Foxconn is an interesting mega-beast. It has a campus that houses 500k people and employees 1 million.
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?
It always makes me scratch my head when people brush off the coming automation revolution by saying "they'll just get other jobs". The point is, eventually, there will be no jobs at all. This is going to require a major rethinking of our social structure. Even the process of getting to that point will be slow and cause severe economic and social upheaval. We need to be thinking about this now before we have 10 million rioting in the streets because there are no jobs left.
The point isn't that there'll be no jobs, because ten jobs building a hundred widgets an hour can be replaced by ten jobs maintaining a hundred robots that build ten thousand widgets per hour, thus making everybody significantly richer.
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.
You're still stuck in the thinking that hackinthebochs is saying we have to get away from, just one level deeper.
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.
The important thing to remember is that we have always been afraid of jobs disappearing due to machines. Textile workers in France in the 18th century were afraid to be replaced by automated spinning machines. Switchboard operators got mad when then the automated switchboards arrived.
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.
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.
"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."
That's the Luddite argument to a T. I mean the historic, literal Luddites, not the modern figurative use. They were hand-weavers, worried that mechanical looms would put them out of business. They were right, and they were subject to severe financial hardship. No force on earth could have stopped the change taking place, though.
The difference is the pace and the scale. When its not just hand-weavers, but large swaths of society being made obsolete in a matter of years, we can't expect it to play out the same way as in the past.
What do you propose? We cannot stop it, nor should we even try to. The best you can do is to be aware of what is happening, and surf the wave rather than get creamed by it. Some people are going to come out poorly, but that is just the nature of the beast that is life. Don't waste calories worrying about them.
I don't think we should try to stop it. But I think the process of transitioning our society will be extremely painful. We can help mitigate a disaster by planning for it. It begins by first accepting that there will likely be huge social unrest as the process unfolds.
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.
I think it's wrong looking at this as a "disaster". There's nothing good about a natural disaster, while history has proven again and again that paradigm shifts, while also having a negative side effect in the short term, have a much larger positive effect in the long term.
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.
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".
Previous revolutions didn't make people obsolete because it still required human labor to drive the increased production, and because the growth in productive capacity mostly equaled the growth in population and demand.
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.
People can just sit around going to restaurants, doing art, doing exercise, travelling, sitting in cafes, surfing youtube. Lots of jobs today are of dubious utility, and lots of people with jobs waste a lot of their time surfing the internet and doing other marginally productive work.
I agree with all that. The point is the current social structure isn't set up for that. We still distribute resources based on how much money you can earn. When there's no money to earn, we need an entirely new framework.
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.
It sort of is, a little bit. No one in Europe has to die without work, they don’t even have to starve. It’s not a pleasant life, certainly, but it shows that a massive change of our social structures wouldn’t be necessary, we would just have to extend what we are currently doing.
I very much agree that this point will eventually be reached. We won't suddenly stop automating tasks and making those automations more and more functional.
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.
This has happened before, to the 90% of humanity involved in hunting and gathering whose jobs were displaced by Agriculture. It happened again when agriculture and textile production became mechanized.
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.
"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."
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.
The downside of the utopia is the sheer amount of things that the robots can produce. Then what do you do with all that stuff?? That is a theme of the story "Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl.
"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."
Somehow, I can't imagine a bored and aimless population of billions building utopia. Bored people tend to be troublesome people, so if there isn't enough Farmville, we might be in trouble.
One thing that everyone is missing in all of this is the incoming demographic crash. Western Europe, the US, Japan, and China will be heavily affected by this. Automation will allow the remaining workers to produce the goods and services necessary for the wealthy countries as populations age. The real losers will be the countries that have not climbed the industrialization curve by the time that the cost of producing goods locally falls below the cost of transporting them from countries that have cheap labor. Once this happens, those countries that are not advanced enough to have local production will have to find some other way to reach a modern, consumer-oriented lifestyle. I might be willing to bet on Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia that have the advantage of being close to current manufacturing centers both culturally and physically, but I would not bet that modernization will provide any alleviation of the suffering experienced by Africans in the same way that it is improving living standards in China. Difficult for me to say how India will fare since I have little experience there and the depth of its democratic tradition makes it difficult for centralized decision making to drive the economy forward at the same rate that East Asians have achieved.
"Our only salvation seems, at least for now, to expand ourselves in creative professions that cannot be performed by machines (yet)."
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.
>Yes. We have to move "up-market" in the job market, just like the disruptive innovation theory says
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.
