16 ms·

Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years

99 points by acak 15y ago

ColinWright 15y ago
There are two stories on this currently posted to HN, this one, and the one at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827861 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827861 I have no idea which will get the discussion, if either, but it might be worth trying to make sure any discussion doesn't get unnecessarily split.
sixtypoundhound 15y ago
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.
- naz 15y ago
  You can build and maintain robots and factories cheaper in China.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  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.
  - gaius 15y ago
    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.
- riobard 15y ago
  Not until you see the whole picture. 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.
  - meric 15y ago
    One anecdote vs another, my cousin is currently serving compulsory military service.
    - riobard 15y ago
      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.
- DasIch 15y ago
  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.
- wisty 15y ago
  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.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  They are not going to replace all of the workers with robots -- only those who do the simplest possible labor. Think of it as changing a carpenters manual tools with power tools rather than getting a robot carpenter.
- _delirium 15y ago
  > 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.
  - justincormack 15y ago
    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.
- icegreentea 15y ago
  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.
- notatoad 15y ago
  "they need to transition from rural economies into urban employement" why?
ximeng 15y ago
Promotional videos from a company involved with Foxconn robots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa8qCj1oQn0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa8qCj1oQn0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpvIc0Zd2E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpvIc0Zd2E And another asking if they'll still need humans (spoiler: no): http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjMyMTMzMzk2.html http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjMyMTMzMzk2.html One more blurry one: http://video.sina.com.cn/v/b/51887552-1635296834.html http://video.sina.com.cn/v/b/51887552-1635296834.html
georgieporgie 15y ago
"...which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers' dance party Friday night." Wow, talk about a dick move. I wonder how he spun that.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  I imagine that the average tenure at a Chinese factory is less than three years, so I doubt this will effect most of the workers currently there.
  - adaml_623 15y ago
    Got any references for your claim of 3 years?
- hugh3 15y ago
  On the bright side, in a few years we'll have robot dance parties instead.
peteretep 15y ago
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. China in capitalist trail blazing shocker? ;-)
- tomjen3 15y ago
  Unlikely. 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).
- _delirium 15y ago
  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.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    > 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.
nextparadigms 15y ago
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).
- adaml_623 15y ago
  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.
  - gst 15y ago
    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.
Mrich30 15y ago
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.
iqster 15y ago
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). Edit: Link to the PR2 laundry folding robot - http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/04/02/towels-uc-berkeley http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/04/02/towels-uc-berkel...
- dmethvin 15y ago
  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.
ThomPete 15y ago
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.
nextparadigms 15y ago
This is the robot they plan on using: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjo4AsTVh0s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjo4AsTVh0s http://www.abb.com/cawp/abbzh254/8657F5E05EDE6AC5C1257861002C8ED2.aspx http://www.abb.com/cawp/abbzh254/8657F5E05EDE6AC5C1257861002... http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/13/frida-concept-robot-will-solve-all-of-foxconns-problems-by-re/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/13/frida-concept-robot-will-...
- ippisl 15y ago
  Can you please link to the source ?
rkalla 15y ago
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? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E
- diminish 15y ago
  I am afraid AI will soon claim creative jobs too. So I am afraid of my designer job.
  - mcritz 15y ago
    As soon as AI can accurately express the human condition as well as Bob Dylan I'll be worried. Meanwhile, we've got this: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/06/24/science/1247468035233/interview-with-a-robot.html http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/06/24/science/1247468035...
mrbill 15y ago
It's pretty hard for a robot to throw itself off a roof.
rlf 15y ago
To our Chinese friends, welcome to our world.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
huherto 15y ago
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.
- orijing 15y ago
  > Somebody is going to have to design, manufacture, and maintain the robots. Eventually that will be the robots: Designing, manufacturing and maintaining themselves.
  - rkalla 15y ago
    Exactly right. It just depends on where you stop in the hypothetical timeline of thought. If you stop in 2020, then yes, we have a ton of human engineers working on this problem. If you think out 2030, now more of it is handled by machines and testing routines/simple AIs. You think out to 2040 and now a good majority of it is automated. You think out to 2060 and you are begging for your life at the feet of a red-eyed monster or some variation of that future :)
ComputerGuru 15y ago
Sounds like an Onion News headline...
benthumb 15y ago
Was at the Microsoft campus bus stop in Redmond recently and it was plastered (and I mean plastered) w/ posters for Mike Daisey's spoken word piece: http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/ http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

