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Foxconn unit to cut over 10k jobs as robotics take over

161 points by nreece 9y ago

alextheparrot 9y ago
I hope some Wisconsinites read this and better understand the deal their government is making with Foxconn. Investing in traditional manufacturing is risky if you expect those jobs to pay off over more than a couple years. On the other hand, people need jobs and even a sub-optimal solution can be beneficial.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- oneplane 9y ago
  Artificially 'creating' or 'protecting' jobs doesn't help anyone, at least not in the long run. I get that people don't like change, but trying to stand still in a moving world only hurts the people standing still.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    I am curious what you suppose the solutions are if not protectionism and tarrifs. I cannot live in the US on a Chinese factory worker’s wage, and it’s my government’s job to protect me, not the free market. I have said this repeatedly, so forgive the repetition, but this is not progess if we’re all going to live in poverty in slums paycheck to paycheck except for the wealthy.
    - ahnick 9y ago
      The long term solution is automate as much as possible and subsidize/invest in education. A robot in china more or less costs the same as a robot in the US. We are never going to be able to compete with the Chinese or other southeast asian countries with human labor costs. The next part of the solution is education and re-education of the labor force. If there is any place where deficit spending can make a real impact it is education. Student loan forgiveness, universal basic income for people going to school (university/vocational/community/etc), monetary incentives for going into highly skilled professions, increased teacher pay, etc. The key is transitioning the workforce to a knowledge based economy. Trying to resurrect the manufacturing jobs of yore is a sure-fire way to slow economic decay.
      - mdorazio 9y ago
        Educate and re-educate toward what exactly? Knowledge economy jobs are being upset by technology almost as fast as manufacturing jobs. See financial adviser and paralegal positions as examples. Your solution also naively assumes that people in their 40s and 50s who have only ever had one type of job can all magically re-train into knowledge economy jobs that may or may not be available where they live. The whole "we just need to re-align the labor force" argument has never made sense to me.
        seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        It happens over time, but there is a lot of collateral damage in the meantime (the luddites never retrained because of the automated looms, they simply died out).
        ahnick 9y ago
        That's simple. The jobs that are in demand and are needed. Software development, green energy, healthcare, etc. These jobs are not currently being upset by technology, which can easily be seen by the salaries that companies are willing to pay for these skilled workers. If you were correct about the speed of disruption then you should expect lower salaries across the board, but that is not what is being observed. You can cherry pick a few jobs of course, but even your example of paralegals is an exaggeration. (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/paralegal https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/paralegal) People are very adaptable and given the option of living in poverty or going back to school, I'm pretty sure I know what most people would pick. Say what you will about coding bootcamps, but I'm willing to bet that someone who completes a 15 week course will have much better job prospects (and receive higher pay) than someone who does not. A lot of people just need a little financial help to make the transition and that is where the government can help. There's no magic involved here. Just common sense policy and hard work.
        dragontamer 9y ago
        Until they make a robot that can change out bedpans at nursing homes and hospitals, nursing is going to be an incredibly in demand field as the Baby Boomers retire, grow old, and require care. Technology seems to be a field where the more tech is created, the more problems come up. There used to be typists who specialized in punching cards until the IDEs and compilers automated away their jobs. Their used to be entire staffs of people who would run programs one-after-the-other, until modern operating systems automated away their jobs. Each time a job is automated away in tech, it seems like 10 more pop up.
    - jayess 9y ago
      The world economy was once 100% subsistence and farming. Now it's, what, 1%? At least in industrialized countries. What happened to those other 99%? OMG they must be living in slums paycheck to paycheck.
      - dane-pgp 9y ago
        Workers moved from agriculture to industrial manual production as farming tools and machinery became more efficient. Then workers moved from industrial manual production to more mentally demanding work like radiologists and web designers as industrial automation became more capable. Now AI is taking over these more mind-based tasks. The onus is on you to explain which entirely new sectors of the economy are suddenly going to spring into existence to provide jobs for people whose skills can't compete with those of ever more capable machines.
        perl4ever 9y ago
        I'm not sure why new sectors need to suddenly "spring into existence" as though we are facing an inflection point. Automation is something that's been happening for hundreds of years, and any automation that people could do last year was done already. I don't understand why there is this feeling that there is a backlog and therefore automation is sneaking up on us to put everybody out of work next week. Perhaps there is too much handwaving about the "technological singularity".
        fwsgonzo 9y ago
        There is a story on HN right now about how 10 000 people lost their jobs at Foxconn, being replaced by robotics. If the evidence is "evident" shouldn't we proceed to look for solutions?
        perl4ever 9y ago
        I don't understand the relevance of your response to my post, and wonder if you meant to reply to a parent. We are in the thread about Foxconn, talking about implications. My point was that at a macro level, automation seems to be a steady process that's gone on for much longer than any of us have been alive. But right now, it seems fashionable to assume a sudden discontinuous increase in the rate of automation is right around the corner. This only makes sense to me if there is a lot of "low hanging fruit" that people have not been automating until now. Which I think is implausible.
