More About the Robots Are Coming and It's Getting Faster

The Robots are Coming is an ongoing theme on Ithaka and plenty of evidence has been presented thus far but generally the reaction seems to be, well, maybe in fifty years.  We insist they're coming right now and here's more proof of that contention from Foxconn.  (RedOrbit:  iPhone manufacturer announces plans to automate factories)

According to MacRumors and The Verge, the company plans to carry out its automation process in three phases, the first of which will involve using machines to perform tasks believed to be too dangerous or repetitious for human employees to continue doing. In phase two, entire production lines will be replaced, and by phase three, factories will be nearly 100% automated.

- RO

Foxconn has come up previously in the context of robotic automation but the last mention was for replacement of sixty thousand human jobs.  In this update, apparently they will replace most or all human workers.

How far along is Foxconn’s plan? As Dai Jia-peng, general manager of the firm’s Automation Technology Development Committee, told Digital Times, factories in Chengdu, western China, Shenzhen, southern China, and Zhengzhou, northern China, have all already been brought to the second or third phases of the program. Furthermore, he said that there are 10 fully automated or “lights-out” production lines in factories located in Chengdu, Chongqing and Zhengzhou.

- RO

The time delay between the news of Foxconn replacing sixty thousand human jobs and now was only about a year and nowhere close to the fifty-year estimate from conservatives who don't believe it's coming so fast.

There's the question of economic viability since there's no chance this will take over corporate production if it costs more.  In general that has translated to high conversion costs but lower costs over the long run with some unknown period passing before the company gets a pay off.  Given the aggressive pursuit by Foxconn, apparently that pay off comes quickly.

There is no hysteria in the Rockhouse regarding the Robo Conversion even when many human jobs are lost because, technically speaking, they are really shitty jobs.  It's probably time to reevaluate your life when you observe there's a high incidence of suicide among coworkers lest you become one of them.  Perhaps we're being too provincial about it but, here at the Rockhouse, we regard that circumstance as a shitty job.

There's a parallel sub-theme of The Need for a Guaranteed Universal Income but we really don't want to confound in this article about the subject of the technology with the matter of the inevitable Socialist changes.  The justification for a GUI is the loss of so many jobs but that mechanism will keep when many don't really believe there will be the Age of Robots or not soon enough to be important.

The absence of hysteria about the robos is also based on the fact a whole lot of human jobs are shitty because they're repetitious and boring.  It doesn't take a particularly intelligent robo to take over that kind of job since anomalies or anything weird aren't acceptable on a production line or it breaks.

There's another echelon of jobs above that one and they're repetitive but they're also strange and that's why the human requirement because Artificial Intelligence seems often to be trying to be too clever with grand pronouncements about what it can do for humanity or not clever enough in which it manifests as Siri on an iPhone.

Phone bank jobs are likely candidates for robos but they're not sophisticated enough yet to handle it when a caller wants to fly to Europe but wants to go by way of Milwaukee to collect her grandmother who has a two-hundred pound medicine chest and she won't travel without it so what can we do?

A robo may still flip its gears trying to solve that problem whereas a human will cut through it quickly to say, "You're daft.  Get the fuck out."

There's no need to index previous articles on Ithaka on the matter of The Robots Are Coming even though it would look impressive.  It's probably better to do a generic search for material on the subject to collect more opinions on the subject.  Here at the Rockhouse, we don't like fortune tellers and they do so much of it on MSM news.  We want to present the facts and you make the call.  The thinking is the more information at your disposal, the better the call you will make.

Note:  this is not a reprise of "Everybody Knows" in a different form and we do not see the robots as the coming plague Leonard Cohen wrote into the song.  We see this as potentially the best thing which ever happened to humanity in the time when humans don't have to do 'xxx' work anymore and 'xxx' translates into a thousand horrible things over history as all the things we don't want to do.

Fine.  Let the robots have those jobs and how about getting along with evolving society to deal with it.