From Singularity Hub:
Terry Gou is CEO of electronics manufacturer Foxconn. He’s also a big proponent of replacing humans with robots in factories. Gou said Foxconn would replace human workers with a million robots in three years. That was three years ago.Okay, there may have been some hints:
Since that first announcement, Gou has indeed pursued robotics, developing his own robotic arms (or Foxbots as they’re called) to replace humans in his automated factories of the future. But his million robot workforce has yet to materialize.
What has materialized?
Earlier this year, Foxconn said it was preparing to deploy 10,000 Foxbots costing $20,000 to $25,000 to make iPhones. It was said the robots could produce some 30,000 devices a year and Foxconn would add some 30,000 robots annually.
It isn’t a million robots, but would represent a pretty serious challenge to human workers if accurate and scaleable. To date, the reason factories like Foxconn’s aren’t fully automated is because robots are unable to match the dexterity of human hands and lack the judgement to perform quality control checks on the assembly line.
But instead of the bots driving mass layoffs, the firm reportedly hired a record 100,000 human workers to cope with demand for the latest iPhone. Further, the robots, it was said, would merely assist existing human workers, not replace them.
And then it surfaced that Gou was dissatisfied with his first generation Foxbots. They were not up to snuff in terms of proficiency and flexibility. Generation two is forthcoming. But it’s apparent Gou’s million robot revolution is nowhere in sight.
So who cares if a CEO made an overexuberant forecast? For one, too often big claims make headlines and aren’t scrutinized down the road to see how well they hold up. But there’s another good reason to keep checking in on Gou’s Foxbots.
In the past, we’ve written about worries that robots will replace humans and cause structural unemployment—that is, non-cyclical long-term joblessness. To a degree, Foxconn’s progress represents an early benchmark for such concerns.
Here we have a manufacturing giant with every reason to pour resources into automation. They’ve had three years to develop robots dexterous enough to maneuver circuit boards, place touch screens, and generally automate processes.
The task, however, has proven more difficult than it first appeared, the development has been slower, and human-level performance harder to match. Further, the number of bots is less than promised by two orders of magnitude, and the number of human workers required isn’t down at all—in fact, at least for now, it’s rising.
I don’t take this as evidence the robot revolution won’t happen. Or that it’ll be much slower than expected. But I do think it offers insight into how hard robotics still is—particularly when it comes to physical tasks humans can do without blinking an eye.
Common wisdom has it that the first wave of robots automated manual and physical tasks. But that’s not quite right. There is are still a significant number of manual and physical jobs that are much more easily and cost-effectively performed by humans....MORE
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“Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
- Foxconn CEO Terry Gou at an annual family day for staff at the Taipei Zoo.
Via the Financial Times
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