
First robots have arrived in plan to replace 1 million Foxconn workers - Reltair
http://singularityhub.com/2012/11/12/1-million-robots-to-replace-1-million-human-jobs-at-foxconn-first-robots-have-arrived/
======
Symmetry
Ultimately all progress in human material conditions comes from "eliminating
jobs". Back In The Day it took 80% of the US population just to keep everyone
fed. When tractors came along most of the population went into manufacturing,
and with robots people go into services. You can't have more stuff without
finding ways to produce the current level of stuff with less people.

~~~
kamaal
>>Ultimately all progress in human material conditions comes from "eliminating
jobs".

I think it should rather be eliminating the need to work for things like food,
clothing, medicine and shelter.

As automation increases by multiple folds, I see this as a inevitable fallout.
Needing to have a job to even survive might not even be relevant as concept in
the future.

~~~
polarix
Needing to have a job to even survive _must_ not be relevant in the future.

------
angkec
Personally I think this will generate some social unrest in my hometown where
foxconn has a factory. Those robots will drive millions of young workforces
out of a basic job. I'm pretty concerned about the near future.

In the long term though, this seems to be the only way to go: automate boring
jobs.

~~~
richardw
From the perspective of the owner, the social unrest is a temporary problem.
As robots take over jobs, the potential for social unrest in the future
reduces. Bosses don't have to worry about wage demands, housing, transport,
kids, strikes etc.

They're unfortunately not focused on automating boring jobs, which would at
least have some benefit for the worker. They're reducing variability and the
need to negotiate with humans.

How long before the next jobs are eliminated, then middle management jobs,
then everyone except those who own the robots?

In my country we've had miners striking, demanding pretty large increases. My
default answer has been to automate the lot and put robots underground, but on
the other hand...

~~~
pretoriusB
> _From the perspective of the owner, the social unrest is a temporary
> problem. As robots take over jobs, the potential for social unrest in the
> future reduces. Bosses don't have to worry about wage demands, housing,
> transport, kids, strikes etc._

That's not how it works. You're thinking it of the perspective of the factory
owner, not the overall society.

In fact, the potential of social unrest in the future increases: all those
people, brought over from their villages and left unemployed in the big city,
with wages for unskilled labor going down (due to even less demand after the
automation of most jobs), and no future, will not end well.

> _In my country we've had miners striking, demanding pretty large increases.
> My default answer has been to automate the lot and put robots underground,
> but on the other hand..._

But on the other hand, we have (as a society) exploited the work of those
workers at the time that the job could not be automated (which is still the
case today mostly), while paying them less that it's worth it.

"You'll work for a pittance, and if you argue about it, we will force you to
using the police instead of negotiating better wages."

And that in an extremely harsh job, where a huge percentage of miners dies of
cancer.

~~~
richardw
I'd ask you to read it again. I'm arguing _for_ the workers, but pointing out
why the managers are making their decisions.

It's not because they're trying to make boring work go away. Managers don't
optimise for the health of society. They do it for their own gains.

> all those people, brought over from their villages and left unemployed in
> the big city

They're migrant workers. They have to go home after their term is complete. In
China you can't just move to a new city or region.

I'm not saying it's right. I'm pointing out the perspective of the decision
makers. With respect to the miners I was pointing out the obvious parallels,
and why my default perspective on striking miners might not be correct.

------
agumonkey
Anyone else is happy about that ? When everything will be done by machines we
will have to think about what it means to exist in this world without being a
little hand.

