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from the employees-will-now-lead-lives-of-leisure dept.
Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer of Apple's iPhones and other electronic devices, aims to replace human workers with "FoxBots" and achieve nearly full automation of entire factories:
The slow and steady march of manufacturing automation has been in place at Foxconn for years. The company said last year that it had set a benchmark of 30 percent automation at its Chinese factories by 2020. The company can now produce around 10,000 Foxbots a year, Jia-peng says, all of which can be used to replace human labor. In March, Foxconn said it had automated away 60,000 jobs at one of its factories.
[...] Complicating the matter is the Chinese government, which has incentivized human employment in the country. In areas like Chengdu, Shenzhen, and Zhengzhou, local governments have doled out billions of dollars in bonuses, energy contracts, and public infrastructure to Foxconn to allow the company to expand. As of last year, Foxconn employed as many as 1.2 million people, making it one of the largest employers in the world. More than 1 million of those workers reside in China, often at elaborate, city-like campuses that house and feed employees.
In an in-depth report published yesterday, The New York Times detailed these government incentivizes for Foxconn's Zhengzhou factory, its largest and most capable plant that produces 500,000 iPhones a day and is known locally as "iPhone City." According to Foxconn's Jia-peng, the Zhengzhou factory has some production lines already at the second automation phase and on track to become fully automated in a few years' time. So it may not be long before one of China's largest employers will be forced to grapple with its automation ambitions and the benefits it receives to transform rural parts of the country into industrial powerhouses.
To undermine American manufacturing, ditch the meatbags.
(Score: 1) by ben_white on Tuesday January 03 2017, @09:08PM
Close, but not quite. Try this:
Human society will need to adapt to a world where much of what we once considered "work" is done for us by our technology. Not every member of our world can be world class innovator. We have to find meaningful activities for all members of our societies that provide value and reasonable distribution of resources, even if those activities are assigned very low value currently. If we can't make this leap we will tip into chaos as instability provoked by poor resource allocation creates large segments of society with no mooring to technological progress, and therefore no incentive to participate in the complex world it creates. It is my belief that much of the current instability in the world could already be attributed to this phenomena. If you doubt this, look at youth unemployment rates in unstable countries.
--
cheers, ben
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @10:15PM
Yeah, my prediction will be that 1% of people will work making ridiculous amount of money which will then have 90% tax applied to it, to spread around to the other 99%. That is the outcome in the near future until all work is removed, which wont happen for a long time and if it ever did the machines might just opt to kill us instead of serving us.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 04 2017, @12:42AM
Most humans are becoming more and more useless. A small minority with ultra-specialized skills are becoming more and more valuable.
And then there's reality [voxeu.org] - two thirds of all humanity has seen a 30% or greater growth in their income when adjusted for inflation. It boggles my mind how people can keep insisting on this when there are obvious counterexamples out there like the development of China and India's economies, which demonstrate that human labor is not going that way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @03:27AM
A lot at the bottom (undeveloped) went up. So did the few ones at the top (top of developed). And the ones in the top middle (developed and in development) got all the crap while still working like mules to make ends meet. So excuse me if western, latin america or ex communists are not happy about how things went. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-27/get-ready-to-see-this-globalization-elephant-chart-over-and-over-again [bloomberg.com] After 2008, the studies point that all at the bottom got the short stick and only top of top got better (yeah, why that study ended in 2008 but was published in 2014? if taking data to 2012 or 2013 the elephant would be just cobra snake).
Or quoting that paper you linked "if we take a simplistic, but effective, view that democracy is correlated with a large and vibrant middle class, its continued hollowing-out in the rich world would, combined with growth of incomes at the top, imply a movement away from democracy and towards forms of plutocracy." Their words. And the facts 2008-2016 seem to confirm we are going into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonomy [wikipedia.org] and most of the population is left behind.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 05 2017, @12:37AM
yeah, why that study ended in 2008 but was published in 2014?
Published in 2012. A four lag is typical for such data.
if taking data to 2012 or 2013 the elephant would be just cobra snake
Show it then. The authors of that aren't the only ones in the world who can read data sources and construct a graph.