Of course the newer cabbies would prefer a GPS or smart phone to
guide them, but then, guide being guide, one of these day, you
should be able to drive without them, it is like having milk bottle
and teddy bear when you are new to this world, then as time goes
by, you should start to off loan all these stuffs and be
independent.
The case should end up with no GPS or smartphone, you cannot
drive, that will be no good at all.
Taxis driving is a labour intensive job, it is not going to be
some stockbroking or banking firm whereby software can take
over human labour, same goes to construction and shipyard jobs, it
is labour intensive, you cannot go on with no labour, unlike some
electronic firm, it can use robotics.
Being labour intensive, we need to be independent, of course,
technology today do helps us in a way of locating the exact places
and traffic conditions. But as time goes by, by the rule of thumb,
you should be able to drive without all this gadgets, it is like
releasing all your dependents and set free.
Allow me to show you a news on the new labourless industrial
that will take future world without labour, and china, being the
factory workers of the world, will suffer if the west start it, and
in fact, it had started, so brothers, let be up to date and open
your eyes the true of Business without border and workers.
DRACHTEN, the Netherlands — At
the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of
workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric
shavers. That is the old way.
At a sister factory here in the
Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like
flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the
capability of the most dexterous human.
One robot arm endlessly forms
three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into
holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast
that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people
supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a
coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a
year.
All told, the factory here has
several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant
in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.
This is the future. A new wave
of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by
automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers
around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories
like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to
those used by Apple and
other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of
thousands of low-skilled workers.
“With these machines, we can
make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an
electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in
Drachten.
Many industry executives and
technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on
Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone manufacturer,
continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional
workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a
million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in
China.
Foxconn has not disclosed how
many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry
Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his
more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January,
according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are
also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a
headache.”
The falling costs and growing
sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among
economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost.
This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid
transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human
skills is relatively recent and has profound economic
implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the
Machine.”
In their minds, the advent of
low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the
revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when
farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the
work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the
industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of
manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee
argues.
“At what point does the chain
saw replace Paul Bunyan?” asked Mike Dennison, an executive
at Flextronics,
a manufacturer of consumer electronics products that is based in
Silicon Valley and is increasingly automating assembly work.
“There’s always a price point, and we’re very close to that
point.”
But Bran Ferren, a veteran
roboticist and industrial product designer at Applied Minds in
Glendale, Calif., argues that there are still steep obstacles that
have made the dream of the universal assembly robot elusive. “I had
an early naïveté about universal robots that could just do
anything,” he said. “You have to have people around anyway. And
people are pretty good at figuring out, how do I wiggle the
radiator in or slip the hose on? And these things are still hard
for robots to do.”
Beyond the technical challenges
lies resistance from unionized workers and communities worried
about jobs. The ascension of robots may mean fewer jobs are created
in this country, even though rising labor and transportation costs
in Asia and fears of intellectual property theft are now bringing
some work back to the West.
Take the cavernous solar-panel
factory run by Flextronics in Milpitas, south of San Francisco. A
large banner proudly proclaims “Bringing Jobs & Manufacturing
Back to California!” (Right now China makes a large share of the
solar panels used in this country and is automating its own
industry.)
