[Silicon Valley] Apple iPhones: Brought to you by automation

I think its a bit silly to imagine a future where man is b

You often use blog-like sites as sources. Just FYI, quoting someone else does not make it a legit source.

 

If capitalism is about efficiency, and payroll is always the highest expense, it only makes sense that the end goal is to remove humans out of the equation.

 

The topic is about automation. You stated "Automation doesn't replace workers, but rather changes the way the workers do their job". Foxconn replaces 60K factory workers with robots.

 

Workers beg for automation to replace them when they keep asking for more money and more benefits. Those who advocate for a "living wage" are effectively asking for as much automation as possible to put people out of work anywhere possible.

 

Is your solution to reduce wage? That can only go so far.

If you work for free, maybe you won't be replaced. I said maybe because robot does a better job in many tasks and human will be replaced anyway regardless for those tasks.

 

That's kind of a weird suggestion. I point out accurately that those who constantly want more money and more benefits end up out of work and you think I'm suggesting lowering wages? You do understand that there is more than just 2 options right? You don't have to increase or decrease. When you increase the cost of labor with things like Obamacare and minimum wage increases or by having unions work to increase wages you end up putting people out of work. Those fortunate enough to keep their jobs get compensated better, but that doesn't really help those who now are unemployed. That was my point.

Many people end up pricing themselves right out of a job once they make employing them more expensive than having a robot do their job and they have no one to blame but themselves.

 

What ever you think is a solution to automation, understand it's nothing more than a band aid. Automation will trump labor... NO MATTER THE COST OF LABOR.

Your entire narrative is proven false when manufacturers like foxconn are laying off 60000 CHINESE laborers for automated factories. The future is bleak for low skill employment. There really is no going back unless there is an entire paradigm shift such as axing capitalism which will never happen. There is no way around this.

Your narrative is nothing more than right wing wishful thinking.

Even with all that, manufacturing jobs are ever so slightly still increasing though the curve is definitely concave down with respect to time.

 

What? Businesses move like a plague, exploiting laws and workers around the world to prop up stock prices, corporate profits, and executive compensation. As soon as those areas institute tighter labor laws, unions, environmental regulations, and better wages those businesses move on to another area. That's how capitalism is designed to work. Profits over people, always.

 

One thing i have learned from Liberal Logic 101 is that automation is ....



The only way to counter this is to give free education to everyone. Apparently a degree will somehow create jobs....in which 6 out of 7 of them will eventually be replaced with automation (Source: Sweet Lou). I dont understand this concept. Maybe one of the left wing nuts can help me with this.

 

1- Of course not all job loss are due to automation. But automation plays a huge part today when Foxconn just replaced 60K worker with robots at one of its factory.

2- Automation can replace any worker, as soon as it make sense to. We aren't there in any significant way, but cost of robot will continue to go down and we will get there. In that same article, McDonald's former CEO said "It's cheaper to buy a 35k robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who is inefficient, making $15 an hour bagging French fries". As another example - obviously, you don't "offshore" Amzn warehouse since shipping time would be longer and costs would be much higher. So Amzn invested in automation at its huge warehouses in the US which directly replaces human labors.

You started with Apple and presumably these other huge tech companies. Enforcement of current US labor laws is not going to do a single thing to the trend of offshoring for these tech companies.

For the low wage jobs, particularly in construction and agriculture, I don't know how much enforcement will help overall, if not actually causes more issues for everyone. Georgia and Alabama fairly recent examples should give everyone pause on if that's the right solution.

 

Yet another weird thread with a several different half baked premises combining into a quarter baked premise. They'd be good topics if Croquette weren't so bent over trying to finger others with hypocrisy.

Any company worth their salt will invest in automation when it can. Foxconn is not your avg manufacturer. They practically own and operate small towns. They're considered one of the "better manufacturing employers" in China because the one thing Apple wants more than tight margins is the lack of bad press over their shadiness.