    - oneplane 9y ago
      Well, don't work in a factory, and don't depend on a position as if it's going to be there forever. It might sound strange or maybe harsh, but it's not some sort of 'given' that you are going to learn how to do a thing and then you can just lean back, stop learning, and do the thing forever. You are born, learn a bunch of stuff to behave like other humans so you can live together instead of being dead, and then you select an initial training or education. Once you finish that, you usually start trading your knowledge and time for money. While you are doing that, you can look around, watch the world changing, change yourself, and maybe even arrange more change in your environment (i.e. by applying knowledge, skill and creativity to create something that wasn't there before). This process continues in an endless loop until you die (independent of doing something that would be called a 'job'). There is no case where you get born, learn some basic stuff on how to be a human, and then stop and pretend to be a basic automaton doing the same thing over and over until you stop existing (which is what protectionism, tariffs and artificial jobs boil down to at some point).
  - crimsonalucard 9y ago
    >I get that people don't like change, but trying to stand still in a moving world only hurts the people standing still. Eventually the world will move so fast that all of us might as well be standing still. The factory worker that this initiative affects is a just the first victim. He is a representation of the impending wave that is to consume all of us. As the technology we create cannibalizes our jobs where does the world go from here? Many theorists talk about crazy things like universal basic income with machines as our servants. However, we all know that these theories rarely ever end up fitting the ideal fantasmical utopias we imagine. The future is unknown. I feel remorse that people are losing their jobs and I sympathise with individuals taking measures to protect these people with 'job protection' or 'artificial job creation.' When technology inevitably cannibalizes your career, technology will be moving at such a horrifying velocity that no human, programmer, engineer, scientist technologist let alone a factory worker will be able to keep up. During this time not only would you want job protection, you'd be on your knees begging for it.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      People have been making these predictions, that machines are going to take away all of our jobs, for 'literally' hundreds of years. So, have those doomsday scenarios come true? Or, instead, is the world a much much better place because nobody is spending 80 hours a week working on a farm to feed themselves?
      - crimsonalucard 9y ago
        Dude. Those factory workers just lost their jobs. Machines literally took their jobs. It's not a prediction, the article literally said it happened. >So, have those doomsday scenarios come true? Or, instead, is the world a much much better place because nobody is spending 80 hours a week working on a farm to feed themselves? I'd say that technology has benefited society but has also widened the wealth inequality gap. Technology has benefited us but it is now harder to be employed in jobs that distribute wealth more evenly. My guess in what is to come with technology is that there will be a few mega rich elite people who own that technological real estate while almost everyone else works multiple menial jobs to barely get by.
  - crimsonalucard 9y ago
    We as technologists are the last to fall and the first to blame others for not being able to keep up.
    - darawk 9y ago
      Nobody is blaming anyone. It just is what it is.
      - IntronExon 9y ago
        Have you been paying attention to politics lately? Blame is alive and well, and I for one don’t want to put up against a wall by rioters because of the worst of us. The blame is real, whether it’s fair and accurately placed being another question.
        darawk 9y ago
        Perhaps, but the grandparent comment was not engaging in any sort of blame. So, i'm not sure what relevance politics broadly has to my comment.
      - crimsonalucard 9y ago
        Sounded like blame to me. The person was attributing it to people who "don't like change" while the reality is that those people can't change even if they wanted to.
        darawk 9y ago
        He said "I get that people don't like change". That isn't apportioning blame. It's just recognizing a fact.
    - oneplane 9y ago
      It's not about blame, it's about trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella.
  - golemiprague 9y ago
    But also artificially bringing illegal immigrants to do a job doesn't help anyone. There is certain subset of the population who can do certain type of jobs. Those people need all our help but instead we pit imported cheap labor against them so we can have cheaper services and products. There are enough things that must be done locally, require simple or sometimes sophisticated labor work and will not be replaced by robots very soon. The Chinese competition would not be an issue if we didn't import so many people to do jobs here which should go to existing Americans.
  - afterburner 9y ago
    We still need social benefits to keep up with potentially devastating changes in society.
    - adventured 9y ago
      We have social benefits. The US spends $4.x trillion every year on social programs, at the local+state+federal levels. The US has the world's largest welfare and social entitlement programs, and some of the richest per capita as well (only rivaled by elite Scandinavian nations). About 65% of all US Government spending is going to entitlements at this point. ~80% is going to entitlements + welfare programs. That percentage will continue to increase over the next decade. At the current rate of growth, entitlement spending alone will consume all US Government spending in about 30 years. Entitlement, welfare programs, and defense spending are basically crowding out all other government spending, pushing the "other" spending toward an ever smaller share of the budget (which is why US infrastructure is in such desperate need of investment). You can certainly argue we need to be a lot smarter in our spending allocation. The biggest problem the US has is not that it isn't spending, it's that the cost of these systems is astronomically out of line with what is actually sustainable (eg the US healthcare system at all levels).