99 points by acak 15y ago

There are two stories on this currently posted to HN, this one, and the one at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827861 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827861 I have no idea which will get the discussion, if either, but it might be worth trying to make sure any discussion doesn't get unnecessarily split.

sixtypoundhound 15y ago

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.

naz 15y ago
You can build and maintain robots and factories cheaper in China.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
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.
- gaius 15y ago
  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.
riobard 15y ago
Not until you see the whole picture. 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.
- meric 15y ago
  One anecdote vs another, my cousin is currently serving compulsory military service.
  - riobard 15y ago
    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.
DasIch 15y ago
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.
wisty 15y ago
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.
tomjen3 15y ago
They are not going to replace all of the workers with robots -- only those who do the simplest possible labor. Think of it as changing a carpenters manual tools with power tools rather than getting a robot carpenter.
_delirium 15y ago
> 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.
- justincormack 15y ago
  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.
icegreentea 15y ago
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.
notatoad 15y ago
"they need to transition from rural economies into urban employement" why?

ximeng 15y ago

Promotional videos from a company involved with Foxconn robots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa8qCj1oQn0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa8qCj1oQn0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpvIc0Zd2E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpvIc0Zd2E And another asking if they'll still need humans (spoiler: no): http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjMyMTMzMzk2.html http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjMyMTMzMzk2.html One more blurry one: http://video.sina.com.cn/v/b/51887552-1635296834.html http://video.sina.com.cn/v/b/51887552-1635296834.html

georgieporgie 15y ago

"...which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers' dance party Friday night." Wow, talk about a dick move. I wonder how he spun that.

tomjen3 15y ago
I imagine that the average tenure at a Chinese factory is less than three years, so I doubt this will effect most of the workers currently there.
- adaml_623 15y ago
  Got any references for your claim of 3 years?
hugh3 15y ago
On the bright side, in a few years we'll have robot dance parties instead.

peteretep 15y ago

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. China in capitalist trail blazing shocker? ;-)

tomjen3 15y ago
Unlikely. 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).
_delirium 15y ago
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.
- mseebach 15y ago
  > 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.

nextparadigms 15y ago

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).

adaml_623 15y ago
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.
- gst 15y ago
  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.

Mrich30 15y ago

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.

iqster 15y ago

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). Edit: Link to the PR2 laundry folding robot - http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/04/02/towels-uc-berkeley http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/04/02/towels-uc-berkel...

dmethvin 15y ago
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.

ThomPete 15y ago

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.

nextparadigms 15y ago

This is the robot they plan on using: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjo4AsTVh0s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjo4AsTVh0s http://www.abb.com/cawp/abbzh254/8657F5E05EDE6AC5C1257861002C8ED2.aspx http://www.abb.com/cawp/abbzh254/8657F5E05EDE6AC5C1257861002... http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/13/frida-concept-robot-will-solve-all-of-foxconns-problems-by-re/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/13/frida-concept-robot-will-...

ippisl 15y ago
Can you please link to the source ?

rkalla 15y ago

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? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E

diminish 15y ago
I am afraid AI will soon claim creative jobs too. So I am afraid of my designer job.
- mcritz 15y ago
  As soon as AI can accurately express the human condition as well as Bob Dylan I'll be worried. Meanwhile, we've got this: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/06/24/science/1247468035233/interview-with-a-robot.html http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/06/24/science/1247468035...

mrbill 15y ago

It's pretty hard for a robot to throw itself off a roof.

rlf 15y ago

To our Chinese friends, welcome to our world.

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huherto 15y ago

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.

orijing 15y ago
> Somebody is going to have to design, manufacture, and maintain the robots. Eventually that will be the robots: Designing, manufacturing and maintaining themselves.
- rkalla 15y ago
  Exactly right. It just depends on where you stop in the hypothetical timeline of thought. If you stop in 2020, then yes, we have a ton of human engineers working on this problem. If you think out 2030, now more of it is handled by machines and testing routines/simple AIs. You think out to 2040 and now a good majority of it is automated. You think out to 2060 and you are begging for your life at the feet of a red-eyed monster or some variation of that future :)

ComputerGuru 15y ago

Sounds like an Onion News headline...

benthumb 15y ago

Was at the Microsoft campus bus stop in Redmond recently and it was plastered (and I mean plastered) w/ posters for Mike Daisey's spoken word piece: http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/ http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/

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