BI Chinese station reported on June 10
You don’t have to worry about the futureRobotIs it going to take your job, it’s already starting to happen.
Three of the world’s top ten employers have deployed tens of thousands of robots to replace workers’ labor:
Foxconn, the main contract manufacturer of Apple, Google and Amazon, is the tenth largest employer in the world. The company has already replaced 60,000 workers with robots.
Walmart, the world’s third-largest employer, which currently employs 2.1 million workers, plans to replace warehouse pickers with drones. The drones that Walmart is developing can scan the codes of goods in the warehouse and then send the data to the control center. Using this method, picking and counting inventory will be dozens of times faster. Walmart plans to deploy the drones in all 190 U.S. distribution centers, and warehouse pickers will be reassigned to new jobs.
The US Department of Defense, the world’s largest employer, has the world’s largest number of unmanned aerial vehicles, mainly deployed in the Middle East. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense has 7,362 Great Crow drones in service.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. As can be seen from CLSA’s list of the world’s top ten employers, these employers have a large workforce and have great potential to replace human labor with robots.
(Note: 1. US Department of Defense 2, Chinese People’s Liberation Army 3, Wal-Mart 4, McDonald’s 5, NHS 6, China National Petroleum Corporation 7, State Grid Corporation of China 8, Indian Railways 9, Indian Army 10, Hong Kong Sea Precision (Foxconn) million=million)
Of the top 10 employers, only the NHS is a hard-to-reach field for robots – the work of the UK healthcare system’s vast workforce of doctors and nurses is not repetitive and simple. The remaining nine employers employ large numbers of people to perform repetitive tasks that might be best done by software.
77% of jobs in China could be done by robots
Foxconn’s 60,000 robots make up only a fraction of the company’s 1.3 million workforce. So, we are just standing at the entrance to the future of robotics. Few now know the scale of the coming labor market revolution. think about it:
Citibank and Oxford University predict that 77% of jobs in China are likely to be replaced by robots, and 57% of jobs in 34 OECD countries are likely to be realizedautomation.
The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2020, 5 million jobs worldwide could be automated.
IBM says it has created a computer that is better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors.
Not even journalism has been spared—the Associated Press is already using AI software to write corporate earnings.
Of course, the sight of robots causing mass unemployment doesn’t have to happen. The most optimistic scenario is that the machines reduce the amount of labor and we only need to work four days a week, and we spend most of our time clubbing and watching TV. New technologies often create more jobs while replacing some jobs—every robotic worker needs a maker, manager, and maintainer.
But in the most pessimistic scenario, the future of society may become more unfair – low-cost robots will put the low-wage and middle-class out of work, creating more and more profits for factory owners and tycoons at the top of the industry . A graph produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that this kind of imagining is already happening in the press and publishing world. The Internet has created many media jobs, but it has cost more print workers their jobs.
Citibank warned in its report that “the benefits of technological progress are not widely shared” and that automation and robotics could widen the gap between the rich and the poor between the 1% and the 99%. (wing flying)
The Links: DF9200654-B0 3HAC7349-1
