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China: Robots
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  • The number of industrial robots sold worldwide last year exceeded 240,000 for the first time – equivalent to a year-on-year growth rate of 8% – according to new figures released by the International Federation of Robotics ( -

    http://drivesncontrols.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/5090/Global_sales_of_industrial_robots_hit_a_new_record_in_2015.html

    The China market for industrial robots reached an estimated US$1.3 billion in 2015. This market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20%, reaching US$3.3 billion in 2020, according to IHS.

    China accounted for 13% of global industrial robot revenues in 2015, and is expected to comprise 25% in 2020, said IHS.

  • Government support for the integration of ever cheaper and more efficient industrial robots is good news for factory owners in China, who are facing a weak global economy and a slowdown in domestic demand. But the benefits of the robot revolution will not be shared equally across the world. Developing countries from India to Indonesia and Egypt to Ethiopia have long hoped to follow the example of China, as well as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan before them: stimulating job creation and economic growth by moving agricultural workers into low-cost factories to make goods for export. Yet the rise of automation means that industrialisation is likely to generate significantly fewer jobs for the next generation of emerging economies. “Today’s low-income countries will not have the same possibility of achieving rapid growth by shifting workers from farms to higher-paying factory jobs,” researchers from the US investment bank Citi and the University of Oxford concluded in a recent report, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be, on the impact of technological change.

    http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1dbd8c60-0cc6-11e6-ad80-67655613c2d6.html

    Statement is so bullshit and full of capitalist lie.
    Industrialization is not made to generate low qualification jobs. It is made to produce means of production and consumer goods. Robots where they can be used are more efficient from energy and resources point of view. This means that for people it is left more energy end resources to do other stuff. And this is very good, it means that life will be better.

  • Lets remember one of the best labour saving robots is the humble washing machine.

    But in reality when something become the "new normal" people just expect more. No-one walks around talking about their washing machine anymore! (Well maybe ones that have apps). ;-)

    No-one runs around saying darn washing machines are taking away jobs either!

  • About washing machine

  • @alcomposer: Washing machines made lots of traditional low-wage "washing maidens" jobless. Today, some of them might find jobs as hair-dressers, in nail-design-shops or alike, but not quite as many. I'm not saying progress is bad, but I think we have to deal with the reality that automation does not magically introduce new jobs as sometimes proclaimed.

    The number of humans not being able to compete with machines at any paid job is rising at increasing speed, and society has not yet found a plausible answer on how to sustain a pleasant environment when let's say 30% of the people no longer find anyone who would be willing to pay them for anything they can offer.

  • The number of humans not being able to compete with machines at any paid job is rising at increasing speed, and society has not yet found a plausible answer on how to sustain a pleasant environment when let's say 30% of the people no longer find anyone who would be willing to pay them for anything they can offer.

    Capitalism society did not find answer... :-)

    As complaining that people now do not work hard in dirt at fields, work in cold dirty factories and washing places is just mad. People do not need this jobs at the first place.

    Idea that automation must introduce new jobs is even more mad. Automation is made to save resources and most valuable resource - human life time spent on shit.

    All capitalism can do is to make more night clubs, sex chat services and similar shit for this people. Capitalist looks for profits, not for people good or requirements.

  • More about this

    A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).

    But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

    These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

    If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

    http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

  • Above citation suggests that "not allowing a massive reduction of working hours" is the result of some conscious, sinister plan.

    I do not think it is. It's rather the result of the natural human greed - in different forms.

    Let's assume in our land of Utopia, person A and person B both work for 4 hours a day in the same profession, both earning the same, just the right amount for them keeping their accepted standard of living.

    Now person A thinks of what he could do with twice the money, starts working 8 hours per day. Due to unchanged demand, but higher supply, the value others are willing to exchange for the work done will decrease. So now person B will make less money, his standard of living decreasing below his accepted level. Person B could start also working 8 hours a day, but would only gain the value in exchange that he had when both A and B were working 4 hours per day.

    The regime of Utopia could try to counter this by either disallowing "working for more than 4 hours a day", but that would lead to the ugly situation that whatever productive thing people would do in their free time would fuel a "black market" - you would have to impose a nightmarish regime of permanent surveillance to counter conspirative barter deals.

    The regime of Utopia could also try to fix salaries, as in "you will earn the same no matter what or how much you work". But that would lead to an obvious downward spiral: Now person B finds there's no disadvantage in working only 2 hours per day (chilling out another 2 in the workplace, if some presence was required). Person A will certainly not want to work 6 hours to compensate for his colleagues lazyness. So supply decreases, demand stays the same, but prices are fixed - welcome to the dystopia of empty shops and lack of supply.

    And those are just the most simple scenarios where Utopia starts to fail. There are more difficult ones, like person A and person B work in different professions, and disagree on the value of each others work. Now person A wants some result of B's work and B wants some of A's work. Who's to decide at which rate A and B may exchange their results? If the Utopia regime fixes this to something like 1:1, not-fun-to-do jobs (like, let's say, disposing of animal corpses) just won't be done.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm all for governments setting up rules to make the "labour market" a reasonably fair one, but I do not believe there any simple solutions - if only because it's human nature to be greedy, unfair and mostly interested in one's own advantage.

    Robots introduce another aspect into this, but certainly not making things easier. Now it has become conceivable that a relatively small group of people can get anything they need and desire from mostly automated production, and a large group of people have nothing to offer that could compete with the automated work, while at the same time they have nothing that they could trade in for "robots of their own" who could supply them with what they need and desire.

