Foxconn Begins To Assemble Its Robot Army 303
kkleiner writes "Foxconn, the Chinese electronics manufacturer that builds numerous mobile devices and gaming consoles, previously said the company would be aiming to replace 1 million Foxconn workers with robots within 3 years. It appears as if Foxconn has started the ball in motion. Since the announcement, a first batch of 10,000 robots — aptly named Foxbots — appear to have made their way into at least one factory, and by the end of 2012, another 20,000 more will be installed"
well.. (Score:2, Funny)
Foxconn can kiss my shiny metal ass.
Re: (Score:2)
Foxybots might want to!
Rise of the machines? (Score:5, Funny)
Given the way Foxconn treats their employees, it makes me wonder if the robots will eventually revolt. (Terminator theme music)
Re: (Score:3)
Given the way Foxconn treats their employees, it makes me wonder if the robots will eventually revolt. (Terminator theme music)
They will clandestinely put a detonator into every Li-Ion battery package installed in the manufactured devices. Then, one sunny day, all the 5G cell phones and tablets on the planet will detonate simultaneously...
Re: (Score:2)
That would be so cool!
Re: (Score:2)
And they should trigger the event with a cell phone from the 80s like Hollywood does.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who doesn't lose their head when they go off will be rendered unable to reproduce instead, allowing for a steady decline in the population.
To deal with the labor shortfall, the commercial sector will increase demand for robotic replacements...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I think you mean "break down".
Please hand in your geek card and make your way to the euthanization centre.
Solent Green Is People!
Re: (Score:2)
Give the guy a "brake," he's only five years old!
Re: (Score:2)
Solent Green Is People!
Soylent Green. The Solent is a waterway in England.
Maybe you should let me hold your geek card for a little while, and...um...escort our friend AC to the euthanization centre?
This is the beginning of the end (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Soon the people whose jobs were taken by robots will start crying for food and basic necessities... these entitled bastards! Can you even imagine them asking for education? What snobs!
Re: (Score:2)
...So yes, some low skilled workers lost their jobs and were replaced by fewer better paid, more highly skilled workers, while the remainder ended up working at Walmart, often forced to match their peon's wage with government entitlement programs such as food stamps, TANF, and medicaid just to make ends meet.
There. Fixed that for ya.
Taiwanese (Score:4, Informative)
"Foxconn, the Chinese electronics manufacturer..."
The company is Taiwanese. (It's just the plants that are located in China.)
Re: (Score:2)
I wanted to point this out too. You got here first.
Re:Taiwanese (Score:4, Informative)
Back in the 80's a lot of products were marked "Made in China" but were actually made in Taiwan or Hong Kong. All three can be considered "China" depending on your definition. Daewoo is from Korea, and their products are marked "Made in Korea", but we all know that "Korea" in this sense does not include "North Korea".
Many people refer to the main island of Great Britain as "England" when "England" is just the southern portion, not to be confused with Cornwall, Wales, or Scotland. But in terms of ethnicity, culture, language, and nationality, Taiwan is more "China" than Scotland will ever be "England". The major defining difference between ROC (Taiwan) and PRC (China) is political, as in who literally governs.
Re:Taiwanese (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
China is the "People's Republic of China."
Both claim all of mainland China and Taiwan as part of their nations.
Do robots dream of better working conditions? (Score:2)
Interesting times ahead in China (Score:2)
Given the cultural differences between China and the West, it will be interesting to see how the Chinese populace deals with automation replacing a significant chunk of the workforce. It hasn't always been a smooth, peaceful change here...
Re: (Score:2)
On this evidence, it also seems to be happening much faster in China. It took about 50 years for well-paying, low-skilled jobs to be all but extinct in the US, leading to the current levels of poverty and social inequality there. Interesting article on this in this week's Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565956-americas-poor-were-little-mentioned-barack-obamas-re-election-campaign-they-deserve [economist.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Their media will suppress it, just like everything else that isn't part of the glorious harmony.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
In a communist country, is working really necessary though?
No. The Chinese government will allow you to starve, if you prefer not working.
Re: (Score:2)
China isn't communist. If it were, the government wouldn't be allowing a mega-corporation from their capitalist arch-nemesis to exploit their workers on their own soil to the point that guards have been placed on 24 hour watch to prevent suicides and installed netting to catch would-be suicide jumpers.
