Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-07/30/c_131018764.htm

by acak • 15 years ago

99 118 15 years ago

news.xinhuanet.com

From a social perspective, isn't this counter productive? China has a ton of people they need to transition from rural economies into urban employement - building robot factories does nothing to address this issue, which is a big deal in a country with compulsory military service (youth unemployment -> civil unrest).

For a competitive perspective, if the labor component is being automated - why should it be cheaper to run a robot factory in China vs. the US? Sounds like you a difference in legal climate...that need to be evened up.

naz• 15 years ago

You can build and maintain robots and factories cheaper in China.

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

For a competitive perspective, if the labor component is being automated - why should it be cheaper to run a robot factory in China vs. the US?

Only some of the labor is being automated. Humans + robots in China is still cheaper than humans + robots in the US.

I don't see how it is counter productive. China, like most poor countries, needs more wealth. The humans who are replaced by robots are now free to create wealth in other ways (e.g., building stuff Chinese people need rather than stuff westerners don't need). Sounds like a win.

gaius• 15 years ago

Assuming equally sophisticated robots. But the money you spend on your robots is proportional to alternate cost of humans doing it. It makes sense for a US company to invest more than a Chinese one.

I mean, this is a pattern that repeats throughout history. The Athenians could have had steam engines. But since they had slaves already, it was never worth them developing the steam engine beyond a toy for philosophers.

riobard2• 15 years ago

Not until you see the whole picture.

In the past few years, Pearl River Delta area (around Shenzhen, where Foxconn and the other sweat factories are located) has been experiencing continuous shortage of experienced cheap labor. Other areas like the Yangtze River Delta (around Shanghai) are offering higher wages.

The supply of cheap labor in China is not unlimited. The vast majority of young generation in rural parts of China has already been lured into cities to work. The remaining population in many villages are children and old people, which no body wants them to come.

Simply put, China (and the rest of the world) could not sustain the cheap labor cost anymore. Foxconn is forced to use robots to reduce its reliance on human. Simple robots aren't expensive anyway. Going all robots is expensive, but not robots + human. Robots can perform routine tasks while leaving more challenging work to human. Win-win.

By the way, China no longer relies on compulsory military service. Most of my friends (me included) have never served in the army. Volunteers and paid soldiers are the majority now.

meric2• 15 years ago

One anecdote vs another, my cousin is currently serving compulsory military service.

DasIch• 15 years ago

I think eventually this might force China (and probably other countries) to re-evaluate what "work" means and if income should be tied as directly to it, as it is now.

In any case taking a step backwards and not using robots or even replacing them with humans will be almost impossible once the price has adapted to the new conditions.

wisty• 15 years ago

No, China is running into a labor shortage. 18-year-olds are getting relatively thin on the ground, for both demographic reasons (one child was ~25 years ago), and because immigration from rural to urban areas has undergone an inflection. Factory workers in a good area can thus get very high (by Chinese standards) wages. Food prices are also going up. They won't admit that inflation is out of control, but it is. Factories are moving inland, or to Vietnam or India. China is looking at Africa, in the long term.

In some cases, work is going back to the US - US workers have higher productivity, the company can sort out quality issues much faster (waiting for a ship to take your whole order to the States, then realizing there's a problem would be expensive), communication is easier, IP doesn't get stolen, and so on.

Also, the cost of living (especially accommodation) is crazy-expensive (by Chinese standards) in the big coastal cities.

China needs to get high-tech before it gets old, and there's already a few grey hairs showing.

tomjen34• 15 years ago

They are not going to replace all of the workers with robots -- only those who do the simplest possible labor.

Think of it as changing a carpenters manual tools with power tools rather than getting a robot carpenter.

_delirium3• 15 years ago

> why should it be cheaper to run a robot factory in China vs. the US?

Among other reasons, there's: 1) cheap utility inputs, mainly hydro/coal electricity and water; 2) laxer environmental standards; and 3) remaining labor needs are still cheaper.

justincormack• 15 years ago

Also there is a lot more general infrastructure and expertise in manufacturing a lot of product types there. And no doubt the factory making the robots will be down the road, improving the ecosystem. Generally you do not do every process in house so you need component suppliers and specialist process makers nearby.

