China’s Troubling Robot Revolution [View all]

[madville]

"In 2014, Chinese factories accounted for about a quarter of the global ranks of industrial robots — a 54 percent increase over 2013. According to the International Federation of Robotics, it will have more installed manufacturing robots than any other country by 2017.

Midea, a leading manufacturer of home appliances in the heavily industrialized province of Guangdong, plans to replace 6,000 workers in its residential air-conditioning division, about a fifth of the work force, with automation by the end of the year. Foxconn, which makes consumer electronics for Apple and other companies, plans to automate about 70 percent of factory work within three years, and already has a fully robotic factory in Chengdu."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/opinion/chinas-troubling-robot-revolution.html


I always find this topic fascinating. In the coming decades we will be losing tons of service and transportation jobs as well, like taxi drivers, truck drivers, pilots, conductors, etc, it will all eventually be automated. One day our great grandchildren may think it was nuts and ridiculously dangerous that we even drove our own cars. Artificial intelligence is a whole other issue, when it replaces human engineers and scientists we'll know things are in for an interesting turn.