If you’re reading this post using an electronic device of some kind, there’s a decent chance you’re holding something right now that was made by Foxconn, in whole or in part. The Taiwanese manufacturing giant with plants all over China has been in the news recently for more dire reasons, but now the legion of robot workers it announced plans to implement last year have taken the field, and apparently, they’re like children. Sort of.
They’re like children in the sense that apparently their “IQ” is equivalent to that of a seven or eight year old. We’re not sure exactly how Foxconn came to that conclusion, as the machines aren’t capable of taking those “free” online IQ tests everyone else uses, but a Foxconn researcher told Economic Information that “they can only engage in some simple, repetitive tasks.” Maybe the 7-8 year-old estimate is a comparison to the sort of factory tasks a small child might be able to complete? Is Foxconn promoting the use of robot child labor?
In all seriousness, though, here’s some information about the machines that isn’t colored by my ridiculous sensationalism: they cost between 140,000 ($22,000) and 160,000 RMB ($25,000) and come in varying sizes depending on the model. As you can see from the image above, they look a lot like typical factory robots, not the giant behemoths of destruction we had imagined. Oh well.
Foxconn promised when it announced the plan that it was never their intention to replace human workers with robots, and thus far, that seems to be the case, as front-line workers told Economic Information that the robots were facilitating their work but — as of yet, anyway — not capable of replacing them. Anyway, now that Foxconn has started using the robots, the next question is how widely it is capable of implementing them, and the answer to that question isn’t yet clear.
[Economic Information via TechWeb]
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