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Foxconn to Replace a Portion of its Workers with 1 Million Robots
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Luckily, the degree I'm working on will essentially guarantee me a job in it, but this probably can't be said about all degrees/industries.
iRobot anyone?... I can seriously see the top of Apple website where it has iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc....add in iRobot....cheap price of oly $4999.
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1'000'000 robots? Give that robots compleat most assembly function that much quicker than people, you'd think this would lead to tens of thousands of job losses!
1'000'000 robots? Give that robots compleat most assembly function that much quicker than people, you'd think this would lead to tens of thousands of job losses!
Yes a 2 tiered economy. The uber rich and the uber poor and no one in the middle. Not really the best thing for society I'd say. My country is facing this two tiered economy issue right now.
Kind of reminds me of the old ways. Like 500 years ago. A few rich nobles and millions of poor peasants. A two tiered economy. And what was the solution there? Civil wars in the US, UK, Russia and many other places. The only difference is the rich earnt their cash today and are not born into it like the nobles of the past.
So yeah it's like history repeating itself.
People forget one important thing: networking. It's more important than your degree. Who you know is everything. I've not started my PhD yet, but I already have two guaranteed jobs post graduation.
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No, you also have to be willing to work hard and not expect that it's someone else's job to pay you a living wage. Unfortunately very few people can grasp that. They all (see many of the posts above) think jobs fall from the sky. In fact some enterprising person creates each and every one because of his own greed and ambition. Learning that lesson to your core will make you have a chance at success in the real world.
res1233 said:
No, you also have to be willing to work hard and not expect that it's someone else's job to pay you a living wage. Unfortunately very few people can grasp that. They all (see many of the posts above) think jobs fall from the sky. In fact some enterprising person creates each and every one because of his own greed and ambition. Learning that lesson to your core will make you have a chance at success in the real world.
You don't understand. The robot saves the company money, and it saves consumers money. Yes, someone lost a job in doing a task that a robot could do, but someone else gained a job in making robots.
For new jobs to be created, old ones must be done away with. And I think you'll agree that a robotic engineer is a much more exciting and useful job than being employee A who sticks a chip on a board.
In my specific field, networking and marketing yourself is not nearly as important as how skilled you are.
We are defined by our mortality rate.
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It may just be the endpoint for everything. As technology increases, humans will be needed less and less for everything. The problem is there are only so many design type jobs to go around. The end game is that you're going to have BILLIONS of people out of work some day and unlike the Jetsons, it's not going to be some fabulous Utopia where everyone sits on their butt and relaxes and just enjoys living and that's because all world's wealth will be held by a very few and everyone else can go to hell, I suppose. More likely, you will have a people's revolution at some point in time that will make the French Revolution look like a picnic and it is at that point that we will revert back to the stone age as the discarded masses revolt and attack everyone that knows anything about anything (and therefore has money and power). You don't need a world war to destroy the future, you only need billions of hungry people.
Don't kid yourself. It could eventually happen if technology follows the point of inevitability where humans are no longer needed to build or service anything. Robots will one day service themselves, build themselves and pretty much replace the entire 'labor' market. Exactly what is everyone else supposed to do? The rich won't pay people to sit on their butts like in the Jetsons cartoon. You will have a nightmare scenario for all involved. And since absolutely no one (except the Chinese, ironically) take the idea of population control seriously, the ever expanding masses will only make the problem that much worse.
We could use technology to make lives easier, but we have already seen that computers and other technology simply make companies demand more productivity instead of making life easier. Forget 3 or more days off a week. Many people work 60 hour work weeks and do the labor of what took hundreds of people to do in the past. Many companies would rather pay overtime than have to bring on more workers with benefits packages and so you get overworked. That's progress? Maybe if you're wired in the brain like a robot. No, technology has made life harder and more stressful in many respects because it is competition and greed that drive the machine.
Then what would be the point of using robots any way. The truth is a lot less people are needed to build the robots than the people these robots replace, that's the whole point, and it inevitably leads to lots of less people having a job.
Another bad news is that there's probably more than 10 "money worker" to every robot service worker, so it definetely leads to less jobs.
It's inevitable, but the whole system needs to be revised. The first step is to get rid of the obsolete and incorrect notion that everyone who doesn't have the fortune to have one of the finite number of jobs is leeching off of society.
Well you sound like a surgeon then, and yes, in that case it's quite true from what I hear. There are some jobs that are still skill driven, or rather statistic driven, but I would stick with my original statement as a blanket approach to most industries.
And that will be the day of skynet. Probably not a nuclear war like the movies. But people will make the first batch of robots. And then the robots will make the 2nd batch, and 3rd batch and so on and so on. Till you get to a point where the whole work force is 100% not human.
Then what happens? People need to eat. And food will never be free. And that will be a very bleak future for anyone around at the time.
I agree 100%. A lot of unemployed people volunteer for various things. Volunteer work is well in Australia one of the backbones of society. I respect people who give their time purely to help the community. There's not enough people willing to help for the sake of helping and no more.
Just great. Instead of humans, robots are now going to experience those poor working conditions. We all know what happens with robots and that kind of environment. Its only a matter of time. Have we not learned anything from movie history?
I'm glad I'm not in that boat. What will your doctorate be in? And are you in danger of being replaced by a robot one day?
Agreed. We all must pay our dues.
Agreed 100%. My company laid off people for a task that was taken over by autmated software. Then, in my department, they are hiring interns to the job instead of a full time employees w/benefits....and interns cant do anything right, so i end up working till 8
I think the issue is that the person who lost their job isn't getting the new one. The topic of creating jobs was aimed at providing work for unskilled laborers.
Scary piece of news.
Also I wouldn't like to work for Foxconn. Terrible conditions and after a couple of years you get a letter: "Because we now employ robots, you serve us no purpose."
A logical way for a company to head really, if they prove more efficient and less money-consuming, but still, one must take into account the humane side of things.
On a side note, if they work just as good as my Roomba, I might pass on upcoming iPhone models
Also I wouldn't like to work for Foxconn. Terrible conditions and after a couple of years you get a letter: "Because we now employ robots, you serve us no purpose."
A logical way for a company to head really, if they prove more efficient and less money-consuming, but still, one must take into account the humane side of things.
On a side note, if they work just as good as my Roomba, I might pass on upcoming iPhone models