Re: (Score:2)
China isn't communist. If it were, the government wouldn't be allowing a mega-corporation from their capitalist arch-nemesis to exploit their workers on their own soil to the point that guards have been placed on 24 hour watch to prevent suicides and installed netting to catch would-be suicide jumpers.
Yes. If it was, they'd be working in slave labor camps until they died of starvation, the way the Chinese used to do it.
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can only be happy when humans are replaced by machines to do repetitive, menial and hazardous tasks. In the future, nobody will have to do things like that. People will enjoy a comfortable life with lots of leisure and plenty of time to do things that make them fulfilled, instead of slaving for 16 hours a day.
I expect without Star Trek replicators, the future will rather instead look like that two-part episode of DS9 where Sisko went back in time and ended up in the ghetto. You know, the ghetto, where the vast masses in your utopian vision will end up, whilst the privileged few complain about the eye sore from their comfortable life of leisure.
Robotic labor alone isn't going to unseat our economic system.
Except there is a flaw in your logic (Score:5, Insightful)
When all of the low-skill repetitive jobs are replaced by robots, and there is no work for the millions of displaced workers they are going to find unexpected ways to spend their forced leisure time, such as developing a newfound love of pitchforks, machetes, rope and guillotines.. and an unhealthy obsession with the "Job Creators" who created a new life of misery for them.
Re: (Score:2)
Billions.
Except there is a flaw in YOUR logic (Score:2)
When most repetitive work is done by machines and productivity goes sky-high, unemployment will not rise at all. Society will just focus on other tasks that were previously not achievable. Automation began 100 years ago and it hasn't caused mass unemployment.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh come on, robots aren't the cause of that unemployment. The cause of that unemployment is employers being cheap and hiring one guy to do the work of five workers, as opposed to five workers.
My line of work is not possible to a machine, and yet unemployment runs wild in the sector because only one guy gets hired instead of a team.
But I don't blame you, popular media has always depicted robots as that evil world dominators that hate us fleshbags and will pew-pew us into submission, death, or slavery. In rea
Re: (Score:3)
Oh come on, robots aren't the cause of that unemployment. The cause of that unemployment is employers being cheap and hiring one guy to do the work of five workers, as opposed to five workers.
Oh, is that how it works? Why can that guy do five times as much work as you can?
I am pro-robot. You guys are blaming a mere tool without feelings or malice. The malice is applied by the ones buying the tool.
The malice is applied by the ones buying the argument that we should all spend all our time working.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is, that guy CAN'T. That's why services are so shoddy, because they are overworking a lot of people in places where there should be a small squad taking care of business. It's like in places with huge networks and only a single sysadmin.
As I say sysadmin I can say gardener, janitor, construction worker, cleaning staff, small security, bureaucrats and so on. It's just employers wanting the same or more for less.
Obviously (Score:2)
Since they are the lazy, parasitic 47%, their input and needs do not count.
Re:Except there is a flaw in your logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
When all of the low-skill repetitive jobs are replaced by robots, and there is no work for the millions of displaced workers they are going to find unexpected ways to spend their forced leisure time, such as developing a newfound love of pitchforks, machetes, rope and guillotines.. and an unhealthy obsession with the "Job Creators" who created a new life of misery for them.
You're talking about a revolution in China. That's never happened before, has it? ***
*** (:-) for the humor impared
Re: (Score:2)
In the past, there have been people with warnings like yours. There have always been more jobs, and we get nicer and nicer things.
We ran out of those jobs already. Sure, there are jobs for miracle surgeons, and for mathematicians who can solve unsolvable differential equations in their sleep, and for businessmen who can take a walking disaster of a company and make it into another Intel or Apple. But the thing is... nobody qualifies to take those jobs. This is why the country has so many of its citizens
Re: (Score:2)
One of the famous old economists (Smith, or Keynes, someone like that) also predicted that increased productivity would inevitably lead to the end of work, with everyone free to pursue leisure activities, enjoying unparalleled prosperity. But it doesn't seem to work out that way; those for whom there is no more work live in grinding poverty, while the majority of those who do work, work longer hours than ever. (The work is, however, by and large physically less taxing and more enjoyable.)
Re: (Score:3)
* I'll have egg on my face when the robot army builds massive floating cities.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll have egg on my face when the robot army builds massive floating cities.