I didn't say we have a choice. It is what it is. We could try to slow it down by not embracing it and making laws against it, but unless the whole planet agrees on this, then it's pointless and will only end up making the country that writes such laws to fall behind the others.
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 think automation throughout the society helps everyone's job become easier.
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.
Still though - someone will have to design, make and maintain the robots? Its still pretty gloomy, but until the time that robots can make better robots, there will still be a place for us.
True, but you are still loosing a significant number of human workers. You don't need 1000 humans to maintain 1000 robots, and those jobs won't be attainable by most people - especially the people the robots were designed to replace.
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.
If USA wants to become a strong "manufacturing" country again, it needs to become a leader in the robot workforce revolution, too. This is disruption. It will happen either way, and it's a net benefit for human kind.
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).
If USA wants to become a strong "manufacturing" country again, it needs to become a leader in the robot workforce revolution, too.
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:
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.
It's largely sampling bias, though. It seems to us, as regular consumers, that everything is made in China because we buy phones and monitors, but we never buy steel girders and Boeing 777s.
Indeed, by definition people in the USA don't buy exported goods.
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.
The USA is already a strong manufacturing country. It accounts for 20% of global output, and output has more than doubled since 1975.
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.
You have references but they don't back up that implication robots are being used in US factories.
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 :-(
For the purpose of this discussion, any machine that automates or assists in a task is a robot. Electric screwdrivers and conveyor belts are robots, albeit unsophisticated ones.
I'm happy that the internet is creating 3x more jobs than it is replacing....
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 wonder what the tax system should do once >90% of the population can't work as farmers anymore, as a majority of the tasks is done by machines.
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.
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.
We have a while longer until we don't have to work anymore, if that will even happen. What happens in an economy where jobs are automated, is that even more opportunities are being created for other types of jobs.
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.
I don't get why people seem to have confidence that we'll find new ways to employ everyone when automation takes over. The whole point of automation is that it takes an order of magnitude less human labor to produce the same output. That's a lot of people to work at a McDonalds. The end game is that there will be jobs for no one. A humanoid robot can do any manual labor job potentially hundreds of times more efficiently than a human. Most white collar jobs could probably be replaced by a sufficiently advanced AI. We need to start at least thinking about the type of society that will be needed when significant human labor is no longer required. Just brushing it off by saying "they'll get other jobs" is burying your head in the sand.
I remember a story from a book (could've been Innovator's Dilemma, I don't remember), where he said that around 1900's I believe, they needed 200 humans to do a job, like carrying a big lumber from a cargo ship. Then cranes came about, and they could do the same job with just a handful of people, because most of the physical work was replaced by a crane.
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.
I don't know if it's true that we've done alright. Realistically speaking, if you were employing 200 people to do something, and you can replace that job with ten people with ten cranes, you should be able to keep on paying 190 people — less the cost of the cranes — to stay at home and not work. Instead the difference goes into the pocket of the employer, and 190 people need to find new jobs or starve to death.
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.
But if that ends up happening anyway (people finding other jobs), then what is wrong with it? Should we stop progress because we want everyone to keep their current jobs for life?
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.
It's not a problem in the short term— that is in the short term someone can find more work, sure. Maybe less skilled work, almost certainly worse paying work, but okay, they probably won't starve to death. And the benefits of industrialization make the economy as a whole grow, so their kids are actually better off. Great!
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 don't mean to come off as argumentative, and I certainly hope you're right. I just can't imagine the types of jobs people would pay for that could employ most of humanity in the age of robots.
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.
> I wonder what the tax system should do once >90% of the population can't work as farmers anymore
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.
No, but most people used to work in farming. Then manufacturing became dominant. Today the service sector is dominating. It is 1.4% agriculture, 20.6% industry, and 78% services. (source: Wolfram Alpha).
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.
I think what he means is that there will come a point at which technology renders most occupations obsolete. What happens when 90% of the population aren't needed in the workforce?
They do something else, as the said 90% of agricultural workers did during the industrial revolution, as did typesetters in the 80s, as did computers (the profession) when computers (the machines) took over.
Human desires are endless. This is why you will always have employment. Technology frees up time and humans than use part of that time for leisure and part of it for doing more meaningful, higher value work.
What do you mean by "employment"? In the far enough future, anything that's deemed profitable can be done much faster by automation. No one will pay a human a check to do something that can be done dirt cheap by a robot.
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.
I don't think that will happen until we have "replicators". Until we can make literally everything ourselves, we'll still need jobs. We'll also need almost limitless resources, too, unless our desires will tend more and more towards virtual things rather than physical. Either way, it's really hard to predict what will happen 50 years from now, but I'm quite optimistic about the human race.