Reindustrialising the US and Europe would be hard.

icegreentea• 15 years ago

You still need to deal with your suppliers. If the majority of your suppliers are based in China/Asian (for example, nearly all the chip and screen fabs), the shorter supply chain may be a benefit.

Also, keep in mind that Foxconn is actually a Taiwanese company. I think that frankly they don't really care about the social development of the Chinese lower and middle class outside of long term impact on sales.

notatoad2• 15 years ago

"they need to transition from rural economies into urban employement"

why?

ColinWright• 15 years ago

There are two stories on this currently posted to HN, this one, and the one at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827861

I have no idea which will get the discussion, if either, but it might be worth trying to make sure any discussion doesn't get unnecessarily split.

ximeng2• 15 years ago

Promotional videos from a company involved with Foxconn robots:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa8qCj1oQn0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpvIc0Zd2E

And another asking if they'll still need humans (spoiler: no):

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjMyMTMzMzk2.html

One more blurry one:

http://video.sina.com.cn/v/b/51887552-1635296834.html

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

"...which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers' dance party Friday night."

Wow, talk about a dick move. I wonder how he spun that.

tomjen34• 15 years ago

I imagine that the average tenure at a Chinese factory is less than three years, so I doubt this will effect most of the workers currently there.

adaml_6234• 15 years ago

Got any references for your claim of 3 years?

hugh33• 15 years ago

On the bright side, in a few years we'll have robot dance parties instead.

peteretep• 15 years ago

You couldn't get away with this politically in the Western world without a huge stink, although from a capitalistic point of view, it's the right thing to happen.

China in capitalist trail blazing shocker? ;-)

tomjen34• 15 years ago

Unlikely.

However China properly doesn't have particular strong unions and Foxconn properly has pretty good connections with the officials who assured them that it was not a problem (and thanks for the BMW).

_delirium3• 15 years ago

Highly automated robot factories are already pretty normal in the Western world, especially for new factories. It has led to some political controversy, though I mostly see it come up when a local government feels it wasted its money with subsidies when they didn't bring jobs: in Germany and France, a number of localities have been disappointed to find that they lured a new factory to town, but then that factory doesn't hire many locals. That leads to the question: if a factory doesn't bring jobs to town, is there a reason locals should still be positive towards it? (One possibility is if it brings tax revenues.)

My Google skills seem unable to dig up the story, but there was a piece in one of the major newspapers a few years ago about new factories in France, and how eerie/futuristic/empty they felt; you go onto the factory floor and it's just robots humming away, with a handful of technicians.

mseebach4• 15 years ago

> That leads to the question: if a factory doesn't bring jobs to town, is there a reason locals should still be positive towards it?

If "positive" means "throw tax money at them" then no. But if "positive" means "not actively opposed" then why not?

Also, in this context, "no jobs" means "fewer jobs than an old world manual factory". Having a thriving community of factories, even if they are not piled high with "Modern Times" style workers is still very likely to be a very positive thing for a community. Advanced factories still need service, they need supplies and end products shipped to and from, they need said supplies to be made and most importantly, they need innovation which attract innovators which starts the cycle over again.

nextparadigms10• 15 years ago

If USA wants to become a strong "manufacturing" country again, it needs to become a leader in the robot workforce revolution, too. This is disruption. It will happen either way, and it's a net benefit for human kind.

It doesn't mean it will replace humans, but it does mean it will kill a lot of current jobs, just like the Internet is killing many jobs now, but creating 3x more in return. Having a robot powered economy means consumerism will explode and there will be a lot of new jobs being created.

Obviously this will upset a lot of things and people in the short term as they need to change jobs, but I think most people are already starting to get used to switching jobs often. The country leaders will need to think long-term here, but seeing how US thinks about "saving jobs" right now, I wouldn't be surprised if they introduce some laws against robot manufacturing in the next few years, but hopefully they won't.

If they push this, it could create a new golden era of growth for USA. If they don't act fast, the Asians will do it first, and they'll continue to remain the leaders in manufacturing (which will probably end up happening).

adaml_6234• 15 years ago

I'm happy that the internet is creating 3x more jobs than it is replacing....