      - murftown 9y ago
        > The US spends $4.x trillion every year on social programs Source? > About 65% of all US Government spending is going to entitlements at this point Source? And does this include military? > At the current rate of growth, entitlement spending alone will consume all US Government spending in about 30 years Source? And is this just the "current rate of growth" frozen in place or does it take into account ways that that rate of growth has been changing as well?
        antidamage 9y ago
        At least part of the problem there is that once you give people that social welfare they're expected to pay for ridiculously high insurance costs. Get rid of the rich-person welfare that comes in the form of bloated medical and insurance costs and your social welfare budget for the poor will plummet. The way it's organised now is that your government gives the poorest some money while the rich complain incessantly, then the rich siphon it off for themselves.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    If the alternative isn’t social and economic measures to help poeple out of a job, then what you’re saying is just a slightly glossy version of “fuck ‘em.” Telling people to just let “progress” roll over them without alternatives is nasty, useless, and counterproductive.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    Protectionism is exactly how China ended up with > 1 million Foxconn jobs in the first place. Did that not help China in the long run? Is China worse off than 30 years ago?
    - dao- 9y ago
      A million pretty shitty jobs by Western standards. China is an advanced developing country with low wages. Foxconn will have to pay higher wages in the US, and thus the pressure for automation will be even higher. The US, an industrial country, adopting China's tactics from a few decades ago, in today's environment, seems quite foolish.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        >A million pretty shitty jobs by Western standards. You'd be surprised -- especially after you factor in relative cost of life.
      - crdoconnor 9y ago
        Building iPhones is way better than most American low wage jobs - driving Ubers, flipping burgers, etc.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Artificially 'creating' or 'protecting' jobs doesn't help anyone, at least not in the long run Artificial jobs have helped people for half a century or more. The whole modern office jobs (and services sector) has been built up on them...
- psychometry 9y ago
  The Wisconsinites who are capable of understanding this are probably also smart enough not to have voted for the jackass who made this happen in the first place.
  - dang 9y ago
    Please don't take HN threads into political flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zappo2938 9y ago
  > At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
- sdca 9y ago
  The government can ban imports and robotics.
- zanny 9y ago
  > people need jobs I dislike this reductive reasoning because it basically turns predatory businesses into saviors by taking mercy on the poor fools who dared to find themselves with no means to feed or house themselves. It really reflects on the last hundred years of human history how we try so hard to perpetuate a facade of how we get everyone doing something valuable to justify their existence, when a large (and growing) percentage of people can outright admit their jobs are pointless, don't contribute anything, and aren't meaningful to anyone but bean counters and a machine bigger than any of them in isolation. So no, pointless bad jobs from Foxconn in Wisconsin are only beneficial as a means to kick the can down the road until society will wake up to the reality that it takes one person to feed a hundred and so long as the needs and wants of a population can be provided by only a subset of that population (and a shrinking subset as time and automation marches on) that there will be a growing fraction of people left surrounded by a glut of resources they are denied so long as they can't contribute anything back that satisfies those other producers. And it absolutely is a glut. What are the figures, some half of all food in the US is thrown out, there are multiple times more unoccupied homes than homeless, and the department of defense regularly "misplaces" billions of dollars? There is waste and excess in every gutter of the economy while children are food insecure and people are giving themselves heart disease from the stress of trying to scrape by in a society that holds them in ire for not being one of the few massive producers. Producers who are themselves often overworked and abused through the same mechanisms that pressure them towards efficiency. And I also despise arguments like an individual state cannot do anything. It doesn't require a heavy hand to create incentives to provide housing assistance, better utilize the food supply, and reduce the strain and stress on its workforce. Small changes like housing first initiatives or pot decriminalization have done wonders to reduce poverty and improve lives. What doesn't improve anyones life in the long term is giving Amazon tax immunity for building a headquarters in your city.
  - roenxi 9y ago
    > I dislike this reductive reasoning because it basically turns predatory businesses into saviors by taking mercy on the poor fools who dared to find themselves with no means to feed or house themselves. I'm onboard with a big chunk of what you are saying; we would have more if we wasted less, and we shouldn't organise ourselves such that we need to work more than we enjoy leisure time. On to the part where I disagree - this lead sentence is absurdly one-eyed and anti-business. Employees have agency; it isn't a label applied at birth that they can't shake. It is as easy to quit as to be fired. Nobody is worse off if new sources of employment are made available. While on the subject, I'm going to take a flying leap and say that the ideas behind there being "predatory businesses" are going to be completely at odds with the ideas behind "their jobs are pointless". To hold both these ideas in my head at once requires the company management to literally be insane and evil. I'm going to opine that they are not both.
- prepend 9y ago