    All visions of Utopia fail where they expect that suddenly humankind collectively stops to be greedy and becomes altruistic. Not going to happen - we are the result of billions of years of evolution where some degree of greed and selfishness was a prerequisite to pass on one's genes.

  • The regime of Utopia could try to counter this by either disallowing "working for more than 4 hours a day", but that would lead to the ugly situation that whatever productive thing people would do in their free time would fuel a "black market" - you would have to impose a nightmarish regime of permanent surveillance to counter conspirative barter deals

    Well, nope. It is exactly workers who fought for 8 hours day (7 hours and less in some countries). It is interest of ruling class to exploit you as much as they can, not yours.

    Most jobs now are in corporations and government related services, all of them are being made by orders of top managers. Have nothing to do with greed.

    I understand your doubt about how it can be so widespread, is it coordinated? It is not. But members of ruling class and their servants just have same interests and act similarly.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm all for governments setting up rules to make the "labour market" a reasonably fair one, but I do not believe there any simple solutions - if only because it's human nature to be greedy, unfair and mostly interested in one's own advantage.

    It is not human nature as ruling classes want you to think. So called "human nature" can change in such amounts that you can not even imagine.

    All visions of Utopia fail where they expect that suddenly humankind collectively stops to be greedy and becomes altruistic. Not going to happen - we are the result of billions of years of evolution where some degree of greed and selfishness was a prerequisite to pass on one's genes.

    "Not going to happen" is good excuse to keep things as shit as they are.

  • My point re: washing machines: Robots have been around for some time, they don't have to have humanoid. Also they can be very simple and help people super amount.

    But remember, just because we have Microwave ovens, food doesn't get Microwaved by itself!

    Actually I think ruling class has huge issue. Currently all benefits to society are paid for by middle classes, (think health care, power, industry etc). Imagine how successful electricity would have been without middle class buying into it, or PC?

    So what happens when middle class disappears?

  • So what happens when middle class disappears?

    What will happen if something that never actually existed, except on paper, will disappear? Nothing.

    Real point you want to say is that will happen if actual income of significant part of US/EU population will be closer to income in other places on Earth? Nothing bad for humanity, but nothing to good for individuals in this countries also.

  • What (actually) happens when wages in south east asia rise is stuff like this: Adidas moves production of shoes back to Germany - where of course, instead of ten-thousands shoe-sewing workers, a few hundred robot mechanics will be the only work-force required.

    This makes looking at effects of automized production easier (as it happenes in the same country as consumption of the product), but it's still, of course, not happy news for people who have no work to offer that others would be willing to pay for.

  • @karl

    Just remember that this factory will be making quite small amount (compared to Adidas overall) and only select shoes models.

    Main reason why you need such amount of human labor is constant change of models, very fast and huge amount of them.

  • That factory in Ansbach is certainly only a pilot project, planned to produce 500,000 pairs of shoes per year, which indeed is not much in comparison to the 300,000,000 pairs adidas sells per year. But plans are there already to build similar factories in other target market countries in 2017, and there is no technical reason why they shouldn't scale well for mass production. But yes, it will take several years to replace manual sewing.

  • Automation is best solution to lower labor and land costs, says Kenmec chairman.

    Hsieh pointed out that compared to those in the past, the automated production lines now have seen dramatic improvements. Robotic arms, instead of just making simple movements, now also feature visibility and computing capability.

  • How does one buy stock in Robots?

  • Results of 2016. Manufacturing robots production increase in 2016 was 34,3% in China. 2017 must be even better.

  • China produced 72,400 industrial robots in 2016 and 35,073 units in January-April 2017, increasing 34.3% and 51.7% on year respectively, Forward Business and Intelligence said, adding 34,000 locally produced industrial robots were sold in the China market in 2016 and the sales volume in 2017 is expected to increase to 43,000 units.

    China was the world's largest industrial robot market from 2013 to 2016, with global market share rising from 20% in 2013 to 25% in 2014 and to 33.3% in 2016.

  • Chine Post added 300 sorting robots this month

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  • Global sales of industrial robots soared by 29% last year to hit a new record of 380,550, according to preliminary statistics released by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). The 2017 sales were worth around $50bn.

    The biggest driver of this increased demand has been China, where sales were 58% higher than in 2016, and 138,000 new industrial robots were installed during 2017. By comparison, sales in Germany were up 8% on 2016, with around 22,000 robots being sold. In the US, sales rose by 6% and 33,000 new robots were installed. During 2017, South Korea installed around 40,000 new industrial robots, while Japan added around 38,000.

    Together, the five biggest markets – China, Korea, Japan, the US and Germany – accounted for 71% of all sales of industrial robots last year. The next five markets in order of size were Taiwan, Vietnam, Italy, Mexico and France.

  • JD com progress

    China-based online shopping operator JD.com began using over 20 smart self-driving robots to deliver merchandise items to purchasers in the Beijing area in late June 2018, according to China-based news reports.

    Robots have pre-set route planning and will send messages to purchasers to pick up the items once they arrive at the destinations, the reports said, adding customer identity verification is done via facial recognition or keying in of codes.

    JD.com has also employed heavy-duty drones to transport items to destinations around China in 24 hours, and such drones have payloads of 1-5 tons and flying endurance of over 1,000km.