anonconformist

bestkeptsecret said:

somethingsometh said:

bobroo said:

$7B in Robots.

Nothing to get excited over.

You must have missed the "30,000 - 50,000" jobs thing.

I'm not able to reconcile the 2 bits of information. Automated manufacturing means less human intervention. How exactly are the 30-50k jobs being created? You don't need that many people to manage the automation plant. Are these permanent jobs or temporary work contracts for installing and setting up the automation plant?

I can't imagine a scale of manufacturing that uses automation and needs 50k jobs. I'm definitely missing something here.

My formal education is focused on robotics/automation.  While it's possible that there could be that many jobs involved, the amount of production required would be huge.  If the robotics/automation used is rather reliable, a rather light number of technicians for fixing/training the robots is required (unless they're using custom machines for each manufacturing cell, if you train one, you've trained many) and there's not much regular recurring need for humans changing things.  It'd likely be a largely lights-out factory.  Where most of the humans would be required are for putting things into trucks, dealing with deliveries, dealing with things that don't recur in a manner that are cheap/easy to automate, but even that's not that many jobs.

Even if they keep updating the technology on a yearly basis, that still doesn't mean that many employed people to make it happen, with how things are assembled and tested: I've been there, done that, on a clean room automated environment (I worked 4 years in a CD production plant).  Because they'd be making displays, chances are this will be a clean room facility, though it may not need as stringent cleanliness as even a compact disc requires.