  Advances in automation are the reason why Foxconn built in the US. No one expected them to employee the same number of employees as their Asian plants as US labor is so much more expensive. Hopefully the state built this into their analysis when offering tax incentives.
- jrs235 9y ago
  Oh I understand! I wish some law makers understood though! Crony hypocritical Capitalism picking winners and losers. The foxconn package comes out to paying $200,000 per "created job". The economics of the deal requires other supporting firms/companies popping up to support supply chains. But how will they survive without incentives or using robotics/automation instead of hiring labor?
- wnevets 9y ago
  >people need jobs If tax payers are going to pay for those jobs why not just cut out the middle man?
  - tialaramex 9y ago
    The answer to that is a belief with one name and two sides. "Protestant Work Ethic". As a belief among those who are going to do the jobs the PWE is a psychological trick that gives humans a sense of self-worth through their labour. I say trick because intellectually our existence is clearly pointless. For the tax payer PWE is a belief that this labour improves those doing it and so making them work for the money is an inherent good. It is perhaps especially ironic that the US population believes so strongly in the PWE while at the same time it is unusually gullible about pseudo-Christian theologies that emphasise words over deeds, the literal antithesis of the PWE.
  - Can_Not 9y ago
    There's actually a lot of things that aren't being solved by the free market where tax funded efforts could be of substantial benefit to society (more than just the added jobs), but that's another topic altogether.
Animats 9y ago
I've been amazed that Foxconn needed so many people to assemble iPhones. It's a huge run of identical items, the best case for automated manufacturing. Motorola was making flip-phones with very few people over a decade ago.
- rmah 9y ago
  If by "very few people" you mean thousands of people, then sure.
  - xt00 9y ago
    Yea, Motorola was not making like 100 million phones in a quarter that had the complexity iphones do.. the actual crazy thing that I can vouch for is that apple actually has a ludicrous amount of people at many factories that feed into Foxconn that are actually dedicated factories for apple.. each of the sub components such as display, cover lens, metal frame, speakers, batteries, PCB, sensors, and all of the ICs.. it’s truly insane the qty of people and machines in that supply chain.. would not be surprised if it is 10 million people.. plus lots of machines and factories...
    - Animats 9y ago
      The Motorola RAZR sold about 130 million units. That was over several years, but Motorola was up there in volume at one time.
      - paulie_a 9y ago
        To be fair they had to make so many because of the incredibly poor quality control and replacement units. I liked my razr a lot.. When I got one that actually worked
      - xt00 9y ago
        Yes definitely.. was truly amazing the number of those phones they built and sold.. pretty amazing phone for the time..
      - 9y ago
rmah 9y ago
Didn't they say they would do this five years ago?
- dictum 9y ago
  In 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-idUSTRE77016B20110801 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-... Some argue [weasel words] it's a form of internal propaganda to keep the workers in line.
nugget 9y ago
I'm curious what would have happened if China hadn't industrialized prior to robotics maturing and fully automating manufacturing. Can you leap from subsistence farming to software development without much infrastructure in between?
- dominotw 9y ago
  Yes that's what India did.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  China was actually never that unindustrialized in recent history. They broke through subsistence farming at least 2000 years ago, so the current miracle is really more of just returning to a former prosperity than a huge leap in society development.
  - adventured 9y ago
    China was extraordinarily unindustrialized until recently. Their GDP per capita was $317 in 1990. ~25 years ago they had 3/4 of their population living on $5 or less per day. ~15 years ago they still had half a billion people living on $3 per day or less. Today they still have a quarter of a billion people living on $3 per day or less, one of the poorest large population segments on the planet. China's total manufacturing sector output was a mere $100 to $150 billion in 1990, about 1/10th that of the US. In 1990 China had only 3% of global manufacturing output value, today it's about 25%. China still has 250 to 300 million people living off of or doing subsistence farming. They have the most backwards and inefficient farming systems of any economic power. South Korea's farming is about 40 times more productive. 20 years ago, it was even worse. Their subsistence farming was so bad in the late 1980s, they had half a billion 'farmers' producing enough food to feed only a few hundred million people at low calorie levels; the US accomplishes the same thing with three million farmers. China had a ratio of farmer to provided ratio of sub 1 to 1, the US is typically around 1 farmer/farm worker to 100 provided for. http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-farmer-productivity-2012-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-farmer-productivity-2...
ggm 9y ago
I'm betting yield per robot for lower error rate rises, but when bad programming hits, yield per robot hits the floor and we get swamped with product failure down the track. Highly repeatable acts on a circuit board or assembly become deeply ingrained into the product. Having a loose bond on two phones because a worker sneezed, vs having 140,000 trash in a year because a 1G placement force was 0.1G out of whack...
- simonpantzare 9y ago
  Include randomness. Tune parameters based on returns, factory test results, more. Is that feasible, maybe done already?
- monocasa 9y ago
  You see the same thing with humans on the manufacturing line with bugs in the process they're following.
antidamage 9y ago
If they take down the suicide nets this problem will just solve itself.
- sctb 9y ago
  Accounts that post uncivilly like this get banned. Please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
agumonkey 9y ago
funny that robots are not freeing people much, there's a need to teach people to build robots for their own needs (when it's really helpful)

