Foxconn Boosting Automated Production in China (digitimes.com) 71
Foxconn Electronics is automating production at its factories in China in three phases, aiming to fully automate entire factories eventually, according to general manager Dai Jia-peng for Foxconn's Automation Technology Development Committee. From a report on DigiTimes: In the first phase, Foxconn aims to set up individual automated workstations for work that workers are unwilling to do or is dangerous, Dai said. Entire production lines will be automated to decrease the number of robots used during the second phase, Dai noted. In the third phase, entire factories will be automated with only a minimal number of workers assigned to production, logistics, testing and inspection processes, Dai indicated.
Get ready for more glued-in/soldiered on parts (Score:3)
Because that's what this kind of automation means. It means less choice because everything has to be the same, standard parts for the machines to churn them out at the rate necessary to make a profit on.
That means if you're holding your breath for Apple to release something that isn't preconfigured in the future, you might as well give up now and save yourself. The same will eventually be said for other computer & cellphone manufacturers. Configuration is about to become the premium option.
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That means if you're holding your breath for Apple to release something that isn't preconfigured in the future
User upgradable phones would make no sense for Apple. By only offering only preconfigured devices, their customers will buy higher priced models to make sure they don't run out of resources before their next upgrade. So instead of getting a 16GB model, and upgrading later if they need it, they buy the 64GB model just to be sure. Since Apple charges far more than the market price for that extra storage, they make a juicy profit.
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That ship has already sailed and was going to happen anyway. A menu full of "less choice" coming right up.
Interesting that the outsourced "cheap labor" is now on the receiving end of being outsourced to robots.
Re:Get ready for more glued-in/soldiered on parts (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting that the outsourced "cheap labor" is now on the receiving end of being outsourced to robots.
The labor isn't so cheap anymore. When my company started outsourcing to China in 1998, we could hire assembly line workers for $3/day. Today, it costs ten times that and it takes much longer to staff up. There are still locations with lots of cheap labor, like Vietnam and Bangladesh, but supply chains are weak in Vietnam and non-existent in Bangladesh. You can sew blue jeans there, but assembling electronics is not going to work so well.
Places like Shenzhen and Pudong have the widest and deepest supply chains in the world. If you are running out of 0.5mm screws, you can just send a guy on a bicycle over the screw factory, and he will be back in an hour. If is better to bring the robots to where the parts are than to try to move all the parts to where the labor is.
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hmm, never thought that manufacturing being a thing in Shanghai area
There is not much manufacturing in Shanghai proper, since everything is so expensive there. But there is quite a big of high end stuff made across the river in Pudong, which most people still consider to be part of Shanghai. In fact, the tallest buildings in the area, and "Shanghai" landmarks like Dongfangmingzhu [wikipedia.org] are actually in Pudong. As you head east toward the airport, Pudong has a lot of low rise sprawl that reminds me of Silicon Valley.
Today, much more manufacturing, especially more labor intensive
Re: Get ready for more glued-in/soldiered on parts (Score:2)
> in 1998, we could hire assembly line workers for $3/day. Today, it costs ten times that and it takes much longer to staff up
It is still very very very cheap. Probably it is not in the realm of being so cheap as to be called ridiculously cheap anymore. And yes, the most labour intensive industries were leaving as far back as mid-nineties.
I want to put few points for manufacturing in China:
First: manufacturing cost != labour cost. Out of all industries, electronics manufacturing was already the one least
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It is still very very very cheap. Probably it is not in the realm of being so cheap as to be called ridiculously cheap anymore.
Sure, it is still cheap. But staffing is a much bigger problem than in the good ole' days. I remember back in 1999, working in a recruiting booth at the Shanghai train station. We would hire farm girls as they exited the trains, with everything they owned strapped to their backs in a big canvas bag. They had nothing to hope for in the countryside but a dead end life of stoop labor in the rice paddies during the day while caring for a nasty mother-in-law at night. So they would head for the big city lig
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On the bright side, once the labor has been removed from the equation; we can move the factory (and the relevant pollution) back to the US so we can save of shipping.
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Which I think is Apple's plan.
They've been stating for years that they want to open a factory stateside. If they can eliminate 90% or more of the labor involved in manufacturing their profit margins increase to the point where it makes sense to only use domestic shipping.
It'll be interesting if they can overcome their India labor issues as well.
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Apple's problem is having anything to sell.
The new computers were panned by Consumers Report; they are cutting back on phone production because the smart phone business is going the way of tablet sales --- there's no need to upgrade.
