By Chris Chang, posted Aug 1, 2011 at 5:30 AM, 2,066 views,

Foxconn Wants To Replace Workers With 1 Million Robots

You don’t know when these things could happen, but you should be very excited to see most of the gadgets you love — your iPads, iPhones, Android tablets and so on — to be assembled by Foxconn robots. Yup, Foxconn is planning to replace their human workers with 1 million robots in 3 years to assemble Apple products. Yeah babe!

We know this may sound ridiculous, but Foxconn’s CEO Terry Gou recently told his employees and local media that the company will replace its assembly line workers with robots. Gou announced this stunning news during a workers’ dance party, and he even revealed that the company has 10,000 robots and will expand to 300,000 next year, gradually opening the door to a total of one million robots in three years.

You may wonder, why Foxconn is replacing workers with robots? Well, the main reason for the changeover was to cut ascending labor costs while improving overall efficiency. In the coming future, Foxconn will greatly increase the amount of robots on the assembly line, and these robots will take over the basic work of spraying, welding and assembling that is usually performed by workers. At the meantime, Foxconn employs 1.2 million people, with over 1 million workers from mainland China, and 400,000 of the workers are from Shenzhen.

Since Foxconn is the largest manufacturer of computer components in the world, assembling products for numerous tech giants, including Apple and Sony, there’s no doubt at all that robots are needed. We know robots will do the same job faster and do it without compliant. They have no vacations, no breaks, no sick pay, thus Foxconn could use these robots to work 24 hours non-stop. Working faster, more accurately, and even continuously, is far more than can be expected of their human counterparts. However, this changeover may be sad for the workers, since hundreds of thousands will be laid off with likely no hope of finding another job unless they get an education. The only people Foxconn will hire are software programmers and mechanics to service the robots. But on the flip side at least this means that they’ll have more high paying jobs in China and not just factory slave labor. Anyway, we think there will be a robot uprising at Foxconn sometime in the future. Maybe 2018?

Source: Xinhua News Agency via AllThingsD