161 points by nreece 9y ago

I hope some Wisconsinites read this and better understand the deal their government is making with Foxconn. Investing in traditional manufacturing is risky if you expect those jobs to pay off over more than a couple years. On the other hand, people need jobs and even a sub-optimal solution can be beneficial.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
oneplane 9y ago
Artificially 'creating' or 'protecting' jobs doesn't help anyone, at least not in the long run. I get that people don't like change, but trying to stand still in a moving world only hurts the people standing still.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  I am curious what you suppose the solutions are if not protectionism and tarrifs. I cannot live in the US on a Chinese factory worker’s wage, and it’s my government’s job to protect me, not the free market. I have said this repeatedly, so forgive the repetition, but this is not progess if we’re all going to live in poverty in slums paycheck to paycheck except for the wealthy.
  - ahnick 9y ago
    The long term solution is automate as much as possible and subsidize/invest in education. A robot in china more or less costs the same as a robot in the US. We are never going to be able to compete with the Chinese or other southeast asian countries with human labor costs. The next part of the solution is education and re-education of the labor force. If there is any place where deficit spending can make a real impact it is education. Student loan forgiveness, universal basic income for people going to school (university/vocational/community/etc), monetary incentives for going into highly skilled professions, increased teacher pay, etc. The key is transitioning the workforce to a knowledge based economy. Trying to resurrect the manufacturing jobs of yore is a sure-fire way to slow economic decay.
    - mdorazio 9y ago
      Educate and re-educate toward what exactly? Knowledge economy jobs are being upset by technology almost as fast as manufacturing jobs. See financial adviser and paralegal positions as examples. Your solution also naively assumes that people in their 40s and 50s who have only ever had one type of job can all magically re-train into knowledge economy jobs that may or may not be available where they live. The whole "we just need to re-align the labor force" argument has never made sense to me.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        It happens over time, but there is a lot of collateral damage in the meantime (the luddites never retrained because of the automated looms, they simply died out).
      - ahnick 9y ago
        That's simple. The jobs that are in demand and are needed. Software development, green energy, healthcare, etc. These jobs are not currently being upset by technology, which can easily be seen by the salaries that companies are willing to pay for these skilled workers. If you were correct about the speed of disruption then you should expect lower salaries across the board, but that is not what is being observed. You can cherry pick a few jobs of course, but even your example of paralegals is an exaggeration. (https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/paralegal https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/paralegal) People are very adaptable and given the option of living in poverty or going back to school, I'm pretty sure I know what most people would pick. Say what you will about coding bootcamps, but I'm willing to bet that someone who completes a 15 week course will have much better job prospects (and receive higher pay) than someone who does not. A lot of people just need a little financial help to make the transition and that is where the government can help. There's no magic involved here. Just common sense policy and hard work.
      - dragontamer 9y ago
        Until they make a robot that can change out bedpans at nursing homes and hospitals, nursing is going to be an incredibly in demand field as the Baby Boomers retire, grow old, and require care. Technology seems to be a field where the more tech is created, the more problems come up. There used to be typists who specialized in punching cards until the IDEs and compilers automated away their jobs. Their used to be entire staffs of people who would run programs one-after-the-other, until modern operating systems automated away their jobs. Each time a job is automated away in tech, it seems like 10 more pop up.
  - jayess 9y ago
    The world economy was once 100% subsistence and farming. Now it's, what, 1%? At least in industrialized countries. What happened to those other 99%? OMG they must be living in slums paycheck to paycheck.
    - dane-pgp 9y ago
      Workers moved from agriculture to industrial manual production as farming tools and machinery became more efficient. Then workers moved from industrial manual production to more mentally demanding work like radiologists and web designers as industrial automation became more capable. Now AI is taking over these more mind-based tasks. The onus is on you to explain which entirely new sectors of the economy are suddenly going to spring into existence to provide jobs for people whose skills can't compete with those of ever more capable machines.
      - perl4ever 9y ago
        I'm not sure why new sectors need to suddenly "spring into existence" as though we are facing an inflection point. Automation is something that's been happening for hundreds of years, and any automation that people could do last year was done already. I don't understand why there is this feeling that there is a backlog and therefore automation is sneaking up on us to put everybody out of work next week. Perhaps there is too much handwaving about the "technological singularity".
        fwsgonzo 9y ago
        There is a story on HN right now about how 10 000 people lost their jobs at Foxconn, being replaced by robotics. If the evidence is "evident" shouldn't we proceed to look for solutions?
        perl4ever 9y ago
        I don't understand the relevance of your response to my post, and wonder if you meant to reply to a parent. We are in the thread about Foxconn, talking about implications. My point was that at a macro level, automation seems to be a steady process that's gone on for much longer than any of us have been alive. But right now, it seems fashionable to assume a sudden discontinuous increase in the rate of automation is right around the corner. This only makes sense to me if there is a lot of "low hanging fruit" that people have not been automating until now. Which I think is implausible.
  - oneplane 9y ago