The bastards are investing in cars and wind turbines (China) ... anything but core products.
Think IBM.
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Or increase the costs of shipping, since we now have to ship all of the parts from the factories and fabs where they are made to the new factory for assembly.
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One could, but why? The parts for the entire supply chain are also in Asia. Why ship all the parts to the USA just to assemble a finished product instead of just shipping the final, tested product? It's easier to work with local supply chains on just in time orders and returns for defects than to deal with international shipping. It takes up to 6 months to send cargo by ship to the USA from China. If there's a problem with a shipment (rusted parts in transit, banged up casings, etc), do you really
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Which goes to show you that the claims of the Trump camp that they will usher in a great renaissance in high-employment manufacturing jobs in the US is utter and complete rubbish.
Re:Get ready for more glued-in/soldiered on parts (Score:5, Informative)
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Apple already does something like this for parts like camera lenses, where a camera scans a batch of available parts and picks the one with the best fit for the current body.
If they can do that, they're fully capable of, say, selecting the type of camera module you might want and plugging that into a BTO phone.
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Most electronics is modular. That means you have a base unit, then you add in more RAM, more flash memory, different radio modules depending on the destination market of the phone, and so forth. And really, how much customization has there ever been in manufactured products? I can order a car from GM or Toyota with customizations, but I'm going to be limited to the upholstery styles and paint colors that the manufacturer has in stock. The same goes for an iPhone. I can order a 16gb model or a 32gb model, bl
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Who cares? Hardware is a mature, dead-end industry. This is why EE is a moronic career choice these days.
http://www.computerworld.com/a... [computerworld.com]
How else but with .5mm surface mount BGAs and HDI technology do you expect to build something like a modern cell phone?
OF COURSE they're going to be nearly impossible to work on at home... SO WHAT? It's all about the software. Phone breaks? Chuck it. Get a new one. It'll be better anyways.
The "choice" you are thinking about no longer has anything to do with the hardware,
I wish (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish there were more articles on automation in other areas besides manufacturing because most people think of assembly lines when automation occurs when that's a small fraction.
Legal research is automated. Much farming. Bookkeeping. And even software development.
It's great that productivity is increasing and having message loops and other boiler plate code generated is a blessing, but what are people who are displaced to do?
Speaking as one of them, retraining is a Fairy Tale. No one hires a middle aged entry level person. Oh! I retrained because it was impossible to get another job as a software developer at 50 - when I did get feedback, it was always "You don't have the skills." Yeah, whatever.
Kids - go into Medical. Luckily my wife is in medical and in her 50s, she has no problem with getting jobs. She is aghast at the stupidity of tech. She thought I was a lazy sack of shit until it came out in the news what a hard time we in tech have - aging out, H1-bs, offshoring, etc....
And I advise young people, unless you are in the 99.99th percentile - you have been offered full academic scholarships to MIT, Yale, Harvard or even Stanford - stay out of tech.
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Get a job bagging groceries in Mexico, in the big supermarkets. You'll easily make 50 bucks a day in tips, which down there is still a small fortune. Believe me, I know...
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By the time the kids are 40, medical will be all but wiped out by automation. Look at IBM's current work on an elder care oriented robot for example. It is one of thousands of medical automation projects underway. And every time we create a new test that any nurse could give to diagnose something, we move towards the day when no doctor will be needed for diagnostics. No job is safe anymore. Even prostitution is in imminent danger in the two to three decade timeframe.
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Truck drivers, one of the largest employment opportunities in the world, will be the next occupation hit as self-driving transport vehicles begin hitting the road in the next few years.
My Physical Therapist isn't going to get automated (Score:2)
Now, if _my_ job's automated and I lose my health insurance that's another matter entirely. I'm in a lot less pain since seeing a PT. But it's still a luxury compared too food. And I'm an American. No socialized medicine for me. We just torpedoed that boat with the biggest, orangest clown in history.
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Liability? of a megacorp? (Score:2)
Even without more "tort reform" which is continually attempted all the time, you think a big corporation is going to actually WORRY about being sued? No. Just look at history even when they are punished big they usually pay next to nothing and make more profit knowingly killing people. Tobacco continues just fine and they kill about 11% of their customers. Before you say "customers choose death" think about you choosing a robot doctor over a real one. Enough people will do so to have a period of transit
Re:I wish (Score:5, Informative)
It's estimated that up to 45% of the jobs that people in the US currently do today are up for automation in the next couple of decades. That's 45% of the workforce, and if you're one of the those dislocated you're not going to just be able to switch to another field, because people there have also been dislocated and they're also looking for work.
