“It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen,” said Ford’s chief execu
+tive about his recent trip to China.
...
“I can take you to factories [in China] now, where you’ll basically be
+ alongside a big conveyor and the machines come out of the floor and
+begin to assemble parts,” he says.
“And you’re walking alongside this conveyor, and after about 800, 900
+metres, a truck drives out. There are no people – everything is robot
+ic.”
...
Other executives describe vast, “dark factories” where robots do so mu
+ch of the work alone that there is no need to even leave the lights o
+n for humans.
“We visited a dark factory producing some astronomical number of mobil
+e phones,” recalls Greg Jackson, the boss of British energy supplier
+Octopus.
“The process was so heavily automated that there were no workers on th
+e manufacturing side, just a small number who were there to ensure th
+e plant was working.
...
“China has quite a notable demographic problem but its manufacturing i
+s, generally, quite labour-intensive,” he says.
“So in a pre-emptive fashion, they want to automate it as much as poss
+ible, not because they expect they’ll be able to get higher margins –
+ that is usually the idea in the West – but to compensate for this po
+pulation decline and to get a competitive advantage.”
...
worlds colliding. Literally! If you read the article you will see war mentioned there from that stupid, but honest, journalist.
no dishwashing in the trenches |