Automating production at China factory reduces 80% of workforce | Hacker News Reader

Automating production at China factory reduces 80% of workforce

digitimes.com

16 pointsvtry30 comments

Products get cheaper due to automation, so people buy more stuff. Laid off workers eventually become robot technicians or designers. Some may never adapt but the same be said for any western country that has lost factories to the east.

Can someone put this in context? Is this an inkling of things to come? I'm curious about how the trend toward automation, away from human labor, will affect unemployment and disaffection in China.

My understanding was that it is strictly a numbers game: workers are used when they are cheaper than robots, and vice versa.

circle of life

Not so much a circle. More like an arrow. Pointing downward. This isn't going to end pretty in the long term.

Why? When did it become a universal truth that human labor must be employed in producing the widgets we consume? Throughout history human labor has been replaced by automation. Some pain is always involved, but society eventually repurposes that human labor to more efficient uses of their skills.

By the same token, I don't think it is a universal truth that human labor will _always_ be able repurpose itself and/or do so in a way that doesn't involve tremendous human suffering.

It always involves some amount of suffering. Entire generations of people have found themselves in a life dedicated to an obsolete skill. Does that mean we should limit the use of, say, printing machines so that people may be gainfully employed manually copying books?

What you're suggesting seems to be to limit innovation for the sake of comfort. A society that buys such a line of thought is far more doomed than the one who may or may not innovate themselves obsolete.

Hey, I am not suggesting there's a solution-- let alone even suggesting that we preserve jobs by "limiting innovation" (if that could even be done). All I am trying say is that there had better be something hard thinking about what will happen to people whose jobs become obsolete in large numbers. If recent history is any indication, it seems that we're NOT headed towards increasing the size of the welfare state. Instead we're seeing larger and large rifts between the haves and the have-nots. That's a serious problem and not one that has an easy solution.

Yeah, at this rate nobody will be working long hours at unsafe assembly lines!

Wait a moment.

I hope all the people who were so critical of Foxconn are prepared for the consequences. From what we've seen Foxconn were so rattled by it that they are investing massively in robotic automation. To the detriment of hundreds of thousands of poorer workers and the millions that they impact.

This ignorance and arrogance on the part of mainly Western countries to judge places they've never visited really needs to stop. Yes we need to maintain basic human rights. But we also need to be mindful that one man's exploitation is another man's livelihood.

It sounds like you'd prefer that rote labor not be automated. Should the potential for a post-scarcity society be abandoned because it costs a few jobs in the short term?

In order to live and avoid starvation, people require a minimum amount of income. There are two things they can use to produce income: work and assets (i.e. house renting).

As automation continues to elevate the standard of employable "work", there will be a lot of people that don't have the required education to be employable, nor sufficient savings to get an education, nor enough assets to generate sustainable living from them.

I'm all for the benefits of automation, but we should have a solution for the above scenario before saying it will be all roses and sunny days. What do we do with these people? Are we willing to get them to an upper level of knowledge via free education supported by higher taxation? Are we going to guarantee minimum income levels or a minimum set of assets to every person to be able to sustain themselves while being educated?

Those are difficult questions, and in a changing world where it's not enough to want to work in order to find a job, answers are needed...

As countries get richer there is more and more affordable education. In other words, higher job productivity from those who can get jobs means higher contributions to help those who can't.

And even if one doesn't have a high-level education, being "poor" in a developed country affords a better lifestyle than being "middle class" in that very same country a few decades ago. In other words, the same minimum wage dollar buys many times more goods. The cost savings spread everywhere - hence post-scarcity.

Western workers : Eastern workers :: Eastern workers : robots.

I seriously doubt whether the criticism of Foxconn is driving automation. Last I heard there is a labour shortage in China, wages are rising, and jobs are being moved to countries like Vietnam.

This is the broken windows fallacy.

Is anyone on Earth better off today because buggy whip production has almost entirely disappeared?

