There will come a time that a human employment crisis will emerge because jobs will be taken away by automated machines or robots, leaving all the menial tasks to them. But perhaps that is happening sooner than we expect as that age has already began – at least in China.
A Chinese factory called Changying Precision Technology recently employed robots replacing 590 of its workers. It is one of the China’s first unmanned factories in the city of Dongguan.
The company’s workforce, which used to have 650 employees, was trimmed to 60 people. And their jobs are no longer involved in the manufacturing of mobile phones itself but only to supervise the operations of the machines.
Ever since automated production lines, robotic arms, and autonomous transport trucks were used to produce certain parts of mobile phones in various manufacturing stations, the result of transitioning to automation has been going so well according to the general manager Luo Weiqiang.
From 60, it might even go to down to 20 human employees someday, he says.
But the most overwhelming – also alarming – part is the increase of mobile phone pieces the factory now makes per month. A report from the company indicates that since it made the shift to robots, a 250% increase was seen in the production of pieces per person per month, from 8,000 to a whopping 21,000.
Some may question the quality of production of the robots, but this is also not an issue at all. It was discovered that the number of product defects has decreased from 25% to just 5%.
Trends of this kind are no longer surprising in China as the entire country tries to achieve the Made in China 2025 goal, which is an initiative aiming to apply technological advances to production including robotics. It is targeted to upgrade the Chinese industries but to a certain cost – the loss of jobs for humans.
Source: Monetary Watch
