
First unmanned factory takes shape in Dongguan City (2015) - doener
http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html
======
jayjay71
This article is wrong. The output _per employee_ changed to 250%. So by
reducing the staff to 10%, the total output is roughly 25% compared to what it
was before.

[http://monetarywatch.com/2017/01/chinese-factory-
replaces-90...](http://monetarywatch.com/2017/01/chinese-factory-
replaces-90-human-workers-robots-sees-250-production-
increase/?doing_wp_cron=1486169062.9302580356597900390625)

edit: added original source courtesy of dmoy
[http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html](http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html)

~~~
inuhj
That doesn't make sense from a business perspective. No one would invest
heavily with output expected to drop to 25% existing levels. More likely is
that the factory's total output is 250% of what it was before the employee
cuts.

~~~
c3534l
Tech Republic says:

> According to the People's Daily, production per person has increased from
> 8,000 pieces to 21,000 pieces. That's a 162.5% increase.

I'm highly suspicious of the factual accuracy of anyof these news reports.

~~~
vm
It's scary how quickly all "data" in articles suddenly seems to have gotten
unreliable.

I hope this leads to a resurgence in journalistic integrity. I would gladly
pay for news I can trust.

~~~
adventured
I'd argue that such hasn't suddenly become unreliable. It was always
unreliable, it's now far easier to fact check (and frequently do so in
exchange with experts in a given field, as happens so often here). Now you
have a million eyeballs on the bogus claims / data, and those eyeballs
frequently have fast, easy access to vast research sources.

Today if the President says something bogus, it'll be fact checked in minutes
by a thousand people and that fact checking will be syndicated globally nearly
instantly on a dozen large media platforms. By comparison, consider the
process, access and distribution that existed at the time of FDR (the things
you can get away with when it takes a week or a month for distribution to
occur).

We have a lot of historical examples from the last two centuries, to show that
data accuracy and reporting in terms of commerce, politics, military,
journalism etc. were not particularly extraordinary in the past. Agenda,
laziness, bad research, bad reporting, misinterpretation, etc. are nothing
new.

~~~
thinkloop
There is that, but also there's been increasing pressure to pump out more
faster due to more competition, and people paying less/nothing. I think
quality-per-article has probably gone way down in the last decade, but we do
have a ton more articles.

------
dmoy
This should probably have a [2015] in the title and maybe point to at least
the English language people's daily source:

[http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html](http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html)

~~~
dang
Thanks, we've done both. Url changed from
[http://www.zmescience.com/other/economics/china-factory-
robo...](http://www.zmescience.com/other/economics/china-factory-
robots-03022017/).

------
Animats
This story is from People's Daily two years ago.[1] The original article is
more useful. The factory supposedly had 650 people doing final polishing on
mobile phones. That task was automated.

[1]
[http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html](http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0715/c90000-8920747.html)

------
z3t4
In most factories in China, humans work like if they where robots, one job
might be to go with a part from one place to another place, witch could
literally be replaced by a transport band. Some workers are extremely skilled
and fast though, replacing them with robots would probably cost much more then
their salary. It can be hard to see the economic sense in deploying robots
when the robots does things five times slower, but when the robot works, _you_
can do something else. Even if you can clean the dishes faster then a
dishwasher, it does save you time! And once something has been automated, it's
much easier to scale.

~~~
brianwawok
Dishes are a bad analogy. I can wash a load of dishes by hand in 15 minutes.
My washer takes 90 minutes. From a time POV, it could be worth it to pay
fleshy robots to do the work.

~~~
user5994461
How about hygiene standards and temperature? The machine can have a major
hedge on that.

~~~
brianwawok
They can get hotter, but they are also happy to take some crusted on food and
bake it on to the plate... making the QC factor a bit lower.

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shimon_e
These should be American robots.

~~~
iSnow
They probably will be made by Kuka...

------
vorotato
Anyone here questioning what the value is aren't realizing that scaling goes
up so so much easier without humans getting tired, getting distracted. It's
much easier to coordinate a million robots than a million humans.