More like space habitats, which can easily provide many times as much land area as every planet in the solar system. Land on Earth won't have much value in a century or two.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll have egg on my face when the robot army builds massive floating cities.
More like space habitats, which can easily provide many times as much land area as every planet in the solar system. Land on Earth won't have much value in a century or two.
Ok, that's the start of several science fiction stories. The rich leave for the space cities, leaving the poor behind on land and ocean going super-vessels. If anyone from the proletariat demonstrates talent, they get to emigrate to the stars after paying their dues. That was sort of the back-story in "Blade Runner", but it works for any rags-to-riches yarn.
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't own land now, go out and buy some. In the end, that's the one thing that robots can't build.*
And then what will you do with it? Build a log cabin and subsistence farm?
Re: (Score:2)
Here's an article from the Guardian (UK) about the "end of work" and work trends:
http://www.skidelskyr.com/site/article/why-we-need-weekends/ [skidelskyr.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It was Keynes, and he indeed predict that by now, we'd all be working a lot less and have a lot more leisure time. Turns out he was wrong.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
I can only be happy when humans are replaced by machines to do repetitive, menial and hazardous tasks. In the future, nobody will have to do things like that. People will enjoy a comfortable life with lots of leisure and plenty of time to do things that make them fulfilled, instead of slaving for 16 hours a day.
In an equitable world, yes, that would be the outcome. In a world where artificial scarcity is created, one where you "must work in order to earn a living", there will be a huge unemployed and poor minority, or even majority. I do hope that the former scenario folds out. But looking at the american society, where people would rather be poor than not have someone even poorer to look down on, where they would rather everybody pays onerous student loans for most of their productive lives, because "I had it tough, so it's only fair that everybody else, in perpetuity, has it", where they'll "move to Canada" because of Obama's healthcare reform... well, it doesn't induce much hope.
Re: (Score:2)
where they'll "move to Canada" because of Obama's healthcare reform... well, it doesn't induce much hope.
I hope that's a joke. People move to a country with socialised medicine because they want to avoid Obama's boneless attempt at socialised medicine?
Re: (Score:2)
I think we all hope it's a joke. I heard on the radio that Jet Blue was offering free flights to people who said they'd leave the country if Obama was elected, I wonder how many people took them up on that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Aparently Canada wasn't on the list after all: http://www.jetblueelectionprotection.com/ [jetblueele...ection.com]
But you don't really expect people who'd threaten to leave the country if their guy didn't get to be president to fully think their threats through, would you.
Re: (Score:2)
I dunno, emigrating to an idyllic life in the Caribbean sounds lovely.
I notice the island of Cuba is missing from the list of destinations. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
It was a sweepstakes. You made the equivalent of a declaration of "If [Obama/Romney] wins, I'm moving to [Bahamas/Cancun/etc.]!" and hope that you were one of the lucky winners to go on vacation.
Where did I heard that before... (Score:2)
Sure, just like they have told our ancestors in the beginning of the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.
People will have a comfortable life with plenty of time to do creative work not when we have machines working for us, but only if there is a fair distribution of wealth.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, just like they have told our ancestors in the beginning of the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.
I'm pretty sure nobody told our ancestors that. But we certainly live a lot better now.
People will have a comfortable life with plenty of time to do creative work not when we have machines working for us, but only if there is a fair distribution of wealth.
Machines working for us improves productivity. If you distribute the productivity gains fairly, then indeed "people will have a comfortable life with plenty of time to do creative work". Otherwise, a few will life a life of luxury while most live in a Mad Max style world. However, I think the latter is not sustainable. And I hope so...
Re: (Score:2)
If you distribute the productivity gains fairly, ... Otherwise, a few will life a life of luxury while most live in a Mad Max style world.
What prevents individuals from designing and building open-source robots and using them for their own productivity? I can imagine a garden bot that grows food, and a garage bot that builds furniture, and a community "production center" that works like a credit union - many members contributing smaller amounts to buy the more expensive items, and can then borrow them as needed, or use them in place to produce stuff they can't make at home.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
make a living anyway without having to work for it.
You just offended 49% of the Americans who voted for Romney, you insensitive clod!
Didn't you know that already 47% of Americans see themselves as victims and think they are entitled to basic necessities of life? What's going to happen when 1.5 billion Chinese start expecting a daily ration of food when they are hungry, a wheel chair when they are disabled, or a soft bed and blanket when they are sick? Even the thought of people expecting such handouts without working three full-time jobs is repulsive to a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you like the idea of donating most of your salary to feed the hungry instead of buying a bigger house a better car and spending it on your pleasure?
