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Robots have a very difficult time doing simple tasks in manufacturing.
LOL. Piece of cake. My last few employers added them, in the manufacturing process, with ease. Repetitious tasks are precisely what robots are for. As time goes on, with AI, they can add more advanced tasks.
There is nothing new about robotic and highly automated factories in China. Anyone who is worried about being replaced by a robot needs to examine their life. If you have no employable skills except for menial tasks that can be done by a robot you might want to think about improving your knowledge and skills.
I am sure I will hear a whole bunch of nonsense about AI robots replacing everything we do. No one should even think they will be able to use that excuse. If you really think that will be a major trend in the next few decades, then what are you doing to prepare? Are you going to be one of those who understands and is paid to utilize the new technologies? Or will you still be complaining that your knowledge and skills are obsolete?
Maybe you check out what is going on with robotics. There is a lot new thing that is going on with them. Getting new skills is not going to help because the jobs you get skills or are going to be done by robots to. I know you do not want to believe this because it goes against your absurd just world fallacy mentality.
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2011 post... but...In a Foxconn Factory this month.... filled with people (workers) not robots.
At least the coming robots will not be jumping out the dorm windows. (It is not always agreeable to be a Factory worker in China)
We had many factories of Robots in our USA manf centers during the 1980's and 1990's, but today Foxconn does a significant portion of our product using PEOPLE. USA factories are still vacant (and so are the MEX factories that Nafta paid to have built, and remove USA 5,000 workers from my site alone (one of many))
I will be VERY happy to see more robots return to USA. I doubt we build too many robots in USA these days. They speak Chinese or Korean. but NOW.... USA does not have the skill set to build tooling for robots to do their job. and we need to buy Machine tools and electronics from China to equip a USA factory. Something tells me this is not gonna turn out real well. (even IF USA can return a LITTLE manufacturing back home.) How many people do you know who fix their own cars, can weld, and build furniture? How many who are stilling filing US Patents?. Likely not as many as you knew 25 yrs ago.
Maybe you check out what is going on with robotics. There is a lot new thing that is going on with them. Getting new skills is not going to help because the jobs you get skills or are going to be done by robots to. I know you do not want to believe this because it goes against your absurd just world fallacy mentality.
I spent my entire career of 30 some years working with automated systems. I helped implement computerized controls and computerized decision making. At the end of my career the output with automated systems was about 10000 times higher than what we initially could do with manual processing.
The places I worked for still required hundreds of human workers. In fact the demand for employees grew constantly. With each jump in automation, the efficiency improved, costs came down, we could do more with less, and DEMAND also jumped exponentially. Not only did the high tech area of the businesses grow jobs but we also had growth in jobs for sales, billing, customer services, logistics, human resources, management, planning, accounting. Whenever possible all of those people used the highest available levels of computerized and automated systems also.
The area I worked in was not unique. Pretty much every workplace has changed greatly over the past few decades. One thing I have seen consistently. There is always a demand for people who accept change, learn new processes, and have a positive attitude. Those who are negative, find excuses and complain, end up being the losers in life.
A publicly traded corporation has no duty, no moral, no ethical and no legal obligation to employ workers. It's only duty is to make profits for its share-holders. Understand that hiring employees is incidental to the primary function of publicly traded corporations, so why shouldn't they use robots if they can?
Because the complete collapse of capitalism at the realization of its most important contradiction will occur. Come now, economists, we all know how this system works. People invest in economic entities (companies) to make a profit. The profit is made by selling products or services to the great mass of people. The great mass of people must earn money to pay for those products / services. They must work in order to earn that money. Here is the symbiosis between owners and workers. The people work for the capitalists who pay them and then they use that money to go out and buy the products that other people produced for other capitalists.
Now, here's the rub. Automation WILL happen. As someone already said in this thread, the only question is when automation becomes reliable and cheap enough that it costs less than a human workforce. So once it DOES happen, those jobs won't exist any more. In fact, given a long enough time line, NO jobs will exist any more except for a very small number of engineers and maintenance people. You can automate everything. Way before that happens, we will reach a saturation point where not enough people can buy the products being created by automated systems. This problem, overproduction, was always a contradiction inherent in the capitalist system. Hence the boom / bust. Under production lead to balanced production lead to overproduction. With automation, overproduction is a permanent condition... permanent state of crisis.
