Foxconn to substitute workers with 1 million robots in 3 years

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  • Reply 61 of 67
    jragostajragosta Posts: 10,473member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by oniontalk View Post


    Isn't this exactly what Moore's Law predicts?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law



    Where does Moore's Law predict that ONE COMPANY is going to buy a number equal to 30% of the entire world's supply of industrial robots in one year?
  • Reply 62 of 67
    rtm135rtm135 Posts: 310member
    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by punkrocker27ka View Post


    does the future have any jobs for humans?



  • Reply 63 of 67
    cloudgazercloudgazer Posts: 2,161member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by newbee View Post


    My bad for using the wrong terminology (I'm not in the industry) .... but a pig in different makeup ... is still a pig ... is it not?



    A pig is not a chicken, neither is it a cow. If you wish to discuss farm animals you may as well get it right before you try to milk the horse.



    Quote:

    In other words ... you are concerned that you made a lousy bet.



    Not necessarily - there are plenty of reasons for wanting to use them, for example Apple may wish to buy treasuries of a particular maturity but be unable to find them on the market at a reasonable price, they could instead chose to buy a mix of corporate bonds and hedge away the credit risk.

    Quote:

    In other words you would lose money on your lousy bet.



    No - I'm talking about transaction costs on switching positions. It's cheaper to use a CDS to change your risk profile than it is to sell or buy debt. At this point your bet hasn't made or lost money, you are changing the bet before the race begins.



    Quote:

    In other words, you have transfered the accountability from the dummy who made the bet to some other unsuspecting sucker .... in this case to the buyer of those "government bonds" that is backed by the taxpayer ... who had no say in the original bad bet. Show me the "value" in that to anyone except the dummy who made the bet, in the first place.



    No - you transferred the risk to a willing market participant, in this case it might be Goldman Sachs, or JPM. Any big player in the CDS market. The only big firm that came unstuck trading CDS was AIG, which was an insurance firm that didn't seem to have a clue that it was playing in a credit market. A CDS is a contract where one party pays another to assume credit risk, Joe the Plumber can't go selling CDSs - there are no 'unsuspecting suckers' in the market.



    Quote:

    I'd be willing to bet that the effectiveness of that ability had some problems showing the "real value" of "credit risk" about 60 days before the meltdown on 2008 .... not much value there, imho.



    All it does is allow you to determine what market beliefs regarding credit is. It doesn't determine 'true' credit worthiness, that's impossible. All price discovery ever allows you to do is to accurately determine what the mass of participants believe, but it's still valuable.



    Quote:

    In other words .... the taxpayer.



    No. This is fundamental. The central bank is not the tax-payer. When the Fed lends money through the discount window it doesn't arrive on the Government's balance sheet. The Fed isn't permitted to bail out insolvent banks, which is why it didn't save the S&Ls back in the 80s, but it is permitted and required to lend money to solvent institutions dealing with a financial panic.



    Bear Stearns & Lehman were both permitted to go to the wall during the meltdown. AIG was effectively nationalized but that was because of the impact that its failure would have on main-street, not on wall street.



    The 'tax payer bailout' story was a great driver of headlines and revenues for the media, and a great source of publicity for politicians - but it was never as simple as it was painted.
  • Reply 64 of 67
    cloudgazercloudgazer Posts: 2,161member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MJ1970 View Post


    This is the one point where you're right. The central bank is a mechanism for monopolizing the monetary system and cartelizing the banking system for the benefit of bankers and at the expense of the taxpayers and average citizen.



    Most everything else you say is right but this just isn't so. The primary beneficiary of the Fed is the US federal government which receives a significant dividend from it every year. Around 45Billion in 2009. This is the income on seignorage as well as any income on loans through the discount window.



    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011103892.html



    Quote:

    By "have to" I mean to say that is was not necessary. The was another option. Let them go bankrupt and take the losses. Some think this would have been catastrophic. It's not clear that's even remotely true.



    In the UK the government dithered over what to do and the results were frankly terrible. There was a literal bank run on Northern Rock, and in the end the government were forced to nationalize it or see tens of thousands of people with no savings and no current account. The government was then forced to arrange a BoE led bailout of much of the rest of the UK financial sector and part nationalize some other banks, because after seeing one bank-run the public were ready to do it all over again. NR didn't even go bust because of CDSs or CDOs. It went bust because it depended on lending in the wholesale markets to fund retail mortgates. Its business plan was fragile in retrospect, but it didn't suffer a massive loan delinquency problem and it didn't screw up with fancy instruments it didn't understand. NR exemplifies the problem that even a reasonably well run bank can face in a financial panic.



