Foxconn CEO Backpedals On Planned Robot Takeover 45
itwbennett writes: For years now, Foxconn has been talking up plans to replace pesky humans with robot workers in its factories. Back in February, CEO Terry Gou said he expected the automation to account for 70 percent of his company's assembly line work in three years. But in the company's shareholder meeting Thursday, Gou said he had been misquoted and that "it should be that in five years, the robots will take over 30 percent of the manpower."
Hyperventilating idiots. (Score:2)
Does this mean we can hold off on the glorious workers revolution?
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No, it just means that Skynet is more patient than you are.
Hasta la Vista, baby (Score:2)
Must have been visited by some serious looking men (Score:3)
Foxconn executive: "We'll have a black factory in 3 years!"
Communist Party: "If you do that, all your people will be unemployed, and instead of slaving away at a phone factory, making useless crap for American idiots, we'll have people available to protest our mismanaged government"
FC: "Not my problem"
CP: "Gulag."
FC: "We'll have a 30% robot presence in 5 years!"
Re:Must have been visited by some serious looking (Score:4, Interesting)
Foxconn is one of the most NRE allergic companies I have ever seen. Unless you, as a customer, are willing to pay the NRE for machines on their assembly line for your product, they will attempt to use the most backwards, insanity inducing flow that can be conceived of. And you will say "Hey, there's a machine for that", and they'll say "Sure, for x amount we'll do that!". And so the negotiations begin, and in the end you realize you're paying for them to build up their factory. While you will both simultaneously make profit anyway, it is entirely because the labor is so cheap, and the environmental regulations so lax, that what you're really doing is hurting your own country to make some other people very rich at the expense of just about everyone else.
Then, if you are smart, you quit your job and leave the field. If Foxconn says "no robot labor" it must mean that some major customer has decided he is not going to pay for it. The idea that the Chinese government is actually protecting its labor is asinine, but they certainly do love the press that makes it seem like it.
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it is entirely because the labor is so cheap, and the environmental regulations so lax, that what you're really doing is hurting your own country to make some other people very rich at the expense of just about everyone else.
Debatable. Your environmental argument is stronger than your labor argument for technical reasons, rather than reasons of rhetoric; it is the technical reasons which concern me.
Realize every cost in every product or service you buy is human labor. Profit margins come on top of human labor. This works out in aggregate, which is important for many reasons: in major aggregate, bulk purchase agreements are bound by this human labor cost and nothing else.
Consider you make steel automobile frames, which u
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As technology improves, we remove low-skill labor jobs from the workforce, leaving only jobs for which substantial amounts of training or education are required in order to fill, which means that eventually anyone who is removed from the work force may take several years before they are capable of being productive and adding to the co
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The question becomes one of to what extent is is no longer possible to limit workforce replacements to a small enough percentage that it's beneficial to the overall economy.
No, it doesn't. The problem isn't of how much, but how much per unit time; if the question becomes how much, implement complete and total communism, because you have entered a post-scarcity economy and everyone has so much money they can't find any way to spend it all.
We roll the dice you're stumbling over every once in a while. The last bad one was the Industrial Age, where we had 70% unemployment for 60 years; it sucked.
The last good one was the Information Age, where we replaced mostly clerks in o
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I understand the economics lesson, to the degree I accept economics as a viable field of study, I'm not really arguing about it. Nor do I think the world should bow to economics, but take it under advisement and engineer it to the benefit of the majority of the population.
I guess my point about cheap labor was more oriented around the problem that their labor protection laws, even if enforced, are feeble by comparison even to the United States, which themselves are feeble by comparison to much of Europe. So
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Nor do I think the world should bow to economics, but take it under advisement and engineer it to the benefit of the majority of the population.
Nobody should bow to any science as a set of rules; sciences are tools. Engineers figure out how to abuse the rules to make interesting things happen.
The trade advantage is certainly lesser, but it doesn't ruin the whole picture.