If you took a list of jobs, ranked by the number of people who do each one, you'll have to go all of the way down to number 33 on the list to find a new job that didn't exist 100 years ago: computer programmer.
Sure, there have been technological advancements and "new" jobs, but most "new" jobs aren't new at all, because by and large the general categories have remained the same: driver, delivery man, manager, secretary, assembly line worker. It's just today that the assembly line worker snaps together circuit boards and screens as opposed to stamping car parts or sewing together buggy whips.
The cabby of today was the carriage driver of yesterday, and, if Uber has it's way, replaced by the self-driving car of tomorrow. In fact, Uber has publicly stated that it's looking to replace all of the cab drivers in NY (51,000) with autonomous vehicles in the next decade.
Major trucking companies are looking to replace their biggest expense (drivers) with autonomous trucks (trials are running... today). There go 3.5 million truck drivers.
And if all of those autonomous vehicles hit their safety numbers, then accidents decline dramatically. That's fewer mechanics and body shop workers, fewer insurance claims adjusters, fewer ambulance and emergency room workers and staff, fewer police needed for speed traps, fewer cooks and truck stop workers, and so on, in every town and city across the US.
Pretty soon you have massive dislocations as entire local industries collapse and -- even worse -- as the industries that depended upon the incomes of those workers collapse, which widens the circle even further. (Can't run a restaurant serving food to people who can't pay for it.)
All told, here in the US we're looking at employment disruptions measured in the tens of millions, and all of them occurring within the next decade.
The Great Depression had an unemployment rate of 25%. What happens when that number hits 45%?
I'd advise that everyone watch the following video, Humans Need Not Apply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I'm not a Luddite, but I am worried that our civilization is going to go through a few major tectonic upheavals in a relatively short period of time.
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Re: I wish (Score:4, Informative)
Please reread the above comments for comprehension this time. We're on track to having nearly HALF the country out of work in the next couple of decades. And as I pointed out below, it doesn't matter how inexpensive things become if you have no job (and as such no income) with which to buy them.
And given current trends, it's looking as if more and more of the wealth generated by our increased productivity is going to be locked up by the top 1%, with a good chance that the rest of us is going to be living in a Matt Damon/Elysium-style world, begging for scraps and choking on our own pollution.
So tell me, oh wise one, given our current corporate, economic and political structure, do you see all of that wealth and productivity being distributed to those that need it? Or will the rich keep on getting richer while more and more people and regions lose work, lose income, and lose hope?
The benefits of automation and productivity and renewable energy can be used to benefit us all... or a very, very, very few.
Hence my comment regarding tectonic upheavals. Without good planning, things in our country could get very dramatic... and extremely messy, with no guarantees that the future we get is the one best for us all.
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No, firstly a luddite wants to just stop the clock. There are other potential solutions.
Next, when your income is ZERO, it hardly matters if things cost one tenth what they do now because you still don't have it. And that's assuming the savings actually get passed on to the consumer. Sure, some will but there's a reason corporate profits are at an all time high.
It's not an insoluble problem, but our current political forces aren't even vaguely interested in solving it.
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Being an entrepreneur is the thing that doesn't seem quickly replaced today by AI,
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Good luck with the revolution when police is composed of killer robotic overlords...
Good luck with changing the laws, when the people that make them are those who will loose the most from it (example: how do the poor in the US get rid of wall street short term grinding when Carl Icahn is chosen as regulatory adviser)
The problem with comparing to history is that's it's never relevant, because time doesn't repeat itself, it only goes forward. For example, history of the black death in Europe shows that overcr
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The Great Depression had an unemployment rate of 25%. What happens when that number hits 45%?
Two things:
1. A one child per couple policy, like China used to have.
2. "Affirmative" Soylent Green Action.
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Kids - go into Medical.
Terrible advice. The American medical system is bloated and inefficient. It is ripe for automation.There are AI systems nearing approval that can do radiology (X-Ray) analysis better than humans. A nurse with a flowchart can diagnose better than a doctor without one, and a flowchart can be automated. Much medical work is routine and repetitive.
stay out of tech.
More terrible advice. Programming will be the LAST job to be automated, because once that is automated you can use it bootstrap the automation of everything else.
Re: I wish (Score:2)
My advice to that guy's kids: come to China, befriend some CCP shmuck on a level of provincial party commitee, and milk the local nouveaux riche untill the end of their days.