    Allowing the banks to fail would have been catastrophic, and it would have turned the long recession we've seen into a full blown depression. Allowing AIG to fail in the US would have had the same impact.



    The US took a huge risk letting Lehman and Bear fail, but since they weren't retail institutions the damage was contained, however after allowing them to fail the government had to contain the damage or risk a domino effect hitting retail institutions - and had AIG or Citi gone kaput we all might be queuing for soup round about now.
  • Reply 65 of 67
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jragosta View Post


    No, I've offered EXPERIENCE in installing and using industrial robots in a production environment - which no one else here seems to have.



    Oh, and btw, let's look at the facts.



    In 2007, there were only a million industrial robots in the entire world. 114,000 new ones were installed in the world in 2007:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_robot



    A different source confirms the 1 M worldwide number in 2007 and says it grew to 1.3 M in 2008:

    http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/r...bot-population



    Same source says estimated WORLDWIDE sales in 2010 would be 1.0 M and 2011 would be 1.2 million.

    http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/r...d_half_million



    Now, given those figures, how in the world do you think that ONE factory is going to install 300,000 robots in one year and 1 M in 3 years? It's just not remotely plausible.



    Complete intelligent assembly/fabrication systems? Sources are still separating those as two different system types: the SCARA/articulated/Cartesian independent arm systems or integrated line systems (which really begs the term "robotic" as the articulators are built into the line and not independent robots in the classical sense). If the head of FoxConn was actually talking about integrated intelligent fabrication or assembly systems (and not really independent robotic systems - which is jragosta's background and where he references his numbers from - I believe) then there is a huge grey area in terminology - individual assembler systems could be called robotic systems and could be run independently but are actually part of the line control intelligence system, providing both assembly and Q/A feedback to the main intelligence control. The entire line could be called a "robot" as it has a unitized and singular function managed by the line controller, but that would make the statement of the numbers involved impossible. If he is referring to the component robotic systems that are part of the intelligent assembly system then you could argue the numbers a little more realistically.



    Ultimately, I am forced to agree with jragosta - he really didn't express the numbers correctly one way or another, regardless of system. Perhaps he was watching I, Robot the night before and assumed that was the demo for his plants.
  • Reply 66 of 67
    jragostajragosta Posts: 10,473member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by fecklesstechguy View Post


    Complete intelligent assembly/fabrication systems? Sources are still separating those as two different system types: the SCARA/articulated/Cartesian independent arm systems or integrated line systems (which really begs the term "robotic" as the articulators are built into the line and not independent robots in the classical sense). If the head of FoxConn was actually talking about integrated intelligent fabrication or assembly systems (and not really independent robotic systems - which is jragosta's background and where he references his numbers from - I believe) then there is a huge grey area in terminology - individual assembler systems could be called robotic systems and could be run independently but are actually part of the line control intelligence system, providing both assembly and Q/A feedback to the main intelligence control. The entire line could be called a "robot" as it has a unitized and singular function managed by the line controller, but that would make the statement of the numbers involved impossible. If he is referring to the component robotic systems that are part of the intelligent assembly system then you could argue the numbers a little more realistically.



    Ultimately, I am forced to agree with jragosta - he really didn't express the numbers correctly one way or another, regardless of system. Perhaps he was watching I, Robot the night before and assumed that was the demo for his plants.



    He used the term 'industrial robots' which has a standard meaning within the industry. As shown by several sources above (and you could find many more), the numbers cited are completely unreasonable.



    Now, if he really meant 'intelligent tools', then the numbers might be correct, but the terminology was wrong. So my statement that his figures were BS is still correct.
  • Reply 67 of 67
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by ezduzit View Post


    can't american robots work as cheap as chinese robots? they can become bilingual.



    That was my thought as well. If the whole purpose of outsourcing overseas was cheap labor why can't we have a US plant full of robots? Or does each robot still require a dedicated worker to keep it operational. Or is there a fear that US robots will unionize and demand wages, benefits and vacation time?
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