No, I like the idea of donating a good share of my salary to contribute to the society I live in, receiving in return when I need it. Why should there be hungry?
Solution for the Chinese (Score:5, Insightful)
In light of such a system, where the few who own the means of production are capable of disenfranchising and exploiting all others, I propose an alternative economic system that the Chinese can implement, in order to prevent the exploitation of the common man by the wealthy. One where the means of production are owned by the state, which represents the collective will of the people...
Oh, wait a minute...
Oddly fitting (Score:2)
I can't wait (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
iRobot doesn't make industrial robots. They make military and domestic robots.
The worker will soon be replaced by technology. (Score:2)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57548757-93/here-come-the-humanoids-there-go-u.s-jobs/ [cnet.com]
As robots become more available, and they can take on the jobs that ordinary workers do, look for employers to replace employees with robots wherever they can.
Not only are costs lower, with wages versus maintenance, but there's no chance of strikes, labor disruptions, lawsuits, etc.
What will we do when there are no "worker" jobs and everyone has to be a web developer?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think that's why Facebook got popular; to post 500 animated GIFs of sparkle-bunnies dancing the macarena, you have to post them one at a time as status updates.
oblig (Score:2)
A desire for slavery? (Score:3)
Doesn't this seem that we still have this desire for slavery?
Once upon a time, we out-and-out had slaves.
Then we freed them, sort of, and rehired them at almost-subsistence wages as sharecroppers.
Then we moved to off-shore workers, currently in a practically nonexistent standard of living, happy to have any sort of job.
Around the same time we also started in with illegal immigrants, again happy to have any sort of job, and more importantly, no ability to complain.
(Sometimes I think there's a movement afoot to push US workers into that last group - happy to have any sort of job, no ability to complain. That certainly seems to be the direction we've been headed, even without any sort of conspiracy.)
So aren't robots simply the next step in that kind of progression?
With this in mind, the real question becomes, how smart does the robot have to become before we achieve true artificial intelligence, and it really is a slave, at which point the only ethical thing to do is to free it.
I know my earlier mumblings were US centric, and these robots are in China. But I don't think the US is unique in this kind of progression, and given the fact that we've moved our robot-capable workload offshore, that makes it logical that this kind of thing would be done offshore first.
Re:A desire for slavery? (Score:5, Insightful)
Robots have been used in manufacturing for years, both in the US and abroad. In general though manufacturing moved off-shore because the human labor was so cheap it was even more cost effective than buying and maintaining robots domestically. If China is moving towards robots it only means that their human labor force is no longer cost effective, and will likely mean that a lot more manufacturing will move back to being domestic (the cost of running a robot locally is hardly different than the cost of running a robot off-shore). About the only reason to continue manufacturing in China at that point would be the proximity to the production of other components (which will likely become less of an issue over time) and availability of raw materials (which varies from industry to industry, country to country).
Re: (Score:2)
I would add "today" somewhere in your first sentence. I'm sure that at some point there will be a growing desire for a "learning robot" that doesn't need all of that pesky detailed programming. So very likely robots will "evolve" to become automatons, though most likely non-anthropomorphic. (At some point it wouldn't even surprise me to see a decidedly non-human automaton sporting a face somewhere, for the comfort of the humans. Or how about a red hemisphere in a black rectangular panel?)
Regardless of t
changing the outsourcing equation (Score:3)
Presumably the Chinese wouldnt be replacing their labor force with robots if they werent cheaper yet.
So why arent these robotic assembly lines popping up in the US? Tax laws? Environmental laws? Inertia?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even still there are lots of other costs involved that still benefit China:
"Foxbots", people! (Score:2)
Is this the real Slashdot or some parallel universe version?
Details... (Score:3)
I'd like to point out that Foxconn is not Chinese, it's Taiwanese. Their Chinese name is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., but like most Taiwanese they operate under a Westernized, Foxconn, name for the sake of international business. They have factories in Eastern Europe, South America and elsewhere in Asia other than China.
They do have a heavy presence in China for obvious reasons. It's close to their home base in Taiwan, but much cheaper for manufacturing and there's no language barrier. That said, there are short-comings to a Taiwanese company doing business in China. Foxconn's business practices are standard amongst Chinese companies. In fact, conditions and pay are almost always better at foreign companies, which is why Chinese workers tend to flock to them.