    Well, don't work in a factory, and don't depend on a position as if it's going to be there forever. It might sound strange or maybe harsh, but it's not some sort of 'given' that you are going to learn how to do a thing and then you can just lean back, stop learning, and do the thing forever. You are born, learn a bunch of stuff to behave like other humans so you can live together instead of being dead, and then you select an initial training or education. Once you finish that, you usually start trading your knowledge and time for money. While you are doing that, you can look around, watch the world changing, change yourself, and maybe even arrange more change in your environment (i.e. by applying knowledge, skill and creativity to create something that wasn't there before). This process continues in an endless loop until you die (independent of doing something that would be called a 'job'). There is no case where you get born, learn some basic stuff on how to be a human, and then stop and pretend to be a basic automaton doing the same thing over and over until you stop existing (which is what protectionism, tariffs and artificial jobs boil down to at some point).
- crimsonalucard 9y ago
  >I get that people don't like change, but trying to stand still in a moving world only hurts the people standing still. Eventually the world will move so fast that all of us might as well be standing still. The factory worker that this initiative affects is a just the first victim. He is a representation of the impending wave that is to consume all of us. As the technology we create cannibalizes our jobs where does the world go from here? Many theorists talk about crazy things like universal basic income with machines as our servants. However, we all know that these theories rarely ever end up fitting the ideal fantasmical utopias we imagine. The future is unknown. I feel remorse that people are losing their jobs and I sympathise with individuals taking measures to protect these people with 'job protection' or 'artificial job creation.' When technology inevitably cannibalizes your career, technology will be moving at such a horrifying velocity that no human, programmer, engineer, scientist technologist let alone a factory worker will be able to keep up. During this time not only would you want job protection, you'd be on your knees begging for it.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    People have been making these predictions, that machines are going to take away all of our jobs, for 'literally' hundreds of years. So, have those doomsday scenarios come true? Or, instead, is the world a much much better place because nobody is spending 80 hours a week working on a farm to feed themselves?
    - crimsonalucard 9y ago
      Dude. Those factory workers just lost their jobs. Machines literally took their jobs. It's not a prediction, the article literally said it happened. >So, have those doomsday scenarios come true? Or, instead, is the world a much much better place because nobody is spending 80 hours a week working on a farm to feed themselves? I'd say that technology has benefited society but has also widened the wealth inequality gap. Technology has benefited us but it is now harder to be employed in jobs that distribute wealth more evenly. My guess in what is to come with technology is that there will be a few mega rich elite people who own that technological real estate while almost everyone else works multiple menial jobs to barely get by.
- crimsonalucard 9y ago
  We as technologists are the last to fall and the first to blame others for not being able to keep up.
  - darawk 9y ago
    Nobody is blaming anyone. It just is what it is.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      Have you been paying attention to politics lately? Blame is alive and well, and I for one don’t want to put up against a wall by rioters because of the worst of us. The blame is real, whether it’s fair and accurately placed being another question.
      - darawk 9y ago
        Perhaps, but the grandparent comment was not engaging in any sort of blame. So, i'm not sure what relevance politics broadly has to my comment.
    - crimsonalucard 9y ago
      Sounded like blame to me. The person was attributing it to people who "don't like change" while the reality is that those people can't change even if they wanted to.
      - darawk 9y ago
        He said "I get that people don't like change". That isn't apportioning blame. It's just recognizing a fact.
  - oneplane 9y ago
    It's not about blame, it's about trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella.
- golemiprague 9y ago
  But also artificially bringing illegal immigrants to do a job doesn't help anyone. There is certain subset of the population who can do certain type of jobs. Those people need all our help but instead we pit imported cheap labor against them so we can have cheaper services and products. There are enough things that must be done locally, require simple or sometimes sophisticated labor work and will not be replaced by robots very soon. The Chinese competition would not be an issue if we didn't import so many people to do jobs here which should go to existing Americans.
- afterburner 9y ago
  We still need social benefits to keep up with potentially devastating changes in society.
  - adventured 9y ago
    We have social benefits. The US spends $4.x trillion every year on social programs, at the local+state+federal levels. The US has the world's largest welfare and social entitlement programs, and some of the richest per capita as well (only rivaled by elite Scandinavian nations). About 65% of all US Government spending is going to entitlements at this point. ~80% is going to entitlements + welfare programs. That percentage will continue to increase over the next decade. At the current rate of growth, entitlement spending alone will consume all US Government spending in about 30 years. Entitlement, welfare programs, and defense spending are basically crowding out all other government spending, pushing the "other" spending toward an ever smaller share of the budget (which is why US infrastructure is in such desperate need of investment). You can certainly argue we need to be a lot smarter in our spending allocation. The biggest problem the US has is not that it isn't spending, it's that the cost of these systems is astronomically out of line with what is actually sustainable (eg the US healthcare system at all levels).
    - murftown 9y ago
      > The US spends $4.x trillion every year on social programs Source? > About 65% of all US Government spending is going to entitlements at this point Source? And does this include military? > At the current rate of growth, entitlement spending alone will consume all US Government spending in about 30 years Source? And is this just the "current rate of growth" frozen in place or does it take into account ways that that rate of growth has been changing as well?
      - antidamage 9y ago
