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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 hear

• 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...
  • yannis 15y ago
    This will only happen, when robots will be able to dream. Feel safe!
• aaronsw 15y ago
  "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.
  • SoftwareMaven 15y ago
    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.
    • walkon 15y ago
      I'm not sure how excited and fulfilled one can be by doing a simple and repetitive task several hundred times a day.
      • amcintyre 15y ago
        I can't tell...are you talking about the jobs the robots will be doing, or playing Farmville?
        • prodigal_erik 15y ago
          Farmville is a good example of the kind of drudgery which robots should relieve us from. I thought this was going to be a joke but, just like WoW and EVE mining, I see that it is actually happening: http://farmvillebot.net/ http://farmvillebot.net/ http://www.femfarmville.com/ http://www.femfarmville.com/
      • deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
    • rkalla 15y ago
      Good point, I wonder if we will need to create virtual realities for ourselves just to stay "occupied" ... here is a meta though... what if that is what we live in NOW, hence all the talk about "is our reality a hologram?" recently. Inceptioned! :)
• hackinthebochs 15y ago
  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.
  • xsmasher 15y ago
    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.
    • hackinthebochs 15y ago
      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.
      • riffraff 15y ago
        isn't this a simplistic view? The industrial revolution was effectively covering the whole society, making a host of jobs obsolete in a matter of years, not only hand weaving. The same happened for the second industrial revolution, or the "green revolution". Why should we expect this time to be different?
        • hackinthebochs 15y ago
          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.
• nextparadigms 15y ago
  "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 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.
  • hackinthebochs 15y ago
    >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.
    • nextparadigms 15y ago
      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.
• omarqureshi 15y ago
  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.
  • choko 15y ago
    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.
• pizza_ 15y ago
  > Foxconn is an interesting mega-beast. It has a campus that houses 500k people and employees 1 million. > Apparently living and working conditions aren't great, we all read the followups to the original suicides. A few dozen suicides over 5 years given a population of one million is significantly below the U.S. national average. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-us-statistics-and-prevention/index.shtml http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-u...
• xsmasher 15y ago
  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.
• bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
  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.
• wallflower 15y ago
  > 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. Read "Manna" by Marshall Brain for a vision of the caste system that may happen http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
  • rkalla 15y ago
    Thank you for the recommendation, 3 chapters in and this is fascinating (horrifying/thought-provoking)
• shareme 15y ago
  one point.. 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.
  • rkalla 15y ago
    Thank you for the correction; I tried to edit the story but it looks like I'm past the time limit.
• DanielRibeiro 15y ago
  Regarding automation, I allways keep in mind Knuth's writting on the subject[1]: The field of "automatic programming" is one of the major areas of artificial intelligence research today. In this sense we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html