Correct. You understand my point, I see: we rapidly move total wealth forward, so even the lowest and most abuse face an improving life situation. You argue that we shouldn't abuse the child of Omelas today so that he may be better off--but still abused--tomorrow; I only argue that it is more efficient, which you seem to understand. I find morality sill
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Correct. You understand my point, I see: we rapidly move total wealth forward, so even the lowest and most abuse face an improving life situation. You argue that we shouldn't abuse the child of Omelas today so that he may be better off--but still abused--tomorrow; I only argue that it is more efficient, which you seem to understand.
No, I can't go there. The Great Leap Forward? How'd that work out? Tens of millions dead to try to turn China into a modern industry. Yes, communist rhetoric was involved, but
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I imagine you would attack less if it was you being condemned.
You imagine a lot.
Your viewpoint on this change doesn't seem to take in to account the various leakages and inequalities present in the system
It doesn't by design. Such things are built on top the system. It's like saying that clay earth only bears 1500 pounds per square foot load: this is a fact, just as the stated facts I have given about economics. You add an argument similar to that engineers sometimes design shoddy buildings, or that builders sometimes cut corners; those are also true, and have nothing to do with how much load the earth will bear. The fact remains you can improve your structure to bear 1500 pounds p
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You have just barely touched on what is really happening, this best described by economics versus psychology. Psychopathic capitalism can only exist where psychopaths dominate economic control, without them it ceases, that is their nature, their ego that drives their psychopathic selfishness and greed, their psychologically need to dominate and control others in society, up to and including live or death decisions over others (this not for mutual benefit but to feed personal ego). Economics is just a religi
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I asked for the hyperventilating idiots to respond upthread. Why didn't you?
You have clearly never worked with big corporations, anything they gain in economies of scale is quickly lost to 'all hand meetings' and 'long term strategic planning'. Microsoft used to be 'big and fast', lasted less then a decade. Now they are big and slow, same as all other big business.
You main point being that economics is a zero sum game is so obviously wrong, there is no point in even talking about it. If you can twist y
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You main point being that economics is a zero sum game is so obviously wrong
How retarded are you?
I described economics in a way where you start with people spending $320/year on chairs, and wind up with them spending $320/year on chairs AND CUSHIONS. That's not zero-sum; are you fucking stupid? More shit is coming out of one side without more shit going in the other.
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This is, of course, completely anecdotal but a number of years ago I had a room-mate from mainland China who was a doctoral student in a STEM field at a major nationally ranked university in the area. One time, he described his undergrad university back in China where, supposedly, they had a significant department focused around automation. He said that the students used to, jokingly, call it the "Department of De-Automation" because what they would do is take western automation technology and intentional
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The first 3 rules are 'no puftas'.
Somebody got a visit from the PRC! (Score:1)
Heh. A country trying to keep a lid on slowing growth, and growing unemployment doesn't like news that says. "Oh hey. One of our biggest high tech employers plans dumping a whole lot of good paying jobs, exactly when we need them hire more and not less"
It's going to happen. Don't worry about that. Replacing the fleshy robots with metal ones in highly automated mass production makes sense. Now they're just going to lie about it and employ some tricks to keep up appearances.
For that mater I would not worry ab
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"Rapid growth lets you gloss over lots of nasty systemic problems, but infinite growth is not possible."
We'll see. In the mid to late '80s, Japan was supposed to take over the world. I'm guessing one of the reasons they couldn't make this happen was the population size and relative cultural isolation. (The other part was the financial bubble that made the growth possible, but that's another story.)
I see two different things in China that could make a difference -- a massive population advantage, and a centr
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Japan today is exactly what will happen to China tomorrow. Explosive growth happened in Japan, but it was unsustainable. Japan today is the definition of a stagnant economy.
Don't' think China isn't in a bubble either. They build their infrastructure on funny money essentially created out of thin air and accounting tricks. This is easy to do when the banks and the construction companies are both owned by family members of PRC ruling class.
I don't think it's got much to do with population. More people require
Uh, boss . . . . (Score:1)
It's harder to use robots than it sounds. Much harder.
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I wouldn't say they are failing in deploying robots, it's probably just not as easy as they thought but it is definitely having an impact. And you have to remember Chinese workers have been getting more expensive with 12% year over year for a number of years. So they aren't the cheapest workforce in the world any more. A lot of manufacturing of clothes moved to Bangladesh to name one country.
