Factory Worker Roll Call: Robots 1000 -- Humans: 0

[Don1]

China Builds City's First All-Robot Factory Replacing Human Workers
© AP Photo/ Wang Dingchang/Xinhua
TECH



As part of a major push towards automation, the first robots-only factory is being built in China's Dongguan manufacturing hub, reducing human employees to a bare minimum.

The factory, owned by Shenzhen Evenwin Precision Technology Co., hopes to reduce its workforce by 90%, to only 200 human workers, with the introduction of a 1,000-robot workforce to take the human's places, according to the company's chairman, Chen Xingqi, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The automated workforce is just part of a major push to replace workers in Guangdong province's Pearl River Delta area, where major manufacturing operations are suffering from a shortage of labor. The province has plans to spend 943 billion yuan ($154 billion) in the region to replace workers with robots over the next three years, the South China Daily reported

[Stonigut]

Ah wonder who going to be doing the repair and preventative maintenance on that 1000 robot factory. That product design and manufacturing process better be wickedly tight those 1000 robots going to need an army of technicians just to stay operational.

[Islandman]

Highly skilled technicians needed for sure, but not an army. This type of equipment has so much diagnostics and redundancy built in that there is not much operational failure on the floor. Mostly scheduled preventative maintenance.

I see a lot of that in enterprise IT operations these days...everything is mirrored or has some type of redundancy built in. If a disk drive, processor or a network card fails, the admin gets an alert and changes it out tomorrow when he/she gets in office. No downtime required.

[Stonigut]

Iman, I hear you but my experience tells me otherwise, manufacturing is not IT services, it is round the clock operation, this is assembly with moving parts, not finished products with everything in place like a server, even at close to six sigma level of efficiency it will require significant recalibration, repair and pm time.

[Sir X]

The Geek squad, RBSC have it all.

[Islandman]

Don't disagree with that, just saying that the number of people required are FAR, FAR less than a traditional factory. it also may depend on what is being manufactured. i know that some Japanese companies are already practicing "lights-out" manufacturing, running multple 24 hour shifts with near zero human intervention.

Check out this Japanese factory, these are robots making more robotic equipment, which is a bit scary. I suspect the narrator is a robot as well. This is from 2007 so imagine what is possble now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SREct28lJM&NR=1

[Mosiah]

I don't understand - they say these robots are needed because of the labour shortage. So how then are they replacing human labour?!

[Islandman]

Maybe replacing the cost of importing human labor is more accurate. Any human labor shortage can be overcome with money.

[Don1]

Ah wonder who going to be doing the repair and preventative maintenance on that 1000 robot factory. That product design and manufacturing process better be wickedly tight those 1000 robots going to need an army of technicians just to stay operational.

Absolutely correct that skilled techs will be required. Fortunately we are building an app for that

[Mosiah]

The trouble is, as the robots get more reliable and more skilled, fewer human techs well be required.

[Islandman]

The standard "joke" is that eventually factories will only need one human and one dog.

The human is needed to feed the dog and the dog is needed to protect the equipment from humans.

[Don1]

The trouble is, as the robots get more reliable and more skilled, fewer human techs well be required.

Well we can try to be among the few....or we can continue mainly preparing ourselves to sell trinkets, taxi rides & rooms to fat tourists

[Mosiah]

What happens when robots start feeding the dog?

What happens when the dog itself is a robot? Robo-dog?

[Assasin]

Think you are spot on. Some of these technology have more problem than we want to admit. What some of these company do is hire less techs than they should and there is a burn out factor and clients are not happy.

[Assasin]

Tourist will never stop. Why do you always have to bring tourism industry into this when we are not even doing half the business we can in that industry?