the assembly step. For example, lots of machines with "Intel inside" are assembled abroad, but the processors are made in the USA - largely by robots - and a lot of the value is in those processors.
For an amazing use of robots in a factory environment, I would suggest a tour of BMW's Munich factory. They have a whole bunch of specialized robotic arms that do things like welding, lifting, painting, etc. Their factory still employs humans (albeit fewer humans). In BMW's case, their use of robotics makes sense. Foxconn, not so much.
Finally, there are some completely automated car factories. I thought Hyundai's US factory manufactured cars solely with robots. However, I believe they have a higher defect rate (partially due to this process).
Edit: Link to the PR2 laundry folding robot - http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/04/02/towels-uc-berkel...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa8qCj1oQn0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpvIc0Zd2E
And another asking if they'll still need humans (spoiler: no):
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjMyMTMzMzk2.html
One more blurry one:
For a competitive perspective, if the labor component is being automated - why should it be cheaper to run a robot factory in China vs. the US? Sounds like you a difference in legal climate...that need to be evened up.
Only some of the labor is being automated. Humans + robots in China is still cheaper than humans + robots in the US.
I don't see how it is counter productive. China, like most poor countries, needs more wealth. The humans who are replaced by robots are now free to create wealth in other ways (e.g., building stuff Chinese people need rather than stuff westerners don't need). Sounds like a win.
I mean, this is a pattern that repeats throughout history. The Athenians could have had steam engines. But since they had slaves already, it was never worth them developing the steam engine beyond a toy for philosophers.
In the past few years, Pearl River Delta area (around Shenzhen, where Foxconn and the other sweat factories are located) has been experiencing continuous shortage of experienced cheap labor. Other areas like the Yangtze River Delta (around Shanghai) are offering higher wages.
The supply of cheap labor in China is not unlimited. The vast majority of young generation in rural parts of China has already been lured into cities to work. The remaining population in many villages are children and old people, which no body wants them to come.
Simply put, China (and the rest of the world) could not sustain the cheap labor cost anymore. Foxconn is forced to use robots to reduce its reliance on human. Simple robots aren't expensive anyway. Going all robots is expensive, but not robots + human. Robots can perform routine tasks while leaving more challenging work to human. Win-win.
By the way, China no longer relies on compulsory military service. Most of my friends (me included) have never served in the army. Volunteers and paid soldiers are the majority now.
Nevertheless, the army, just like Foxconn, needs some cheap “labor” to do boring work anyway. Not sure how your cousin got drafted. I hope he does well there. Best wishes.
In any case taking a step backwards and not using robots or even replacing them with humans will be almost impossible once the price has adapted to the new conditions.
In some cases, work is going back to the US - US workers have higher productivity, the company can sort out quality issues much faster (waiting for a ship to take your whole order to the States, then realizing there's a problem would be expensive), communication is easier, IP doesn't get stolen, and so on.
Also, the cost of living (especially accommodation) is crazy-expensive (by Chinese standards) in the big coastal cities.
China needs to get high-tech before it gets old, and there's already a few grey hairs showing.
Think of it as changing a carpenters manual tools with power tools rather than getting a robot carpenter.
Among other reasons, there's: 1) cheap utility inputs, mainly hydro/coal electricity and water; 2) laxer environmental standards; and 3) remaining labor needs are still cheaper.
Reindustrialising the US and Europe would be hard.
Also, keep in mind that Foxconn is actually a Taiwanese company. I think that frankly they don't really care about the social development of the Chinese lower and middle class outside of long term impact on sales.
why?
I have no idea which will get the discussion, if either, but it might be worth trying to make sure any discussion doesn't get unnecessarily split.
Eventually that will be the robots: Designing, manufacturing and maintaining themselves.
If you stop in 2020, then yes, we have a ton of human engineers working on this problem.
If you think out 2030, now more of it is handled by machines and testing routines/simple AIs.
You think out to 2040 and now a good majority of it is automated.
You think out to 2060 and you are begging for your life at the feet of a red-eyed monster or some variation of that future :)
Wow, talk about a dick move. I wonder how he spun that.
China in capitalist trail blazing shocker? ;-)
However China properly doesn't have particular strong unions and Foxconn properly has pretty good connections with the officials who assured them that it was not a problem (and thanks for the BMW).
My Google skills seem unable to dig up the story, but there was a piece in one of the major newspapers a few years ago about new factories in France, and how eerie/futuristic/empty they felt; you go onto the factory floor and it's just robots humming away, with a handful of technicians.
If "positive" means "throw tax money at them" then no. But if "positive" means "not actively opposed" then why not?
Also, in this context, "no jobs" means "fewer jobs than an old world manual factory". Having a thriving community of factories, even if they are not piled high with "Modern Times" style workers is still very likely to be a very positive thing for a community. Advanced factories still need service, they need supplies and end products shipped to and from, they need said supplies to be made and most importantly, they need innovation which attract innovators which starts the cycle over again.
I agree they bring some needs for service as well, but even that might be non-local. In the story I can't seem to find, that was (correctly or not) a complaint of the local government, that of the people the factory did employ, many weren't even locally based, but Parisians who worked remotely for a third-party servicing firm, and drove out to the factory only when needed.
Obviously I don't know the details of the story, but it sounds like it goes both ways: This local government is likely home to a lot of people that would commute to Paris. And as they attract more factories, eventually someone might see an opportunity to open a local services firm. After all, time spend driving out to the factories are wasted.
I recently had an errand in a business district near a major airport. As I cycled through, I enjoyed picking out the chain of supporting firms (airline, caterer, catering equipment, for one). Neither HAS to be near each other, but if practicality line up with opportunity, why not?