Here is an example of an article from 2007 which mentions the wage growth:
"Wages in China have nearly doubled over th
Cheap labor economics (Score:3)
The problem with the notion of high automation in China is that China has a large supply of relatively cheap labor. It may not remain cheap forever but for the immediate future it will be cheap. Therefore the economics of widespread automation in a place with cheap labor become rather dicey.
Automation really only makes economic sense in a few circumstances:
1) When production volumes are high and labor is relatively expensive and capital is relatively cheap
2) When manual labor cannot achieve the requisite quality/consistency
3) When there are substantial safety issues that cannot be otherwise mitigated
Some of what Foxconn does would make sense to automate but given how inexpensive labor remains in China much automation would be terribly difficult to economically justify in many cases. My company does assembly work (wire harnesses) and even with relatively expensive US labor we have a difficult time justifying automation in a lot of cases. I could buy a machine for $1 million that would build some of our products completely automatically with just one operator required. But we would have to have production volumes in the hundreds of thousands at minimum to justify the purchase and we would need access to credit at reasonable rates. If we had the labor rates Foxconn has the production volumes would need to be in the many millions to justify. And Foxconn makes more complicated products than we do.
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Re:Cheap labor economics (Score:4, Interesting)
You realize that all of Africa is smaller then China in terms of population and much more corrupt?
After China and India build a middle class offshoring is more or less done. The remaining shit holes are too small and corrupt to be worth the effort.
Most smaller nations (e.g the Baltic states) will be 'first world' before China, certainly before India.
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Wait, you thought China wasn't corrupt?
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Compared to Zimbabwe?
Cheap labor in Asia (Score:2)
In my lifetime I will get to see Asia run out of cheap labor and the great manufacturing migration to Africa will start to happen.
You will not see Asia run out of cheap labor in your lifetime or in the lifetime of anyone reading this. The reason is simple. Supply and demand. Asia has the largest supply of labor anywhere in the world. China and India each individually have more people than all of Africa and Africa is far larger geographically.
You'll see it shift around some but it will take decades before even China can raise its GDP per capita to something close to the US or EU. India is even further behind and there are other co
Flexible Automation is Hard (Score:4, Interesting)
As an engineer who works developing flexible automation solutions, this stuff is hard and it is expensive. Sure, it is worth it for companies in North America and Europe (our main customers) because people are even more expensive. But in countries like China and India, this is more of a prestige thing than an actual business case because people are cheap and flexible solutions are not.
Now, I say flexible because the problem with industrial automation is cheap or flexible, pick one. We can easily make a machine for cranking out a product, maybe even a for a family of products. However, if it is a low demand part or worse, is not expected to be around in 10+ years, that machine will be a large useless paperweight. Those that come to us are looking for solutions for when the next product is here, they can hire an engineer to reconfigure to make it work.
My guess, this guy make a prediction without knowing the reality of actual automation and was forced to eat his words.
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That was my impression as well. You got some CEO spouting buzz words about automation because Chinese wages are rising so fast that they are nearing 50% of the west. So he claims he's going to automate it all but he didn't realize how hard automation actually is. I remembered the interviews, he was going to build a robot factory and turn out 10K robots a year. The numbers were ridiculous, I just figured he was as full of shit as western CEO's.
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As an engineer who works developing flexible automation solutions, this stuff is hard and it is expensive.
fortunately, it's only hard and expensive currently. evolutionary neural networks are effectively going to replace you. while we aren't there yet, it's not hard to imagine AI designing and even [re]building entire manufacturing systems without the need for human intervention. in simple terms, the "how?" behind systems is going to be automated. granted, it may take couple decades to make it happen but your job will become and automation optimizer instead of automation designer.
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Viola, Foxconn just realized there's a huge capital investment for robots.
Also, they realized that the current industrial robots can't do much--the vendors promised too much and require maintenance by a MS or PhD. Where as maintenance for a human is called dinner (simple).
Robots need encapsulated, standardized designs to be useful. The automotive industry sort of proves it.