Why outsourced to China is robots? We could just as easily make her own robots.
“Foxconn, has so far installed 40,000 production robots across China as it looks to minimize the number of people it employs.”
Next step will be for Vietnam and Cambodia to build cheaper robots to undercut prices even further and put the Chinese robots out of work.
I wonder how many robots will buy I-phones and I-pads.
Where will the Chinese children go now to make things for us westerners?
Welp, there goes the iPad factory suicide rate down the drain ...
You often read criticism of large companies exploiting third world workers (or third world child workers).
Our moral outrage is triggered by the meager living provided to those workers by those jobs. We react with negative publicity or legislation aimed at those low wages.
The real world outcome is for those low wage jobs to be restricted or eliminated. Unfortunately for the third world workers they just lose that low wage job; they don’t get their job turned into a high wage job, they just become unemployed.
I wonder what they would have to say about our moral outrage.
They know that the clock is ticking. With enough automation, the right geopolitics, and tax incentives, American industry could easily re-shore almost all electronics manufacturing back home. They know the time of the fully-automated phone factory is coming soon, and it could just as well be set up in west Texas as in Shenzhen.
Manufacturing will be coming back to the US but there will be fewer jobs in that sector. Otoh you will be able to start a factory in your garage with a leased robot.
A guy for whom I used did basically that in the sixties and he ended up with 6 plants. Multi millionaire.