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In Dongguan City, located in the central Guangdong province of China, a technology company has set up a factory run almost exclusively by robots, and the results are fascinating.
The Changying Precision Technology Company factory in Dongguan has automated production lines that use robotic arms to produce parts for cell phones. The factory also has automated machining equipment, autonomous transport trucks, and other automated equipment in the warehouse.
There are still people working at the factory, though. Three workers check and monitor each production line and there are other employees who monitor a computer control system. Previously, there were 650 employees at the factory. With the new robots, there's now only 60. Luo Weiqiang, general manager of the company, told the People's Daily that the number of employees could drop to 20 in the future.
The robots have produced almost three times as many pieces as were produced before. According to the People's Daily, production per person has increased from 8,000 pieces to 21,000 pieces. That's a 162.5% increase.
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The growth of robotics in the area's factories comes amidst a particularly harsh climate around factory worker conditions, highlighted by strikes in the area. One can only wonder whether automation will add fuel to the fire or quell some of the unrest.
Is eliminating the work force the best way to solve labor unrest?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Murdoc on Tuesday August 04 2015, @02:20AM
...to deal with this trend of increased automation. It's been known for over a century that machines perform better than humans in nearly every physical job (ones that don't require flexibility anyway), and now we know that they are able to outperform us on a great number of mental jobs as well (like the physical ones, jobs that require lots of repetition and precision). So it should be obvious that we'll never be able to keep everyone employed at a sufficient level. It simply makes too much sense for a company to automate all they can. But like most microeconomic boons, this one hurts the macroeconomic sphere with lower employment. The economists won't believe it because they don't have a real answer for how to deal with it, so they just stick their fingers in their ears and "la la la can't hear you" believing that the magic of the economy will one day save us.
The problem on a physical level is simple: Machines were created to do our work for us, but the more work they do for us, the less we can enjoy the fruits of that increased production, because of displaced labor. So what's the solution? Either you get rid of the machines and keep us all toiling away (something we've been trying to do but failing), make up jobs that don't really need to be done (there's plenty of that in the world today, but how much more ridiculous does it need to get?), or we simply unlink labor from income. Let the machines do their thing, produce goods and services like mad, and let us all enjoy a continuously increasing standard of living! It's not a difficult concept, but it flies in the face of our cultural tradition of "you can't get something for nothing" and all the nonsense excuses people come up with to try and prove it.
And the benefits would be wide-ranging: Poverty, pollution, climate change, crime, even wars would all be beneficially affected. Believe it or not, we'd be able to live in the long-awaited post-scarcity world! We don't need to wait for AI, or perfect humanoid androids, or nanotech, or replicators. We could have this now. Heck, we could have had it decades ago. This kind of resource based economy has already been described [technocracy.ca] and ready to use once we can get enough people aware of it.