But just in case the unemployment rate continues to rise will you do me a favour and calculate what the tax system should do if you have a couple of hundred rich people who own all the robotic factories, farms and trucks and 80% of the rest of the country on 'government handouts'. I'm just saying that we should think about this problem just in case we accidentally manage to replace all the jobs with computers and robots.

gst• 15 years ago

I wonder what the tax system should do once >90% of the population can't work as farmers anymore, as a majority of the tasks is done by machines.

I agree with the parent (of your post) that jobs will just change and people will switch to other jobs that provide a better return.

But let's assume that this isn't the case and a few hundreds of people own the robots that are doing _all_ of the work (even founding startups). I'd say that this would be the perfect case:

We don't need to work to survive, but we would have plenty of resources that allow us to work on things that make fun (of course most of us are doing this anyway). Of course it's pretty clear that for this to work we also would need to change the political and economic systems considerably, but this is not a bad thing - they change all the time.

tomjen34• 15 years ago

That won't happen, anymore than powerdrills will be the end of carpenters -- it will require people to adapt and learn new skills but so have every invention ever.

Replacing humans with computers is easy in a lot of cases, but far from all. Human workers will simply have to take those jobs that are difficult to get robots to do.

They tend to be better paid too.

meric2• 15 years ago

Here's what's going to happen. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

snippyhollow• 15 years ago

Reference needed for "creating 3x more in return". I don't say it isn't true, I just think it's really hard to measure (what is a job "killed by the Internet"/how far do we strech it). I just know that "98% of all statistics are made up".

nextparadigms10• 15 years ago

" Among 4,800 small and medium sized enterprises surveyed, the Internet created 2.6 jobs for each lost to technology related efficiencies."

This is from a study made by McKinsey for e-G8 this year. I can't seem to be able to reach the direct link so here's the Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

And their PDF:

http://www.eg8forum.com/fr/documents/actualites/McKinsey_and...

weavejester• 15 years ago

The USA is already a strong manufacturing country. It accounts for 20% of global output, and output has more than doubled since 1975.

In the same period, worker numbers have decreased by 31%, implying that US manufacturing is already beginning to replace workers with robots.

It's also worth pointing out that China has only exceeded the USA in output this year, and then only by a few percent. Given that China relies heavily on cheap manual labor, whilst USA employment in the manufacturing industry has plummeted, the USA is already betting heavily on robots.

Sources: http://mercatus.org/publication/us-manufacturing-output-vs-j... http://articles.boston.com/2011-02-06/bostonglobe/29344173_1... http://www.manufacturingdigital.com/tags/us/china-vs-us-manu...

adaml_6234• 15 years ago

You have references but they don't back up that implication robots are being used in US factories.

There are a lot of things that have changed in US factories in the last 35 years but I don't think widespread use of robots is one of them. But I can't find references :-(

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

If USA wants to become a strong "manufacturing" country again, it needs to become a leader in the robot workforce revolution, too.

You are more right than you know. This sentence is ten years or more out of date.

I don't blame you for writing this sentence, because journalism is nigh-100%-broken and absolutely nobody understands the following facts. But:

The USA is and has been a "strong manufacturing country". US industrial capacity has risen steadily since 1970. Until this last recession started, there was no year since 1970 where that capacity had gone down:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/ipg1.gif

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/

(The Great Recession is, obviously, a problem, one large enough to show up on this chart. But it's a problem for China and other countries as well.)

The problem is that US manufacturing employment has crashed. Here's a chart showing a 30% drop in the last decade alone:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001?data_tool=XGtab...

Why is this happening? Increased productivity. Why has productivity soared in this way? "The robot workforce revolution".

And why do people persist in maintaining that US manufacturing is "not strong" in the face of very obvious evidence that it is strong? Because there is mass suffering due to mass unemployment, and it is easier to blame "robots" than to blame the humans that mismanage the economy and allow needless suffering to persist.

ciupicri• 15 years ago

And why do people persist in maintaining that US manufacturing is "not strong" in the face of very obvious evidence that it is strong?

Because a lot of today's stuff, e.g. iPhones, LCD monitors are made in China.