The main point you're glossing over with Automation is that a big chunk of Rust Belt Era jobs that once sustained a substantial portion of that region's working middle class are not returning, either because of it being offshored to other countries with their own automated plants or because domestic automation requires multiple skillsets for roughly the same amount of base pay.

This causes a labor supply glut of blue collar labor rather than a mass redirection/refocus promised by a New Economy.

The problem is that no one knows how each innovation impacts each role in each industry, how many people automation can replace, whether the hardware and maintenance necessary for the costs are worth it, and how that affects their brand, product and overall culture.

All of these factors does not negate the broad cuts in labor across different fields from obsolescence through automation.

Your deductive reasoning of one industry doesn't quite fit a much larger model that no one has a clue will turn out.

Congrats. Those million Foxconn workers have some breathing room to change and follow their destiny.

Have a better example where capital costs aren't entwined with individual franchisees? Automation is already rife in the restaurant industry where some of even the fancier ones are outsourcing their menu and customers don't even realize they're eating glorified TV dinners.

Besides, the restaurant industry is service and culturally dependent. No one in Western Europe is crying over living wages for waiters and waitresses because the experience of the customer being wined and dined is part of the meal cost.

People cry about it in the US because having a little **** or spit in your burger can kill a kid here and there as long as the service is fast and the food is cheap.

Your excel example is a flimsy and weak because network computing and the rise of different "x-as-a-service" level offerings are removing capital costs away from the end user (computer/workstation/servers/maintenance) and more into a subscription basis that fits more predictably into an owner's bottom line.

It's not as simple as your thought model frames it because China is reaching PPP at a level that hits a predicted middle income trap. That means it's people are less likely to slave insane hours without benefits, parents are less willing to send children to use their tiny little hands for precision manufacturing, and having more personal standards (entitled pricks) means neighboring SE Asian countries below a 15k per capita GDP are more eager to pry those contracts away with their own human rights tragedies masquerading as factories.

What that also means is that automation will continue to be adopted by large "third world" corporations like FoxCon and cause economies of scale for its little siblings to enter in. This is all in the context of hardware level automation.

Computational automation has been a loyal follower of Moore's Law which means you better pray your candy ass about a painless shift over the way a "worker changes his job".

One=Many...Hell yeah?

**** Trump. Can we automate that?

 

Minimizing suffering and maximizing happiness and freedoms is a great future for mankind.

 

You have been all over the places... unethical company, automation, illegals... not really sure what you are wanting to argue about. Would you want to concisely state again what you are arguing for?

 

The Foxconn example is that even with relatively cheap labor supply, automation is still happening.

So how again is Trump going to bring back manufacturing jobs to America again? Will we magically depress the minimum wage below the Chinese or remove all labor laws and go back to 18hr work days?

The idea is that automation will open up new areas of skilled work (robot mechanics?) and perhaps bring back demand on some older ones like welders.

Sure those will probably get replaced, but by then we've fully realized the terminator/matrix scenario so having a job doesn't matter in that future.

 

Does anyone else notice that when anyone employs the term about 'left wing nut', they refer to draconian practices like free health care and free college. OH NOES!!! There maybe some naive idealism but lol at 'nut'. When right wingers are labeled 'nuts' it's because they say stupid **** like rape prevents pregnancy, or the earth is 10,000 years old or ACTUAL explicit racism or even worse, that the wealthy would rather spend on labor rather than pocketing money they would save with tax rate reductions. Now that is the most lol worthy notion of them all. Such a basic lack of understanding of human psychology right there.

Just pointing out the level of 'nutism' in the American ideological spectrum. Hillary was right

 

Unfortantly, Moore's law curve soon looks like it's about to concave down since the chip manufacturing process is about to hit a quantum limit in a few generations. 5 nanometers by 2021.

 

But have you seen the Jet Black finish and the quality of the camera on the new iPhone 7 Plus?

Amazing!