        At least part of the problem there is that once you give people that social welfare they're expected to pay for ridiculously high insurance costs. Get rid of the rich-person welfare that comes in the form of bloated medical and insurance costs and your social welfare budget for the poor will plummet. The way it's organised now is that your government gives the poorest some money while the rich complain incessantly, then the rich siphon it off for themselves.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  If the alternative isn’t social and economic measures to help poeple out of a job, then what you’re saying is just a slightly glossy version of “fuck ‘em.” Telling people to just let “progress” roll over them without alternatives is nasty, useless, and counterproductive.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Protectionism is exactly how China ended up with > 1 million Foxconn jobs in the first place. Did that not help China in the long run? Is China worse off than 30 years ago?
  - dao- 9y ago
    A million pretty shitty jobs by Western standards. China is an advanced developing country with low wages. Foxconn will have to pay higher wages in the US, and thus the pressure for automation will be even higher. The US, an industrial country, adopting China's tactics from a few decades ago, in today's environment, seems quite foolish.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >A million pretty shitty jobs by Western standards. You'd be surprised -- especially after you factor in relative cost of life.
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      Building iPhones is way better than most American low wage jobs - driving Ubers, flipping burgers, etc.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Artificially 'creating' or 'protecting' jobs doesn't help anyone, at least not in the long run Artificial jobs have helped people for half a century or more. The whole modern office jobs (and services sector) has been built up on them...
psychometry 9y ago
The Wisconsinites who are capable of understanding this are probably also smart enough not to have voted for the jackass who made this happen in the first place.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into political flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
zappo2938 9y ago
> At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
sdca 9y ago
The government can ban imports and robotics.
zanny 9y ago
> people need jobs I dislike this reductive reasoning because it basically turns predatory businesses into saviors by taking mercy on the poor fools who dared to find themselves with no means to feed or house themselves. It really reflects on the last hundred years of human history how we try so hard to perpetuate a facade of how we get everyone doing something valuable to justify their existence, when a large (and growing) percentage of people can outright admit their jobs are pointless, don't contribute anything, and aren't meaningful to anyone but bean counters and a machine bigger than any of them in isolation. So no, pointless bad jobs from Foxconn in Wisconsin are only beneficial as a means to kick the can down the road until society will wake up to the reality that it takes one person to feed a hundred and so long as the needs and wants of a population can be provided by only a subset of that population (and a shrinking subset as time and automation marches on) that there will be a growing fraction of people left surrounded by a glut of resources they are denied so long as they can't contribute anything back that satisfies those other producers. And it absolutely is a glut. What are the figures, some half of all food in the US is thrown out, there are multiple times more unoccupied homes than homeless, and the department of defense regularly "misplaces" billions of dollars? There is waste and excess in every gutter of the economy while children are food insecure and people are giving themselves heart disease from the stress of trying to scrape by in a society that holds them in ire for not being one of the few massive producers. Producers who are themselves often overworked and abused through the same mechanisms that pressure them towards efficiency. And I also despise arguments like an individual state cannot do anything. It doesn't require a heavy hand to create incentives to provide housing assistance, better utilize the food supply, and reduce the strain and stress on its workforce. Small changes like housing first initiatives or pot decriminalization have done wonders to reduce poverty and improve lives. What doesn't improve anyones life in the long term is giving Amazon tax immunity for building a headquarters in your city.
- roenxi 9y ago
  > I dislike this reductive reasoning because it basically turns predatory businesses into saviors by taking mercy on the poor fools who dared to find themselves with no means to feed or house themselves. I'm onboard with a big chunk of what you are saying; we would have more if we wasted less, and we shouldn't organise ourselves such that we need to work more than we enjoy leisure time. On to the part where I disagree - this lead sentence is absurdly one-eyed and anti-business. Employees have agency; it isn't a label applied at birth that they can't shake. It is as easy to quit as to be fired. Nobody is worse off if new sources of employment are made available. While on the subject, I'm going to take a flying leap and say that the ideas behind there being "predatory businesses" are going to be completely at odds with the ideas behind "their jobs are pointless". To hold both these ideas in my head at once requires the company management to literally be insane and evil. I'm going to opine that they are not both.
prepend 9y ago
Advances in automation are the reason why Foxconn built in the US. No one expected them to employee the same number of employees as their Asian plants as US labor is so much more expensive. Hopefully the state built this into their analysis when offering tax incentives.
jrs235 9y ago
Oh I understand! I wish some law makers understood though! Crony hypocritical Capitalism picking winners and losers. The foxconn package comes out to paying $200,000 per "created job". The economics of the deal requires other supporting firms/companies popping up to support supply chains. But how will they survive without incentives or using robotics/automation instead of hiring labor?
wnevets 9y ago
>people need jobs If tax payers are going to pay for those jobs why not just cut out the middle man?
- tialaramex 9y ago
  The answer to that is a belief with one name and two sides. "Protestant Work Ethic". As a belief among those who are going to do the jobs the PWE is a psychological trick that gives humans a sense of self-worth through their labour. I say trick because intellectually our existence is clearly pointless. For the tax payer PWE is a belief that this labour improves those doing it and so making them work for the money is an inherent good. It is perhaps especially ironic that the US population believes so strongly in the PWE while at the same time it is unusually gullible about pseudo-Christian theologies that emphasise words over deeds, the literal antithesis of the PWE.
- Can_Not 9y ago
  There's actually a lot of things that aren't being solved by the free market where tax funded efforts could be of substantial benefit to society (more than just the added jobs), but that's another topic altogether.