Mrich30• 15 years ago

Just a logical step in the development of countries/industries. First human labour is cheaper, then it becomes more expensive and robots become cheaper too making them a good alternative. As a plus, humans dont have to do the dangerous jobs anymore. This very cheap labour will now also move to other countries, making them richer in turn until they will also move to robots. This is the good side of globalization and should be applauded, provided that people who are fired have a chance to move to other jobs and get supported by training and education if necessary.

iqster• 15 years ago

I don't see how this will work in 3 years time. Cheap robots today (<100K) suck at manual dexterity tasks. It took quite a lot of work to get a PR2 to fold laundry (and some of the best robotics people in the world worked on this). The kinds of tasks I imagined Foxconn workers performed all require significant manual dexterity.

For an amazing use of robots in a factory environment, I would suggest a tour of BMW's Munich factory. They have a whole bunch of specialized robotic arms that do things like welding, lifting, painting, etc. Their factory still employs humans (albeit fewer humans). In BMW's case, their use of robotics makes sense. Foxconn, not so much.

Finally, there are some completely automated car factories. I thought Hyundai's US factory manufactured cars solely with robots. However, I believe they have a higher defect rate (partially due to this process).

Edit: Link to the PR2 laundry folding robot - http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/04/02/towels-uc-berkel...

dmethvin• 15 years ago

One reason that assembly of products like phones requires human hands is simply because nobody has yet tweaked the designs and processes to make them friendly to robot assembly. There hasn't been a financial incentive to do so yet.

ThomPete• 15 years ago

This is the real challenge. In 1995-2002 the us lost something around 2 million jobs to Chinese manufacturing.'the chinese lost 15 million jobs to the robots.

nextparadigms10• 15 years ago

This is the robot they plan on using:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjo4AsTVh0s

http://www.abb.com/cawp/abbzh254/8657F5E05EDE6AC5C1257861002...

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/13/frida-concept-robot-will-...

ippisl• 15 years ago

Can you please link to the source ?

rkalla8• 15 years ago

Foxconn is an interesting mega-beast. It has a campus that houses 500k people and employees 1 million.

Just think about that... when was the last time you heard of a company employing more than like 200k people world wide and this company employees 1 million at it's production facility in China.

Apparently living and working conditions aren't great, we all read the followups to the original suicides. From what I gathered they were extremely barren, but better than the alternative of sleeping on the street in that city. They made it sound like if you try and get by in the city on your own, and you are low-income, it is incredibly vicious (mugging, etc.)

What I find interesting is that as these people fight for better conditions and increased wages, Foxconn's reply is "Whatevs, we are getting robots to replace you".

In the next 3 years they are looking at rolling out 1 million robots to replace workers, I imagine slowly firing 50-70% of their workforce. The only way I see these people not getting fired is the Chinese govt, in an attempt to stem riots[1], requires Foxconn to keep most of them employed.

This is an interesting twist of the future... I suppose some part of me assumed that by 2020+ machines would be making most of what I use, but when I look at the scale of jobless people as a result of it, it really makes me scratch my head to figure out where we fit in the future.

Our only salvation seems, at least for now, to expand ourselves in creative professions that cannot be performed by machines (yet).

When AI finally becomes mature enough to model a human (I don't really expect that to be very far off. Our compute power is getting ridiculous) I imagine that won't be off-limits for robots either and our job as humans will be just to exist and experience... nothing more.

tl;dr - assume robots and AI get sufficiently advanced to do most everything physical and most things that are deemed creative... what IS our purpose here then?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E

diminish• 15 years ago

I am afraid AI will soon claim creative jobs too. So I am afraid of my designer job.

mcritz• 15 years ago

As soon as AI can accurately express the human condition as well as Bob Dylan I'll be worried. Meanwhile, we've got this: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/06/24/science/1247468035...

yannis• 15 years ago

This will only happen, when robots will be able to dream. Feel safe!

aaronsw• 15 years ago

"I suppose some part of me assumed that by 2020+ machines would be making most of what I use, but when I look at the scale of jobless people as a result of it, it really makes me scratch my head to figure out where we fit in the future."

This is a common economic misconception. If, by some lucky twist of fate, machines can make everything we may ever want, it'd be great! We can just all lie around and enjoy utopia.

