Only way the iPhone will be made in America is if was automated.
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Apple's Attempts to Automate Product Assembly Have Met With Limited Success
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This is known as the “Luddite Fallacy”
Reducing employment in unskilled assembly positions tends to have the benefit of boosting employment in the service sector, which has been the overall trend in North America for a long time. Service here not meaning just things like fast food and retail, but also including medical care, certain aspects of engineering, etc.
The service sector tends to be fairly protected from automation, as humans value the human to human interaction that comes with most of those positions. It’s not easy to negotiate or relate to a machine, after all.
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I love the punchline at the end: Robots kept destroying Apple devices so eventually Apple decided to just tell the robots to destroy Apple devices for recycling. "Hey, we found something they're good at!"
This thread should be moved to PRSI as the topic naturally leads to interesting discussions about the value of work, social safety nets etc.
Nope, not that easy, you need to ramp down the force before it reaches the torque cutoff/setting.
Human touch is just better for now, also, as the article explains, *the crews are tiny, we can feel if such a screw goes in in the right way, it's such a small force that I have a hard time believing a machine can do that anytime soon.
*Have you seen the screws in an iPhone, some of them are tiny, like a mm or less, the thread is so fine you can't distinguish it.
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It's called Capitalism, it doesn't make sense to criticise an individual company for doing it - it's what the system is meant to do. It's the system that needs to change.
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Isn't it the case that during that time there was a vast rise in basic labour jobs in the rest of the world, creating some sort of balance with the services jobs in the West? As those jobs are automated, what will happen? Is a workforce of nothing but service sector workers viable? And what about service sectors jobs being automated? I've read articles about the beginnings of this is finance, law, programming, etc.
Yes, I was think the same thing. I am always watching the show "how it's made" and there was an episode where they were making Western Digital Black HDD's there was not a single human touching anything until the last boxing point. It was really amazing. Along with many episodes where there ae robots producing entire circuit boards end to end.
You are somewhat correct but when a CEO like Tim strays out of the CEO role and makes a habit of making very public and emotional statements about equality, helping your brothers and sisters, helping the vulnerable move up, and then does things in the company operations which are in contradiction to his pronouncements, it makes complete sense to criticise his company. It doesn't make what other companies do correct but most CEO's are not trying to play both sides of the equation. Tim has his reasons (whatever they may be) and fair enough, but that then opens him up to full scrutiny.
The jobs robots can do are already done by robots because profits. Covid moves the cost benefit curve a bit but it can't drastically change things.
I really wouldn't have expected screws to be so hard. I would have thought this to have been the precise kind of task where machines would outperform humans.
They were trying to automate the production of a product that was designed to be hand built. Hardly any surprise that there were such difficulties. Design the product for automated production. It's not rocket science.
Be it as it may, I much prefer going to the do it yourself line, because it is faster, easier and I don't have to deal with less than friendly cashier people. While I can understand why they may be less than happy and friendly, these were always jobs for schools kids and older people. But now that our education standards have dropped into the crapper (especially math and sciences....that is where the future is) and laziness it's not going to change.
Please don't take what I am saying for nastiness or arrogance, I am just saying it is a shame where we have gone in terms of education and people value. When my daughter was in grade school and middle school, some of her classmates were sent to extra schooling (Kumon) specifically for more math and science because their parents didn't feel they (the kids) were getting adequate education in those areas from public schools.
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Sofar it’s seen that even if a new parent industry doesn’t drum up as many jobs as the one it’s replacing, the supporting industries fill the gaps, if not exceeding the original amount. Take airlines for example, not that many people comparatively are pilots, but many people work in tourism, as stewards/stewardess, as support staff at airports, etc.
I would imagine if we could perfect automation to the point that it could assemble anything better than humans, we would indeed all be focused on service industries, or living off of some form of basic income system.
Automating many service sector jobs is hard, and some impossible, as humans need face to face interaction, and generally do not enjoy the rigidity of talking to a machine (How many times have you called a company only to think “please just give me a real human”).
I’m in the civil engineering field myself. I don’t fear automation at all. Sure, you could automate a lot of structural design, and it essentially is already thanks to analysis software, but at the end of the day you need someone who knows what they are doing to make sure the numbers look right and nothing seems out of place.
Re self checkout, that also generates many more jobs then it destroys. Now you’ve got programmers, designers, engineers, tech support, service staff, that all must exist to maintain this industry.
Good to know but I would say that we have made some advances in automation in the ensuing 40 years, wouldn't you? "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try, again." Wiiliam Edward Hickson
It seems more likely that, right now, humans are more adept at learning, training, and applying fine motor skills for things like tightening down a small fastener - not that we are inherently more accurate than a robot could be. It must be a constant cost-benefit review of how much should be spent upfront to try to automate the operation vs. having humans do it at a higher operating cost but lower startup cost.
You are speaking of the US education standards, unfriendly "cashier people" and laziness so your point stands. You may be surprised what you would find in some other countries.
Yep, fair enough, I suppose I just never take a big rich CEO's pronouncements of leftiness all that seriously. In effect, when I hear him say "we will be nice" my brain inserts the clause "within the very narrow range permissible to a big capitalist organisation".
I don’t know. What’s surprising to me is that it’s the same issues today as back then. Automated conveyors were a huge expensive problem in the 80’s. Screws too.
Seems they still are.
I dunno man, here in Britain I find most shop staff to be perfectly pleasant, but I prefer self-service cos I'm just an antisocial misanthrope. I suppose human rights and true equality for everybody, I just don't want too have to talk to anyone!
Speaking of customer service - I seem to see two extreme and opposite portrayals of American customer service in the media - people are either all big over the top friendliness or they're surly and rude. What's that about? Aren't people just people?
Who do they think is making the micro circuitry and smaller parts on the inside? It’s not that automation can’t do it it’s that Apple didn’t have the right people to do it. We have the technology both mechanically and software esp with the large advancements in AI.
I'd say that the problem is not with the robot but with the fact that we're trying to design a robot to work with parts designed for humans. Instead of trying to design a robot to deal with tiny screws, maybe the fastening system itself needs to be redesigned to be used by a robot. I also call BS on the adhesive problem. Aside from the fact that adhesive sucks for the aftermarket, machines are capable of applying tiny blobs of solder paste and drilling tiny vias in PCBs. They should be able to handle adhesive application.
Yes, your point stands as I have only been to a few other countries, so I have limited "personal" experience, but I do read about others and work directly with people from a lot of different countries...working for a corporate financial company that does business in a lot of different countries. I am/try to be VERY open minded and respectful of other cultures.
Yep. He literally ripped out a lot of automation and replace it with people. People adapt better to unforeseen problems.
Here's a decent article about Tesla struggle to automate. The tldr is the more complex the process, the more human interaction may be required.
Tesla’s problem: overestimating automation, underestimating humans
Elon Musk ‘s Tesla has serious production problems.
theconversation.com