Thus, it's time to move away from a profit-based, investor-required, permanent growth system. Markets can still be involved, but the profit motive leaves everything else to rot.
China wants to replace human labor because they cannot control humans. They fear that one day a major worker mutiny would happens that will spread like wild fire. Income inequality is so bad there that worker mutiny happens frequently there are small factories. Where mobs of workers would block factories from others and demand owners or managers to pay them or they will destroy the factory.
Military there is always on alert. However, if robots starts to take over there, there will be so much civil unrest if people can't work and feed their families. There's no welfare system and no entitlements.
China wants to replace human labor because they cannot control humans. They fear that one day a major worker mutiny would happens that will spread like wild fire. Income inequality is so bad there that worker mutiny happens frequently there are small factories. Where mobs of workers would block factories from others and demand owners or managers to pay them or they will destroy the factory.
Military there is always on alert. However, if robots starts to take over there, there will be so much civil unrest if people can't work and feed their families. There's no welfare system and no entitlements.
Where did you come up with this nonsense? Certainly you have never been to China or never had any sort of detailed conversation with anyone who has visited or migrated from China.
Well naturally corporations are running out of countries to provide cheap labor. The smartest thing for them to do is to automate.
China now reminds me of what the US used to be before labor rights laws and environmental protection laws. Eventually (and beginning now) the workers of China want better working conditions and don't want to breath or drink polluted water.
Well naturally corporations are running out of countries to provide cheap labor. The smartest thing for them to do is to automate.
China now reminds me of what the US used to be before labor rights laws and environmental protection laws. Eventually (and beginning now) the workers of China want better working conditions and don't want to breath or drink polluted water.
It's nothing so sinister. Automation is just a progression of mechanization, basically constantly evolving more efficient tooling. Doing more with less labor is the reason we have the high standard of living we have which goes back centuries upon centuries. Simple tools, draft animals, more complex tools, the industrial revolution and widespread use of machinery. They all were created with the explicit goal of taking jobs away from people. Instead of having people carrying things in their hands you had carts. That enabled one person to carry many more things, putting other people out of work. Then you hooked a draft animal up to a larger cart and put more people out of work. Now we have tractor trailers which can travel much, much faster and carry far more. There's fork lifts that exist to pick up heavy things on pallets and move them around allowing one person to move things that previously would have required many people.
Basically the same progression in any industry. Five hundred years ago, textiles were incredibly time consuming. Wool in the Western world was the most common due to being relatively easy to process. Simple hand-operated spinning wheels and vertical looms were common in that time which sped up the process dramatically but it was still extremely labor intensive. Today both processes are nearly entirely automated on power machinery. It's not like there's an army of skilled labor in Malaysia operating 16th century vertical looms. It's largely unskilled labor operating highly automated power looms. It's to textiles what die cast is to machining. Machining parts is fairly highly skilled, less so today as that is likewise automated, but traditional machining was not just pushing buttons. Since the functions of a die cast operator are not particularly difficult, they're easy to automate. So yeah, you don't necessarily have someone ladling molten metal. That's automated. Taking the parts off, often automated. Cleaning/cooling, often automated. That's just progression of die casting which was invented to replace a labor intensive machining processes with a less labor intensive process for mass producing parts. Over the last 150 years or so, they've become much more sophisticated and even less labor intensive.
Automation is capital intensive, something China hasn't had a whole lot of until recently. They don't really attract a ton of foreign capital as companies with a technological advantage will not operate in China since they'll steal it. That's kind of slowed China down but for a variety of reasons big corporations do not tend to manufacture in China. They outsource to Chinese companies that manufacture in China. Again, that's likewise changing. China is more open to foreign investment nowadays than it was in, say, the '80s. That's attracted a lot of foreign capital. VW was the first major auto manufacturer in China but like GM it's a joint venture with SAIC and FAW. You can't just come in as a foreign company. You need a Chinese partner which was difficult until recently as finding someone with pockets deep enough to do the necessary capital investments wasn't easy.
The only reason this hasn't happened on a much larger scale is the fact that human labor remains cheap relative to the cost of automating. As wages increase, automation costs decrease, or some combination thereof, you're going to see more companies make workers obsolete.
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