If automation will take away assembly line and manufacturing

>>62223597
Automation is cheaper than Western workers, with their high wages and strong job protections, but more expensive than third-world workers who make peanuts and can't sue you.

>>62223597
Easy. Because those factories are set up to be run by personal. Automation often needs to be planned before the building is built.

Take the Foxconn plant coming to Oklahoma. Fewer personal than the Chinese factories and heavy automation.

supply chains

>>62223597
Automation isn't advanced enough to undercut sweatshops yet. They'll keep moving to the third world until there's nowhere to go when products can be 3D printed at will or whatever without a middle man.

>>62223597
Except automation will never take over, anon
You'd know this if you didn't work in fucking walmart

>>62224286
Automation can't do everything. But it can do a lot of things that a lot of people spend a lot of their time at work doing. Basically its good enough to make a lot of people effectively uneconomical to employ at almost any wage, but not good enough to user in a utopian age where machines provide everything so cheaply that people don't have to work.

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>>62224339
>Basically its good enough to make a lot of people effectively uneconomical to employ at almost any wage
Except it's not, because you're forgetting that machines are just that - machines
They only do what people tell them to do and they can do no more, but there are a lot of times in manufacturing where you need to use pure human judgement and logic to get the job done, because the machine is being a fucking asshole and not doing its job as it should
No matter what the media claims or what fantasies people have, automation will never replace humans

>>62224523
Have you met most retail employees? There's no way they are doing anything they aren't specifically told.

>>62223633

It isn't cheaper than western workers because ultimately any sort of automation tech worth it's shit comes from the west and uses western labor. Which is why everyone outsourced everything instead.

t. works in manufacturing design

>>62223597
Chinese sweatshops are cheaper than automation.

>>62224523
>They only do what people tell them to do and they can do no more
Most people that I've worked with are like that anon.

Machines need programmers and maintenance people, both of whom are well-paid.
A CNC programmer making $70k and a machinist making $60k are more expensive than a 14-year-old Chinese boy.

>>62223597

automation = you are fucked if you have to change your assembly line

People are great because you can quickly reconfigure things

>>62224585
>any sort of automation tech worth it's shit comes from the west and uses western labor
Pretty sure Japan has been leading the way there.

>>62224563
We're talking about manufacturing, not retail

>>62224612
Then you're working at a shit place and need to find a new job asap

It's not that the technology isn't advanced enough to beat cheap labour because it is, I'm thinking about replacing two people with a machine right about now, it's that it requires a complete rebuild of the business to use it properly

Really I think the only thing holding back a lot of automation in low-skill sectors is executives saying "Yeah, this'll save the company money, but implementing it is costly enough that it'll take, like, five or seven years to pay off. That's too long, I might be gone by then! I need to meet my bonus targets way sooner than that!"

>>62224802
It's really not

>>62224618
Don't forget about installation!

I'm an IBEW electrician and pricess controls, robotics, and PLCs are really making my pension and annuity fat and happy.

It used to be only very large factories and government sites installing this technology, but its been creeping down into smaller sectors over the last couple decades.

>>62224626
Actually with PLCs replacing relay logic and bus-duct in place, it's a matter of moving machiner around the plant. Almost like large-scale lego.

>>62225261

You still need a mess of engineers to layout the factory, design the new end effectors, write the programs etc.

Not to talk shit, but a lot of work goes into making those drawings you work from and making them is not cheap. And as you note, you are not cheap either.

If you can give a guy a table to work on, bins to pick from, show him what to do, that is pretty easy to setup.

>>62224626
true worked in a machine shop for a bit. Takes hours or even days to reconfigure a C&C to make another part or god help fix a broken one. But they can just move the Mexicans around to do what they specifically need based on the order.

>>62225751
Can you actually imagine having a person do the same job as a C&C machine though?

>>62224627
No, the Dutch.

>>62223597
I run an automated warehouse. We got it because it helps us pack a lot more pallets into a smaller space, and the putaway satellites are faster and more accurate than hoomons in large VNA trucks.
The automated highbay works far more efficiently than the rest of the operation, but only by a factor of three. It requires only two people to keep it running, whereas its equivalent requires 4.

Now, at the scale our site is running at this helps us out a great deal. However, if we were to scale up the operation to triple the amount of work, it can be argued to work out cheaper to set a budget for agency workers rather than expand the capacity of the automated system.

Basically, the reason is the scale of operations. Larger operations will find less value in automation, because agency contracts are cheap.

>>62225832
Yeah it would just require more tools and god knows how much time, quality would be a big issue. Quality with machines now can be a big issue. One of the most common jobs in the shop was measuring the parts to make sure the machine got it right.

>>62225832

You greatly overestimate what a CNC machine gets you. A cnc is mostly just a highly specialized Cartesian robot that has somewhere between 3-6 axis.

If you restrict yourself to machining opps, you still have to get barstock off a truck, saw blanks to length, rough debur, stick it in the machine using clamps / fixturing, hit go button, unclamp, measure the parts, tweak wear offsets, debur, move to next station, probably clean/degrease the parts, plate/anodize them (very labor intensive) then either package/ship the parts or assemble them into a bigger assembly.

Yeah, the CNC does save an amazing bit of labor, but it is only making simple motions within its enclosure. (very fast & precise though). All the other labor mentioned is not simple and difficult to automate.

Not to mention that you really don't want to machine a part if you don't have to.

My point is that a CNC machine does not really solve any sort of factory-wide labor problem. It is a point solution to a specific manufacturing problem.