China steht kurz davor, seine erste menschenfreie Autofabrik zu eröffnen: Sie wird noch vor 2030 fertig sein und das Zeitalter der „dunklen Fabriken“ und Roboter einläuten. Sollte uns das beunruhigen?
https://www.motorpasion.com/industria/china-esta-a-punto-estrenar-primera-fabrica-coches-personas-llegara-antes-2030-estrenara-era-dark-factories
22 Kommentare
At least people miiiiight stop saying that Chinese cars are affordable thanks to cheap or slave labor (as opposed to the true reason, automation and incredibly efficient vertical integration of the whole supply chain)
Wow what will the billions of people there do then ??
depends. Keeping in mind – when you now hear „Chinese factory coming to country X“ this is why and how. Labor is no longer an issue/requirement
We should probably be more worried about the Kung Fu robots armed with Nun Chucks.
Without humans? No. With more and more automation, of course. Increasing automation in manufacturing is long term trend. Same as in agriculture.
The goal of the ruling class now, is to ultimately replace the means of production. You will own nothing, you will owe everything.
Really bad back of the envelope math suggests that this could lower the cost of a vehicle by between 3-15K
Not really. China needs this because of massive population decline.
“Human-Free” until something inevitably breaks or goes wrong and a bunch of technicians have to go in and fix it. And the cleaning crew. And the maintenance workers. And Quality Control. And logistics staff.
To be fair dark factories have been around for some years now in things like polymer production in the united states. There are a handful of humans in management, engineering, and then logistics loading and unloading trucks. Scary but already here.
We need better global tax systems to prevent tax evasion (the legal and illegal kinds) and we need universal income.
Otherwise we are headed towards a dark dystopian future.
The United States should worry about this – the rest of the world is moving forward into the future while we head back to the coal mines. Literally and figuratively.
Seems like this sort of technology could bring manufacturing back to the US. No more high labor costs.
They’re truly going to take the global lead very soon. The US is rotting from the inside at the moment and it’s only getting worse. I don’t know if there’s enough time to wait for the next administration to maybe get things going in the right direction again
Tesla had already tried automating their factories as much as possible years ago
Wealthy western countries should celebrate this. The only reason we started offshoring was for cheaper labor costs. There’s nothing intrinsic about China that would enable their dark factories to produce goods any cheaper than a US/EU dark factory. Add in transport costs (and climate impact), and domestic robot-produced goods will be much more attractive than those from overseas. And we can re-shore all this manufacturing without costing a single domestic job, because those jobs haven’t been here for decades anyway.
China’s the one that should be worried. Cheap labor was their competitive edge. They wisely built on that, but pull that out from under them, and the playing field is completely level.
And before you go all „but the supply chaaaain“ yes, it will take time to rebuild the supply chain we ceded to Asia but again, there’s nothing intrinsic that says we can’t, once labor costs are removed.
It might be harder for EU countries that don’t have a lot of cheap land but that’s not an issue for the US.
Why are we worried about population decline. We are automating ourselves into oblivion.
It should worry the US that China is beating the technological crap out of it. Clean coal!
the question isn’t whether this should worry us. it’s whether countries that aren’t doing this should worry. labor cost advantages disappear overnight when nobody’s on the floor
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Telsa spent a lot of time trying to figure this out and ultimately failed because humans are insanely good at adapting to complex problems. Yes they were also using AI to try and build them.
Only if you then buy the cars that roll out of that factory.
I remember Tesla tried this with the model 3. It was an abject failure. The problem was the hoses. Things that flop and sway are difficult for machines to grab on a moving production line. They move in unpredictable ways that either confuse the robot if it has a vision system (very expensive) or causes them to miss when they try to grab it from an assumed general area.
I’d be interested to see if they can make this work but I’m not holding my breath.