~~~
mburns
People's live shouldn't be wasted doing repetitive tasks year after year, just
to afford food and shelter.

~~~
potatolicious
Perhaps they shouldn't, but we've just gone and replaced their jobs without
having solved scarcity - which is the magic pill that needs to be invented for
a function society where you can do nothing productive yet still live.

In all practicality this means we need to retrain tens of thousands of people
in some _other_ form of repetitive task that hasn't been taken over by a
robot. It doesn't mean they get to go off to a Star Trek-ian utopia where they
can pursue higher pursuits without having to worry about survival.

In the long run this will probably pan out to be a net positive - these robots
can do a job better, more precisely, and less expensively than a human, which
will advance the state of the art further.

In the short run this will create unrest, poverty, starvation, and possibly
arrest the hard-earned development of a country trying desperately to claw its
way out of poverty.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Robots destroy lives!

It's funny, software automates far, far more than robots do, and yet you would
be hard pressed to find people on this site who hold the opinion that software
destroys jobs. Software adds value, it may create efficiencies but it is not a
job destroyer. And the same is true of physical automation as well.

We've come a long way since the days where everyone worked on the farm, or
everyone worked in a factory. Automation has never created poverty or
starvation. Look at Japan, which went through _exactly_ the same process as
China is today. In the mid 20th century it was a country heavily dependent on
exports fueled by cheap labor (in 1950 Japan's per capita GDP was less than
1/5th of the US's). But it didn't take long for them to automated like crazy.
Is Japan a poor, unruly, starving country today? No, it's one of the richest
countries in the world with one of the highest standards of living.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"and yet you would be hard pressed to find people on this site who hold the
> opinion that software destroys jobs"_

You've found one right here. Not all software destroys jobs, but much of it
certainly does. More often than not this destruction is a net positive for
society - but it tends to create localized minima that are hard to resolve.

In less abstract speech: by using software to destroy jobs we create more jobs
that ostensibly have a greater positive impact to society, but that's really
very little comfort to the auto plant worker in Michigan, or the call center
agent in Minnesota, or the travel agent in California, most of whom are
severely underqualified for these new jobs, and have no reasonable way of
becoming qualified.

Humans are not discrete units of productivity - specializations, experience,
education, intelligence, all of which exist as substantial barriers in making
humans easily interchangeable.

One cannot reasonably take the position of "relax! we won't even remember this
in 100 years", even though it is true. While society will recover from these
periods of change, you still have millions of unemployed, hungry, desperate
people at your door step _right now_ , and you will have to face that problem
regardless.

> _"Automation has never created poverty or starvation."_

Are you _serious_?

"Automation has never created a net decrease in productivity in the long term
(measured in decades)" is probably more accurate.

If you want to see automation creating poverty and starvation just go to the
rust belt in this country. Go to Detroit and see the boarded up houses, the
burned out husks of neighborhoods, and then try to say with a straight face
"automation has never created poverty or starvation".

Whenever this topic comes up on HN (and elsewhere) the response is invariably
highly binary. Either automation is a noble advancement with no negative
effects, or automation is a complete evil that destroys people. Both views are
equally ridiculous. Automation is an inevitable fact that is, in the long
term, a positive for society - but it creates _very_ significant localized
destruction for substantial amounts of time (measured in terms of human life).

The ignorance of that last part is dangerous. Automation has already put
millions out of work just in _this_ country alone, and will continue to put
more people out of work. There are substantial gaps between the unemployed and
the new classes of jobs that are being created, and bridging this gap is
neither inevitable, nor trivial, nor will the magic of unbridled capitalism
solve it automatically. It is a tremendous social issue that faces every
society on this planet, and it should not be trivialized.

~~~
discreteevent
I think it will depend on the culture its dropped into. Norway seems to have
benefited greatly from its oil but its been a curse for some African
countries. Total automation could be the same.

------
chubbard
So if the Chinese are just replacing people with robots why can't America, or
really any nation, do that now? Or why didn't they do that sooner? If we want
to bring back manufacturing why not start with robots? It might not bring back
the mass amount of jobs, but it will bring back more exports and stabilize the
trade deficit. The robot repairmen will stay busy that's for sure.

~~~
bunderbunder
There's no need to "bring back manufacturing". China didn't pass the USA as
the world's largest producer of manufactured goods until last year. And
contrary to popular belief, the reason why the USA shed so many manufacturing
jobs over the previous few decades has little to do with Chinese competition,
and a whole lot to do with the USA's rapid adoption of robotics in factories.

The real causes for the USA's trade deficit have less to do with its ability
to manufacture goods and more to do with macroeconomic conditions such as its
strong currency, relatively low domestic savings rate, and relatively high
rate of foreign investment.

Theoretically, it should eventually sort itself out due to normal market
forces. For example, domestic savings should increase and foreign investment
should decrease as Americans begin to quit living on credit and start
refilling their bank accounts. Incidentally, this sort of thing happened a few
years ago, and was accompanied by a huge drop in the size of the trade
deficit.

~~~
mr_luc
I was hoping to see someone mention this, because there's a great conversation
that we're not having because of the lack of awareness of the extent of
automation and even lights-out machining.

There was a wonderful article on lights-out machining in the States that I
found thanks to HN - sorry I don't have the link - but which mentioned that
manufacturing in the States grew by a third since 2000, while jobs were
slashed.

That really complicates the conversation.

Lots of people seem to implicitly assume that by giving companies incentives
to manufacture here, we can solve the employment problem. Um ... nowadays,
there are manufacturing jobs that require knowledge of CNC machines and maybe
even programming and/or metallurgy. Skilled stuff.

I want to know: now that we don't have the easy fix that 'wet robot' jobs gave
us, are jobs on the whole being created or destroyed in high-tech societies?
Even assuming people can be given technical skills in the numbers that they'd
need, the openings for skilled technical work hardly seems sufficient for the
masses of people being made redundant.