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

Somehow, I can't imagine a bored and aimless population of billions building utopia. Bored people tend to be troublesome people, so if there isn't enough Farmville, we might be in trouble.

gregpilling• 15 years ago

The downside of the utopia is the sheer amount of things that the robots can produce. Then what do you do with all that stuff?? That is a theme of the story "Midas Plague" by Frederik Pohl.

"The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage. Morey eventually hits on the idea of having the robots help him to consume his quotas. At first he fears punishment when he is discovered, but instead the Ration Board quickly implements his idea across the world."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

hackinthebochs10• 15 years ago

It always makes me scratch my head when people brush off the coming automation revolution by saying "they'll just get other jobs". The point is, eventually, there will be no jobs at all. This is going to require a major rethinking of our social structure. Even the process of getting to that point will be slow and cause severe economic and social upheaval. We need to be thinking about this now before we have 10 million rioting in the streets because there are no jobs left.

xsmasher2• 15 years ago

That's the Luddite argument to a T. I mean the historic, literal Luddites, not the modern figurative use. They were hand-weavers, worried that mechanical looms would put them out of business. They were right, and they were subject to severe financial hardship. No force on earth could have stopped the change taking place, though.

ximeng2• 15 years ago

People can just sit around going to restaurants, doing art, doing exercise, travelling, sitting in cafes, surfing youtube. Lots of jobs today are of dubious utility, and lots of people with jobs waste a lot of their time surfing the internet and doing other marginally productive work.

hugh33• 15 years ago

The point isn't that there'll be no jobs, because ten jobs building a hundred widgets an hour can be replaced by ten jobs maintaining a hundred robots that build ten thousand widgets per hour, thus making everybody significantly richer.

The real problem is that increasing automation only creates jobs for smart people, while destroying jobs for dumb people. Not everybody capable of building widgets is capable of maintaining a widget-building robot. We're replacing manual labour jobs with jobs that require a brain, but half the population still has below-average intelligence.

rkalla8• 15 years ago

I very much agree that this point will eventually be reached. We won't suddenly stop automating tasks and making those automations more and more functional.

It'll be interesting.

I've spoken to people that feel our role will be to move back to an intellectual time of philosophy and cultural advancement while our mechanical counterparts take care of everything else.

As a side-note, part of the Animatrix compilation was an anime short by a famous animator that portrayed the future where we have throngs of robot slave labor. Just abusing, destroying, crushing and pushing them harder and harder, throwing them away as they are "injured".

It was a perverse vision to be sure and only made more perverse by the need to make the robots human-like and then eventually given them AI (in the anime at least).

All of these things will be unexpected challenges.

Will you cringe in 2040 when you see a humanoid robot fall from a skyscraper or accidentally have a tractor drive over it while moving something big?

These are the strange/unexpected/unprepared scenarios I think will catch us off guard.

timedoctor• 15 years ago

Not at all. There will be different types of jobs. For example: massage, hair dresser, more beauty salons, personal assistants etc

nextparadigms10• 15 years ago

"Our only salvation seems, at least for now, to expand ourselves in creative professions that cannot be performed by machines (yet)."

Yes. We have to move "up-market" in the job market, just like the disruptive innovation theory says. But this will also create many more opportunities for us. Automation of work is not new. And in the few last decades that we've used it intensively, it has only led to the growth of country economies and to a more advanced society, with more opportunities for non-physical work.

Now, what happens when robots become "smarter" than us at everything we can do and can think for themselves? That's harder to predict right now. But it doesn't necessarily mean we'll become their slaves. We might still use them as our "tools", or worst case scenario we'll literally merge with technology to keep pace with them, but I don't think that will happen until nano-technology is mature enough (http://www.nanofuture2030.com is an interesting blog on this).

In a way we're already starting to merge with technology, just not physically yet. If we watch the trends in computing since the birth of the mainframe, computers have become ever more "mobile", smaller and more "personal", from Mainframe > Mini-computer > PC > Notebook > Smartphone.