Some people will lose their jobs, but there will be other jobs. Look to Japan, they automated a lot of their factories in the mid 20th century. And now look at how horrible life is there, they are merely one of the richest countries in the entire world. Just think about how life would be so much better there if only more people had entry level factory jobs.

China is modernizing, that is in no way a bad thing.

Until now it has been the case that you could always sustain yourself via manual labor if you had no education and no assets to support yourself. Automation will change this, we've never encountered this before in our history (see my other comment in this thread).

Off the top of my head, I can easily name a pile of manual-labor jobs that won't become subject to automation for a very long time; some of these require training or apprenticeships, but none require formal university-style education, and many pay significantly better than minimum wage:

Plumber, electrician, woodworker, metalworker, mason, numerous forms of construction-related labor, electronics repair, truck driving, towncar/shuttle/cab driving, most of the hospitality industry, yard maintenance / landscaping, restaurant staff, grocers and other brick-and-mortar stores of all sorts, warehouse labor (only some of this can be automated).

I think that list can easily become significantly longer with a bit more thought, but that seems sufficient to make the point. And apart from the handful of crafts on that list that require training or apprenticeship, switching between them does not require significant unproductive time, making them all available as options simultaneously.

Try an experiment: imagine you got in a serious accident (a server rack fell on your head), and when you recovered you found that while you still had the ability to think and act resourcefully, you remembered none of your field-specific education (university or equivalent self-study). Your treatment cost precisely all of your savings and assets, so you can't afford to not work immediately. Now, do you really think you couldn't find a job anywhere? Give it a non-trivial amount of thought, and assume that until you come up with an answer you have at least 40 hours a week to think about it.

Many/most of the occupations you list are a lot closer to highly skilled labour than they are to manual labour.

For example, an electrician's ticket around here requires a grade 12 education, 2 years of college and 4 years of apprenticeship.

The first year of college includes math and physics courses that are very similar to those seen in the first year of an engineering course at University. The biggest difference is that the exams are easier and they make it easier to make up failures. In consequence, the failure/dropout rate is lower than the university engineering drop out rate, but is still significant.

I made a point of listing relatively few of those. And the requirements for those types of positions vary by jurisdiction; in many, the apprenticeship includes and accommodates the requirement for formal education (i.e. allows you to do supervised work while training, and pays enough that you can afford the education). Nonetheless, the list I gave includes many other jobs with no such requirements.

That's an apples to oranges comparison though. What is the minimum level of skill necessary to legally do work running wires and hooking up outlets for residential home construction?

In particular, to legally do so under the supervision of an expert while training.

And now other countries start doing the same as the US did 100 years ago. Soon they'll be outsourcing jobs too, though IDK to whom. Soon there won't be any cheap labor as the rest of the world catches up!!

Or maybe super poor countries will start being better off .... hmmm

The next destination for labor is Africa.

I'm really interested to see what happens after that though, when there is comparatively little wage arbitrage opportunities remaining.

Africa won't become a major manufacturing hub until companies can be relatively confident that violence and political turmoil won't destroy their investments.

I don't know if that's the case.

One of the big reasons Asian countries are so popular is because of their proximity to other members of the supply chain. This is vital for maximizing JIT inventory management.

It might just end up moving to Asian countries that still have pockets of cheap labour e.g. Philippines.

>I'm really interested to see what happens after that though, when there is comparatively little wage arbitrage opportunities remaining.

Post-labor economies driven by efficiency improvements from technological advancement.

Most of the western world lives dissipatively save for a cohort of knowledge workers fighting for prestige and social proof. (You already see this in the startup industry with those who have enough money to retire on.)

Those that don't adapt to the non-necessity for everybody to be working will experience tumult.

What do you mean by dissipatively?

My dictionary hasn't caught up with your vocabulary yet ;)

Imagine what most people would do if they no longer had to work to survive.

Sit around, watch TV, etc.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dissipative

Specifically: "To indulge in the intemperate pursuit of pleasure."

Contains a more...nihilistic edge than hedonism though.

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