The amount of moneys stupid americons poured into Chinese good-for-nothing companies is staggering, it will last for a generation even if everybody with access to those money will smoke opium with hookers doin nothing their entire life.
In Shanghai, a dumb bloody _bike rental_ company of only 13 men got an $80m round, and later $20m and
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More terrible advice. Programming will be the LAST job to be automated, because once that is automated you can use it bootstrap the automation of everything else.
Well it depends what you call programming. If it's the algorithmic part, i.e., designing a sequence of logical steps to follow to solve a problem expressed in natural language, then I'm ok, it will take a bit longer than the remaining. But that's math, not really programming, right? If its translating specification into machine code (pissing code as we call it), then it's already started to be automated. My guess is that in less than 15 years nobody will be hired to write code for the sake of it.
NP-Complete (Score:2)
Remember your computer science! Programming has a long list of HARD problems. The classic Satisfiability Problems are all NP-Complete perhaps you had to use those to build up equivalence proofs to proof others are also NP-Complete?
Here is a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(One does wonder way SAT solver tools are not available for programming... like language/compiler level integration.)
This is just an aspect of programming not the whole process; thankfully for us the fundamentals are HARD
We die (Score:2)
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It's really not.
They've been doing this for some considerable time - way before the most recent concerns in the US election.
However - it does show that any new factory 'bringing jobs back' to the USA is only going to bring a tiny fraction of those jobs - there will be few if any assembly workers doing the same task on every phone that passes through the line.
May as well build in the USA and Europe. (Score:2)
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If you're able to automate everything then it makes sense to manufacture closer to point of sale. The thing that would stop that though is that all of the chip suppliers are also in the area.
That would make sense if manufacturing in China were simply a labor-payroll-saving decision. As you mention, chip suppliers are in the area, so there are still logistical considerations. But you also forget about differences in government bureaucracy between China and the US/EU. And environmental regulations about the waste being created, regardless of whether its man or machine assembly.
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One of my customers who has Chineese-made products found that they should build things in the 'States if any of the following was true
- you could build an automated production line for it.
- the device contained a computer-based controller, or
- the device was big or heavy.
That had them building, in that particular case, in Marshalltown, Iowa.
Technology getting less-expensive (Score:2)
Technology has become more-viable and less-expensive. It's more-reliable and takes less maintenance to design, build, and operate. Just like replacing hammers with frame nailers, replacing stacked canned goods with palletized goods on the wooden shipping pallet, and replacing armies of accountants with small offices and spreadsheets (and, eventually, with specialized accounting software), we've now started to replace 300-worker assembly lines with 21 logistics and maintenance staff keeping a more-automat
Re:Technology getting less-expensive (Score:4, Informative)
Except that truck driving and delivery is being automated. Order picking and fulfillment is being automated. Stocking and inventory is being automated.
And those jobs with it. To those people, it doesn't matter if the phone is $300 or $50. Without a job and the income it provides, both are equally out of reach.
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Except that truck driving and delivery is being automated. Order picking and fulfillment is being automated. Stocking and inventory is being automated
There are still human actors involved, which means...
And those jobs with it. To those people, it doesn't matter if the phone is $300 or $50. Without a job and the income it provides, both are equally out of reach
You want to see a fully-automated factory? Look at, oh, any factory. The jobs done in factories are the ones that require too damned much retooling to automate. It costs $150,000 to retool, but saves you $300,000 over 5 years ... but you have to retool every 4 months. Well, humans are cheaper to retool.
Retooling is a fact of technical progress and equipment change. Every t
When automation is cheaper than people in China... (Score:1)
we really need to start seriously rethinking how we distribute resources to people.
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Smart people have been saying that for a while.
The stupid will not be swayed by whatever amount of evidence. After all, they are stupid.
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Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam might offer even cheaper workers, better tax conditions, even better trade deals with more nations, cheaper new factory sites, expanded airports, lower energy prices, housing for the few workers still needed.
Once robots can do more, any cheaper nation can offer a special factory zone and fill it with robots and staff.
What China offered was cheap workers and less tax for a decade with export transport to mo
Trump need to slap them with an import and robot t (Score:3)
Trump need to slap them with an import and robot tax.
Or you can just move it to the usa and we will wave the robot tax for a few years.
Sad! (Score:2)
Doesn't work (Score:2)
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Chopping 80% of the workforce is still a significant problem, don't you think?
Foxconn is not a Chinese Company (Score:2)
Foxconn is a Taiwanese company. They have no obligation to keep mainland Chinese workers employed.