Whatever the next big computing paradigm will be, I know that "device" will be more mobile, smaller and more intimate with the human being.

hackinthebochs10• 15 years ago

>Yes. We have to move "up-market" in the job market, just like the disruptive innovation theory says

You seem to have a lot of faith in the average person's ability to move "up market". Personally I don't see this becoming a reality. Furthermore, the creative and knowledge jobs needed are orders of magnitude fewer than manual jobs to provide for the same amount of production in society. The welfare state will have to become the norm and getting to that point will require major social upheaval.

omarqureshi• 15 years ago

Still though - someone will have to design, make and maintain the robots? Its still pretty gloomy, but until the time that robots can make better robots, there will still be a place for us.

choko• 15 years ago

True, but you are still loosing a significant number of human workers. You don't need 1000 humans to maintain 1000 robots, and those jobs won't be attainable by most people - especially the people the robots were designed to replace.

xsmasher2• 15 years ago

This has happened before, to the 90% of humanity involved in hunting and gathering whose jobs were displaced by Agriculture. It happened again when agriculture and textile production became mechanized.

It was accompanied by massive social upheaval, but it didn't lead to either a crapsack post-apocalyptic unemployscape nor a prefect utopian leisure world. Not from our point of view anyway; you'd have to pluck a 7000 or 300 year old man from his world into ours to find out what he makes of our progress.

bd_at_rivenhill• 15 years ago

One thing that everyone is missing in all of this is the incoming demographic crash. Western Europe, the US, Japan, and China will be heavily affected by this. Automation will allow the remaining workers to produce the goods and services necessary for the wealthy countries as populations age. The real losers will be the countries that have not climbed the industrialization curve by the time that the cost of producing goods locally falls below the cost of transporting them from countries that have cheap labor. Once this happens, those countries that are not advanced enough to have local production will have to find some other way to reach a modern, consumer-oriented lifestyle. I might be willing to bet on Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia that have the advantage of being close to current manufacturing centers both culturally and physically, but I would not bet that modernization will provide any alleviation of the suffering experienced by Africans in the same way that it is improving living standards in China. Difficult for me to say how India will fare since I have little experience there and the depth of its democratic tradition makes it difficult for centralized decision making to drive the economy forward at the same rate that East Asians have achieved.

wallflower• 15 years ago

> but when I look at the scale of jobless people as a result of it, it really makes me scratch my head to figure out where we fit in the future.

Read "Manna" by Marshall Brain for a vision of the caste system that may happen

http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

rkalla8• 15 years ago

Thank you for the recommendation, 3 chapters in and this is fascinating (horrifying/thought-provoking)

shareme• 15 years ago

one point..

FOxconn views moving to using robots as ideal because the costs of recruitment of workers went up not increases in wages. In other words despite increasing wages they have a hard time finding workers to fill the factories. So not the 'replacing workers' like you claim.

rkalla8• 15 years ago

Thank you for the correction; I tried to edit the story but it looks like I'm past the time limit.

DanielRibeiro• 15 years ago

Regarding automation, I allways keep in mind Knuth's writting on the subject[1]:

The field of "automatic programming" is one of the major areas of artificial intelligence research today.

In this sense we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html

mrbill• 15 years ago

It's pretty hard for a robot to throw itself off a roof.

huherto• 15 years ago

Somebody is going to have to design, manufacture, and maintain the robots. Consumer goods will be cheaper. Robotic technology will make progress. A lot of people will benefit but we must also think about the people who will loose their jobs. I don`t have an answer but I hope there is a plan for them.

orijing• 15 years ago

> Somebody is going to have to design, manufacture, and maintain the robots.

Eventually that will be the robots: Designing, manufacturing and maintaining themselves.

rkalla8• 15 years ago

Exactly right. It just depends on where you stop in the hypothetical timeline of thought.

If you stop in 2020, then yes, we have a ton of human engineers working on this problem.

If you think out 2030, now more of it is handled by machines and testing routines/simple AIs.

You think out to 2040 and now a good majority of it is automated.

You think out to 2060 and you are begging for your life at the feet of a red-eyed monster or some variation of that future :)

ComputerGuru• 15 years ago

Sounds like an Onion News headline...

benthumb• 15 years ago

Was at the Microsoft campus bus stop in Redmond recently and it was plastered (and I mean plastered) w/ posters for Mike Daisey's spoken word piece:

http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/

Foxconn to replace workers with 1 million robots in 3 years

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