------
velodrome
Too bad the article does not discuss the time it would take to break even on
that investment.

~~~
ChefDenominator
I feel like this is always missing. Robots don't scale down, which is a real
issue.

~~~
contingencies
They kind of can - you can lower the duty cycle and batchify things. You can
also outsource to them, and/or otherwise share them with other
producers/production lines. I personally believe future manufacturing will be
significantly more dynamic with respect to assembling/disassembling production
line unit operations via electronic contract (re-)negotiation.

At [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/) we are essentially placing
miniature (fresh food preparation) factories in retail spaces, and so I've
been reading a lot of industry literature recently. I've found very
interesting crossovers with former work on a major Bitcoin exchange - eg.
multi-asset/service/settlement path capable transaction markup and negotiation
systems - [http://ifex-project.org/](http://ifex-project.org/) In the same way
factories use JIT (just in time) concepts to optimize inventory and supply-
chain logistics, we similarly optimize for delivery of ingredients and
packaging, and thus reduce storage bulk overheads and achieve form-factor
minimization. Operations research truly is operations generic, and quaintly
fascinating coming from a programming background.

~~~
ChefDenominator
You can do anything with unlimited funds, the existence of such technologies
or the dream of such technologies doesn't really mean anything. The comparison
should be against alternatives.

Human labor is still far more scalable than any technology can provide. The
reason the tech industry so strongly supports minimum wages and other
increases in cost to labor is because it makes their products more competitive
against humans.

~~~
contingencies
A fair point, though I think it's fair to say that due to the very nature of
HN and startups a lot of people here choose think in the 'what is just around
the corner' and 'what is coming' domains, shunning obstinate currency (perhaps
subconsciously as done/uninteresting/unchallenging).

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tetrep
Defect rate dropped by 80%, I wonder how much of the productivity boost is
related to that.

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petercooper
Off tangent question - did anyone here fill out the email subscription form
that takes up the entire screen when you go this article? I keep getting told
they "work" even though I think they're terrible.

~~~
pryelluw
They work on the average person. Mostly due to them putting no resistance to
filling out a form.

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naranana
I wonder what they'll do when there's nobody left to buy the products. Maybe
they can sell them to the robots themselves?

~~~
homero
Basic income is the only future, truck drivers will be all out of work by 2020
for example

~~~
noarchy
>Basic income is the only future, truck drivers will be all out of work by
2020 for example

This has become the refrain in the comment section for every article dealing
with automation I've seen, of late. Some of the articles, I suspect, are being
posted by basic income proponents.

Even accepting the premise that a basic income would be needed in the case of
near-universal automation, there are plenty of us who are yet to be convinced
that we're heading in that direction.

~~~
olegkikin
I don't think most of the people talking about basic income are the
proponents. I'm a strong believer in that you should be paid the market rate
for your work, so if you want to make good money, you must make smart choices
about your education and career. That makes the whole system more efficient. I
do however think that basic income is inevitable, because of the automation on
the scale we've never seen before. Inevitable, because the other option is to
let the unemployed starve. So not really an option.

~~~
gloverkcn
I'd like to think that letting the unemployed starve is not an option, but it
is. People can be extremely cruel when they don't have to take responsibility
for the outcomes of government policies.

They lean on "those people should have worked harder/planned better"

It wasn't that long ago that poor people who needed critical medical care were
kicked to the curb to die on the street because they couldn't pay.

~~~
olegkikin
Ok, you're right, it is an option in third-world countries. I don't see it
happening in the EU/US/AU/CA or even China (even considering their past human
rights violations). But if it does happen on a large enough scale, hungry
riots will just take over the means of the food production (mostly robots and
other machinery these days).

> _It wasn 't that long ago that poor people who needed critical medical care
> were kicked to the curb to die on the street because they couldn't pay._

Healthcare is a separate issue. What you're describing is still happening all
over, including the US. I've been looking at the US health insurance premiums,
and I have no idea how an average person can afford something like that.