Animats 9y ago

I've been amazed that Foxconn needed so many people to assemble iPhones. It's a huge run of identical items, the best case for automated manufacturing. Motorola was making flip-phones with very few people over a decade ago.

rmah 9y ago
If by "very few people" you mean thousands of people, then sure.
- xt00 9y ago
  Yea, Motorola was not making like 100 million phones in a quarter that had the complexity iphones do.. the actual crazy thing that I can vouch for is that apple actually has a ludicrous amount of people at many factories that feed into Foxconn that are actually dedicated factories for apple.. each of the sub components such as display, cover lens, metal frame, speakers, batteries, PCB, sensors, and all of the ICs.. it’s truly insane the qty of people and machines in that supply chain.. would not be surprised if it is 10 million people.. plus lots of machines and factories...
  - Animats 9y ago
    The Motorola RAZR sold about 130 million units. That was over several years, but Motorola was up there in volume at one time.
    - paulie_a 9y ago
      To be fair they had to make so many because of the incredibly poor quality control and replacement units. I liked my razr a lot.. When I got one that actually worked
    - xt00 9y ago
      Yes definitely.. was truly amazing the number of those phones they built and sold.. pretty amazing phone for the time..
    - 9y ago

rmah 9y ago

Didn't they say they would do this five years ago?

dictum 9y ago
In 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-idUSTRE77016B20110801 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-... Some argue [weasel words] it's a form of internal propaganda to keep the workers in line.

nugget 9y ago

I'm curious what would have happened if China hadn't industrialized prior to robotics maturing and fully automating manufacturing. Can you leap from subsistence farming to software development without much infrastructure in between?

dominotw 9y ago
Yes that's what India did.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
China was actually never that unindustrialized in recent history. They broke through subsistence farming at least 2000 years ago, so the current miracle is really more of just returning to a former prosperity than a huge leap in society development.
- adventured 9y ago
  China was extraordinarily unindustrialized until recently. Their GDP per capita was $317 in 1990. ~25 years ago they had 3/4 of their population living on $5 or less per day. ~15 years ago they still had half a billion people living on $3 per day or less. Today they still have a quarter of a billion people living on $3 per day or less, one of the poorest large population segments on the planet. China's total manufacturing sector output was a mere $100 to $150 billion in 1990, about 1/10th that of the US. In 1990 China had only 3% of global manufacturing output value, today it's about 25%. China still has 250 to 300 million people living off of or doing subsistence farming. They have the most backwards and inefficient farming systems of any economic power. South Korea's farming is about 40 times more productive. 20 years ago, it was even worse. Their subsistence farming was so bad in the late 1980s, they had half a billion 'farmers' producing enough food to feed only a few hundred million people at low calorie levels; the US accomplishes the same thing with three million farmers. China had a ratio of farmer to provided ratio of sub 1 to 1, the US is typically around 1 farmer/farm worker to 100 provided for. http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-farmer-productivity-2012-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-farmer-productivity-2...

ggm 9y ago

I'm betting yield per robot for lower error rate rises, but when bad programming hits, yield per robot hits the floor and we get swamped with product failure down the track. Highly repeatable acts on a circuit board or assembly become deeply ingrained into the product. Having a loose bond on two phones because a worker sneezed, vs having 140,000 trash in a year because a 1G placement force was 0.1G out of whack...

simonpantzare 9y ago
Include randomness. Tune parameters based on returns, factory test results, more. Is that feasible, maybe done already?
monocasa 9y ago
You see the same thing with humans on the manufacturing line with bugs in the process they're following.

antidamage 9y ago

If they take down the suicide nets this problem will just solve itself.

sctb 9y ago
Accounts that post uncivilly like this get banned. Please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

agumonkey 9y ago

funny that robots are not freeing people much, there's a need to teach people to build robots for their own needs (when it's really helpful)