Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots

[TallSilhouette]

Shadow1980 said:
Machinery used to be labor-saving devices that freed up workers from certain tasks and shifted them to other jobs, but now they are labor-eliminating devices, destroying more jobs than they could ever possibly create. Very few people's jobs will be safe in the robot revolution, as the vast majority of jobs can theoretically be performed by a robot. As I mentioned in the thread about the minimum wage, if the vast majority of all jobs are done by machines in the future, thus making most human beings permanently unemployed and unemployable, then there needs to be a fundamental overhaul of our very economy. Eventually governments will start running out of taxpayers to keep the roads paved, the mail delivered, the streets policed, the nation defended by a military, the emergency services functioning, and so on, and even the very companies that replaced all their workers with robots will themselves start running out of consumers. A post-labor economy needs to be a post-capitalist, post-socialist, and post-scarcity economy. It will need to be something unlike anything seen before, and it will need to benefit all of humanity and not just a small class of elites. A world where robots can perform 95+% of all labor simply cannot operate on the same economic principles of today.

Agreed. Well said. Gonna be interesting to see what the new world looks like and probably pretty scary along the way.