I feel like a Luddite even typing that.

~~~
newbie12
You are being a Luddite. People will shift into cushy service sector jobs.
Craft beer, massage parlors, landscape architects, mobile game programming,
whatever wealthier societies might want more of.

~~~
mr_luc
That sounds fantastic, because service sector jobs tend to be local.

Massage parlors and landscaping -- pretty geographically limited, ie limited
competition, and scale poorly, ie no large competitors with economies of
scale.

Is that the overall trend? The things that wealthy societies want -- in the
future, will they increasingly or decreasingly come from geographically
limited services that scale poorly and are thus good candidates for employing
large numbers of humans? Even if increasing wealth grows the pie, will enough
of the things we want in the future be the kinds of things that lots of our
individual neighbors can give us?

I wouldn't bet on it.

I mean, I think it'll all work out -- it always has -- but I could also see
lot of things we take for granted, like high employment and industrialized
education as sufficient to prepare people for work, revert back to the
historical mean a bit.

~~~
bunderbunder
I don't think one needs to be so pessimistic about it.

The historical trend is that as technology improvements have reduced the need
for human labor in industries that used to be big employers, humans think up
new and exciting ways to put the excess labor force to use.

When we look back on the era of cottage industry, we don't remember it as a
golden age of high employment. We remember it as an era where the standard of
living was lower because the huge amount of human labor that went into
textiles meant that they were comparatively expensive. So expensive that after
people were done paying to clothe themselves they had little money left for
other consumer goods such as clocks, books, or glassware.

Similarly, we don't look back on the era of peasant agriculture as a time when
every able-bodied person was virtually guaranteed a job in the thriving
agricultural industry. We remember it as an era where most everyone was tied
to the land and eked out their lives doing backbreaking labor.

As for whether the service economy can replace the manufacturing economy, I
don't think that's a question we need to speculate on. Looking back on the
past few decades of American economic development, it's clear that it already
has. And that employment rates in the USA have remained relatively high
throughout that process.

------
bglusman
I submitted a story last week I was a little disappointed got no comments or
upvotes, but if this ([http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/11/06/evil-high-
speed-...](http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/11/06/evil-high-speed-robot-
hand-proves-humans-doomed-to-be-servants-to-our-coming-borg-
overlords/?fromcat=shareables)) is what robots in labs can do no, then things
will continue to be exciting and interesting as these technologies get
commercialized, become hackable and find new uses.... what COULDN'T robotics
like this be used for? (that link was the one I submitted if that wasn't
clear)

~~~
CodeCube
Ahh, I remember seeing this video back when it first surfaced. One of my
favorite comments I saw somewhere (maybe slashdot?) was that robotic
capability is usually insufficient for something like dribbling a ping pong
ball ... until it isn't, at which point it can do it hundreds of times a
second flawlessly.

I'm sure I've paraphrased quite liberally with the comment, but hopefully the
intent stands. With sufficient engineering we should be capable of many many
things quite soon.

------
islon
I guess we'll see an increase in robot suicide rates.

~~~
lostlogin
If the rate is anything like that of computers or other complex technical
gear, they will need plenty of engineers. Nowhere near the number of people
they are replacing on the production lines, but still not an insignificant
number.

~~~
moe
_but still not an insignificant number._

I doubt that. You need humans to construct and program robots. There is no
reason why you'd need humans to maintain and repair robots.

For a (slightly contrived) analogy you could look at modern farming or
datacenters. It's not uncommon for a modern farm with thousands of cattle to
be run by a work force smaller than 30 people. The same is true for
datacenters that house ten thousands units of rather complex machinery.

In purely manual labor (assembly lines) a 1000:1 workforce-reduction doesn't
seem unlikely.

------
hnriot
Does this mean the robots can be installed in the US and we made iPhones and
iPads here in the US, at least the robot service jobs will be local.

~~~
snuze
As far as I understand it, China currently has a monopoly on rare earth
minerals: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/06/08/rare-
earth...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/06/08/rare-earth-
minerals-an-end-to-chinas-monopoly-is-in-sight/)

~~~
ImprovedSilence
Actually the US has a pretty fantastic supply of rare earths. the US used to
mine a TON, then imports from China got cheaper, so they stopped mining
domestically. In this process, lots of "knowledge capital" was lost, but we
still have vast reserves of rare earths. The big problem now is the lack of
infrastructure to get at them again.

------
ilaksh
<http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm>

------
ynniv
According to the article that is 83.3% of their workforce that will no longer
need to be paid. It will take about three years to recoup costs, which means
more profit for Foxconn and Apple and more subsistence farming for previously
Foxconn employed Chinese peasants.

Labor Problem Solved™!

------
jobigoud
"these robots are manufactured in house"

Wow, that's just… mean. Being tasked with building the machine that will put
you out of job.

