Unfortunately, politicians in office insist on implementing mechanisms like migration controls to stimulate local employment, but they conveniently ignore the giant elephant in the room: automation. Those who want to see what awaits us in the future only need to look at the Changying Precision Technology Company. This company replaced 90% of its employees with robots, a strategy that allowed it to increase production by 250% and reduce defects to 5%.
All major companies are thinking in one way or another about doing something similar. Robotics, drones, machine learning, neural networks, artificial intelligence, autonomous cars... at the end of the day, they share a common goal: getting a computer to definitively replace a human being in their job. This is not going to stop. Automation processes will become more robust, cheaper, and more efficient. Installing robots will be the new arms race among competitors, and those who strike first will gain a considerable advantage. The reasons are so obvious that it no longer makes sense to discuss them: a robot doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, doesn't get sick, doesn't get injured, has no tax burdens, doesn't unionize, works 24 hours, doesn't take vacations or weekends. Minimal maintenance and occasional repair will always keep it in top condition. And if you think I'm exaggerating... let's travel to China.
The Changying Precision Technology Company, whose factory is in the city of Dongguan, is dedicated to producing mobile phones. The first reports date back to 2015 meaning they've been at this for over a year and a half, but at that time the factory had 650 employees. Today it has only 60, and they expect that in the future that number can be reduced to 20. The key is a series of 60 robotic arms distributed across ten production lines. Depending on the task, each robotic arm replaces between six and nine people, and the remaining humans in the plant are dedicated to supervising.
Before automation, the factory produced about eight thousand pieces per person-month, but now it's at 21,000 pieces, a bit more than the 250% increase. On the defect side, the average was 25% among human employees, but with robots it went below 5%. And to be honest, they've only just begun. The 'Made in China 2025' initiative will seek to drastically increase the number of automated factories, and no one doubts that other countries will follow the same path. This is how we arrive at the so-called 'delicate' discussion (according to politicians) about universal basic income. The excuses are running out.
Monetary Watch
