
Foxconn unit to cut over 10k jobs as robotics take over - nreece
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/AC/Foxconn-unit-to-cut-over-10-000-jobs-as-robotics-take-over
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alextheparrot
I hope some Wisconsinites read this and better understand the deal their
government is making with Foxconn. Investing in traditional manufacturing is
risky if you expect those jobs to pay off over more than a couple years.

On the other hand, people need jobs and even a sub-optimal solution can be
beneficial.

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oneplane
Artificially 'creating' or 'protecting' jobs doesn't help anyone, at least not
in the long run. I get that people don't like change, but trying to stand
still in a moving world only hurts the people standing still.

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toomuchtodo
I am curious what you suppose the solutions are if not protectionism and
tarrifs.

I cannot live in the US on a Chinese factory worker’s wage, and it’s my
government’s job to protect _me_ , not the free market.

I have said this repeatedly, so forgive the repetition, but this is not
progess if we’re all going to live in poverty in slums paycheck to paycheck
except for the wealthy.

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ahnick
The long term solution is automate as much as possible and subsidize/invest in
education. A robot in china more or less costs the same as a robot in the US.
We are never going to be able to compete with the Chinese or other southeast
asian countries with human labor costs. The next part of the solution is
education and re-education of the labor force. If there is any place where
deficit spending can make a real impact it is education. Student loan
forgiveness, universal basic income for people going to school
(university/vocational/community/etc), monetary incentives for going into
highly skilled professions, increased teacher pay, etc. The key is
transitioning the workforce to a knowledge based economy. Trying to resurrect
the manufacturing jobs of yore is a sure-fire way to slow economic decay.

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TaylorAlexander
I feel strongly that the long term solution is to end our reliance on jobs for
individual survival. If we automate the industries that produce what people
need for survival, and we find some way of collectivizing those industries (I
only support voluntary non governmental collectivization of industry via
common share holding schemes), then we can make the marginal cost of living
close to zero.

To me it seems perfectly reasonable that in 50-100 years people would no
longer need to work to stay alive (as the norm). Productivity will continue to
grow due to the high output (assisted by automation) of those who continue to
work. The limits of a life supported by public infrastructure will still
encourage anyone capable of doing useful work to do so, but no one would be
cast away and suffering from lack of work.

I write about this at:
[http://tlalexander.com/machine](http://tlalexander.com/machine)

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crimsonalucard
Karl Marx once imagined an idealized economy. He called it communism. These
theories rarely work in practice. I can't say with confidence whether or not
your theory will succeed, but speaking purely from a perspective of
probability, what you propose will unlikely be what's ahead for us in the
future.

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jayess
Not 'rarely,' never. Every time "pure" communism has been tried, it has ended
is misery, death, disease, and horror.

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TaylorAlexander
What do you think led to misery, death, disease, and horror? I do feel that
Capitalist nations also continue to be responsible to misery, death, disease
and horror (typically in far off places).

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perl4ever
I'm doubtful that "Capitalist nations" exist in the sense of nations founded
on an ideology called Capitalism. My impression is that "Capitalism" was
originally a pejorative term created by opponents to the established order and
came over time to be adopted as a reaction by some of those being criticized
to mean what _they_ wanted it to mean. So we have an ongoing struggle over the
meaning of the word, and reasoning based on a pretense of shared understanding
of the meaning is not productive.

It's not as though someone wrote a Capitalist manifesto that initiated the
practice of Capitalism.

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Animats
I've been amazed that Foxconn needed so many people to assemble iPhones. It's
a huge run of identical items, the best case for automated manufacturing.
Motorola was making flip-phones with very few people over a decade ago.

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notatoad
as long as people are cheaper than robots, it's not a question of "needing"
people.

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Theodores
I am amazed when I see video footage of a keyboard being put together by hand,
each keyboard being a 102 piece jigsaw puzzle done with cottage industry
workflow and technology levels.

I had assumed that all of this had been automated and that robots would be
doing it all.

It really is a question of people being cheaper than robots.

Personally I would prefer people to be able to have the robots do the work and
more people share that wealth in some socialist republic where there are huge
sport centers, universities and creche facilities. The thing is that having
factories full of people can be considered 'wage slavery', robots are okay
with being slaves and they don't need wages.

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notatoad
it's not that the robots are okay with being slaves, it's that as soon as you
automate a job is stops being a crappy wage-slave job and starts being a "good
manufacturing job" and politicians start looking for ways to give them back to
humans.

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nugget
I'm curious what would have happened if China hadn't industrialized prior to
robotics maturing and fully automating manufacturing. Can you leap from
subsistence farming to software development without much infrastructure in
between?

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seanmcdirmid
China was actually never that unindustrialized in recent history. They broke
through subsistence farming at least 2000 years ago, so the current miracle is
really more of just returning to a former prosperity than a huge leap in
society development.

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adventured
China was extraordinarily unindustrialized until recently. Their GDP per
capita was $317 in 1990.

~25 years ago they had 3/4 of their population living on $5 or less per day.
~15 years ago they still had half a billion people living on $3 per day or
less. Today they still have a quarter of a billion people living on $3 per day
or less, one of the poorest large population segments on the planet.

China's total manufacturing sector output was a mere $100 to $150 billion in
1990, about 1/10th that of the US. In 1990 China had only 3% of global
manufacturing output value, today it's about 25%.

China still has 250 to 300 million people living off of or doing subsistence
farming. They have the most backwards and inefficient farming systems of any
economic power. South Korea's farming is about 40 times more productive. 20
years ago, it was even worse. Their subsistence farming was so bad in the late
1980s, they had half a billion 'farmers' producing enough food to feed only a
few hundred million people at low calorie levels; the US accomplishes the same
thing with three million farmers. China had a ratio of farmer to provided
ratio of sub 1 to 1, the US is typically around 1 farmer/farm worker to 100
provided for.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-farmer-
productivity-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-farmer-
productivity-2012-8)

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seanmcdirmid
If you look at history before the industrial revolution in the west, China was
on par with most western countries, and for many periods the richest country
on earth. That is way beyond the subsistence farming level, which has a very
specific meaning! Even in their darkest time, china did not fall back into
subsistence farming, that is just totally ridiculous.

Yes, China has a lot of farmers. But no, it isn’t like a poor African country
that really is dominated by subsistence farming.

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ggm
I'm betting yield per robot for lower error rate rises, but when bad
programming hits, yield per robot hits the floor and we get swamped with
product failure down the track.

Highly repeatable acts on a circuit board or assembly become deeply ingrained
into the product. Having a loose bond on two phones because a worker sneezed,
vs having 140,000 trash in a year because a 1G placement force was 0.1G out of
whack...

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simonpantzare
Include randomness. Tune parameters based on returns, factory test results,
more. Is that feasible, maybe done already?

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rmah
Didn't they say they would do this five years ago?

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dictum
In 2011. [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-
robots-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/01/us-foxconn-robots-
idUSTRE77016B20110801)

Some argue _[weasel words]_ it's a form of internal propaganda to keep the
workers in line.

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agumonkey
funny that robots are not freeing people much, there's a need to teach people
to build robots for their own needs (when it's really helpful)