That won't happen, anymore than powerdrills will be the end of carpenters -- it will require people to adapt and learn new skills but so have every invention ever.
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.
Reference needed for "creating 3x more in return". I don't say it isn't true, I just think it's really hard to measure (what is a job "killed by the Internet"/how far do we strech it). I just know that "98% of all statistics are made up".
I don't see how this will work in 3 years time. Cheap robots today (<100K) suck at manual dexterity tasks. It took quite a lot of work to get a PR2 to fold laundry (and some of the best robotics people in the world worked on this). The kinds of tasks I imagined Foxconn workers performed all require significant manual dexterity.
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).
One reason that assembly of products like phones requires human hands is simply because nobody has yet tweaked the designs and processes to make them friendly to robot assembly. There hasn't been a financial incentive to do so yet.
From a social perspective, isn't this counter productive? China has a ton of people they need to transition from rural economies into urban employement - building robot factories does nothing to address this issue, which is a big deal in a country with compulsory military service (youth unemployment -> civil unrest).
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.
No, China is running into a labor shortage. 18-year-olds are getting relatively thin on the ground, for both demographic reasons (one child was ~25 years ago), and because immigration from rural to urban areas has undergone an inflection. Factory workers in a good area can thus get very high (by Chinese standards) wages. Food prices are also going up. They won't admit that inflation is out of control, but it is. Factories are moving inland, or to Vietnam or India. China is looking at Africa, in the long term.
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.
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.
I said “China no longer _relies_ on compulsory military service”, not “China no longer _has_ compulsory military service”. It is still there, but it compulsorily drafts significantly less people since 1998. So effectively, we no longer have to worry about this anymore.
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.
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?
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.
Assuming equally sophisticated robots. But the money you spend on your robots is proportional to alternate cost of humans doing it. It makes sense for a US company to invest more than a Chinese one.
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.
I think eventually this might force China (and probably other countries) to re-evaluate what "work" means and if income should be tied as directly to it, as it is now.
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.
> why should it be cheaper to run a robot factory in China vs. the US?
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.
Also there is a lot more general infrastructure and expertise in manufacturing a lot of product types there. And no doubt the factory making the robots will be down the road, improving the ecosystem. Generally you do not do every process in house so you need component suppliers and specialist process makers nearby.
Reindustrialising the US and Europe would be hard.
You still need to deal with your suppliers. If the majority of your suppliers are based in China/Asian (for example, nearly all the chip and screen fabs), the shorter supply chain may be a benefit.
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.
Just a logical step in the development of countries/industries. First human labour is cheaper, then it becomes more expensive and robots become cheaper too making them a good alternative. As a plus, humans dont have to do the dangerous jobs anymore. This very cheap labour will now also move to other countries, making them richer in turn until they will also move to robots. This is the good side of globalization and should be applauded, provided that people who are fired have a chance to move to other jobs and get supported by training and education if necessary.
Somebody is going to have to design, manufacture, and maintain the robots. Consumer goods will be cheaper. Robotic technology will make progress. A lot of people will benefit but we must also think about the people who will loose their jobs. I don`t have an answer but I hope there is a plan for them.
This is the real challenge. In 1995-2002 the us lost something around 2 million jobs to Chinese manufacturing.'the chinese lost 15 million jobs to the robots.
You couldn't get away with this politically in the Western world without a huge stink, although from a capitalistic point of view, it's the right thing to happen.
Highly automated robot factories are already pretty normal in the Western world, especially for new factories. It has led to some political controversy, though I mostly see it come up when a local government feels it wasted its money with subsidies when they didn't bring jobs: in Germany and France, a number of localities have been disappointed to find that they lured a new factory to town, but then that factory doesn't hire many locals. That leads to the question: if a factory doesn't bring jobs to town, is there a reason locals should still be positive towards it? (One possibility is if it brings tax revenues.)
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.
> That leads to the question: if a factory doesn't bring jobs to town, is there a reason locals should still be positive towards it?
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.
For "why not", I suppose it depends on whether the factory has any downsides. Traditionally they have some pros and some cons: they bring jobs and tax revenue and a thriving "stuff is happening" feeling to the local economy, but they can also bring things like odors, air and water pollution, noise, increased truck traffic, and possibly requirements for new infrastructure (e.g. wider roads). That's why new factories can run into opposition in a way that new Google offices don't.
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.
Most of the grievances can be (and are) addressed by placing the factories in business zones that are placed near to transport links and a certain distance from residential zones.
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?
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).
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?
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E