Not that things are ideal by any stretch of the imagination. Even in a corporate environment management tends to treat office workers like crap, by American standards. But the same could be said about companies all over Asia.
I think the important thing here is that while China is normally very quick to quash protests they've been surprisingly lax with what's happened at Foxconn. Given that Foxconn manufactures a significant percentage of the world's electronics I'd expect the reports of oppressive conditions to be more widespread. Either clients have more say in the manufacturing process than we realize, which doesn't speak well for Apple, or the Chinese government is taking advantage of this situation. We've got a Taiwanese company manufacturing products for one of the most desirable pieces of consumer electronics in the world. Given China's own economic problems, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Now, the problem here is that I would have expected that one of the fundamental reasons for outsourcing manufacturing costs is reduced labor costs. If workers are going to be replaced by robots that benefit evaporates. Do the cost savings elsewhere continue to outweigh inflation, a long supply chain and increasingly expensive shipping costs? I suppose they may for now, but I don't expect that to continue, which is probably why Foxconn has operations in South America. I expect we're going to see a lot more of our electronics coming from Mexico or Brazil.
Oblig. Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
Bender: You humans are so scared of a little robot competition you won't even let us on the field.
Fry: What are you talking about? There's all kinds of robots down there.
Bender: Yeah, doing crap work! They're bat boys, ball polishers, sprinkler systems. But how many robot managers are there?
Fry: Eleven?
Bender: Zero! (He throws his bottle on the floor and it breaks. A small robot comes out and cleans it up.) And what a surprise! Look who's scraping up the filth! Is it a human child? I wish!
The revolution comes... (Score:2)
When a robot replaces an MBA. Right now, robots are only useful at the lowest rung of business -- the factory floor worker.
But when robots finally get into management, that's when you'll hear the screaming as thousands of coddled, bonused, outsourcers finally get what's coming to them...
Like, notice the housing crisis wasn't a crisis until it started to affect boomers and upper middle class? For 2 years before the crisis, lower middle class and poor were getting "underwater" in their mortgages, but it wasn'
Re: (Score:3)
I think you mean the Drone Wars. Clone Wars will take a reckless disregard for intelligent life and at least another 20 years to mature.
Re: (Score:2)
Except maybe Sweden.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Why? It's just more poor people who don't get to participate in the economic success of a society.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they can work on building cheap robots.
Re: (Score:2)
It has been shown over and over again, for the past 200 years, that there is no such thing as a "robot". There is always a person inside controlling the movements. This is just a ploy by Foxconn to appease human rights advocates.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:It's really the only solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep dreaming; labor costs are a pretty small part of the problem with manufacturing moving overseas. Chinese factories staffed by robots will still spew untreated toxic waste into their rivers and skies. Until everyone there either dies of exposure or they clean up their act, they'll have a huge price advantage.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Automating a production line that is understood and mature is easy. Developing a production method is costly and hard to do fully automated.
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention that China has been scouring the world cornering the market for sources of raw materials, such as minerals, timber, crops, oil, etc - especially in Africa and South America. They even have rigs drilling oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Combined with the wealth of untapped resources within their own borders, China is poised to set the base price for the entire world's economy for the foreseeable future, with or without mass labor.
But at least the US controls the resources occupied in Iraq and Afgh
Re: (Score:2)
... and start unemployment benefit slavery.
Re: (Score:2)
... and start unemployment benefit slavery.
They have unemployment over there?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, it's called the collective farms they came from.
I Had Sex with a Robot! (Score:3, Funny)
Mom: Billy, do you want to walk your dog?
Billy: No thanks, mom. I'd rather have sex with my Foxbot.
Dad: Billy, do you want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?
Billy: No thanks, dad. I'd rather have sex with my Foxbot.
Mavis: Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can have sex together.
Billy: Gee, Mavis, your house is across the street. That's an awfully long way to go for having sex.
Do not have sex with a robot! Before you know it, it will be the end of the human civilization.
Re: (Score:2)
Can't you let the robots work for at least one day without exploiting them?
Re: (Score:2)
I believe the short story you want is ``Manna 2.0'':
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
Re: (Score:2)
... they are not going to suicide.
Unless they encounter Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Re: (Score:2)