The View | Here’s the perfect rebuttal to automation alarmists who say robots are taking over
iPhone manufacturer Foxconn says the robot revolution is a gradual process limited by the need for rapid adaptation on the assembly line
For those who may have missed it, a very interesting interview with a Foxconn Technology Group executive ran in this paper over the weekend. The world’s biggest single employer of factory workers came clean on its grand plan to switch to robot labour: it won’t be happening.
The plan was first mooted in 2011, when the iPhone manufacturer’s chief executive and chairman, Terry Guo, vowed that within three years, a million robots would be deployed at its China-based factories. The “million” figure was unsettling, because that was approximately the number of human workers at Hon Hai Precision, aka Foxconn Technology. Moreover, those workers, recognising that size brings clout, were agitating for better pay and conditions. Was it really possible to just replace them with robots in three short years?
Banking analysts who cover this listed company were doubtful. However, technology boosters and automation alarmists seized on the story. Even low-cost factory workers in China were about to lose their jobs to machines! What surer sign of the coming apocalypse for labour.
In early 2014, business professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, in their book The Second Machine Age, reported a very puzzling update on the story: that Foxconn had already installed hundreds of thousands of robots to replace human workers, and a completely automated future was just around the corner.
In fact, as Sanford Bernstein analyst Alberto Moel explained to me at the time, there was no evidence of such an undertaking, which would have appeared on the balance sheet in the form of an explosive expansion in capital expenditure. For sure, Foxconn was increasing its investments in automation, and saving labour costs in the process. But the company was not about to go full robot.
