I feel for the people of this company, telling his employees that they will be fired at the dance party Friday night. Someday when their will be no more workers to buy goods then who will buy them. Or there will only be the ultra rich and the rest of us beggars. They won't even need maids, gardeners etc because they will have robots to do everything.

everyyear Foxconn has several workers committed themselves suicide,,Foxconn want avoid such things happen again, robots will not kill themselves,haha..

Yeah! That's the stuff...

I actually enjoy seeing this happening. It's kinda inevitable. Eventually, nobody will be working, nobody buys. The same as the music industry has its model getting old, everything else is going the same way. I believe there's a documentary that go over this, it's called Zeitgeist (there are 3 movies, I don't remember which one talks about it).

[whimsical] It's the future! How long have we been promised labour saving technology? And yet all of us still find ourselves with burdened with work! Finally will we have harnessed technology to free us from the shackles of work. How I've dreamed of the day when a robot does my job and I stay home! [/whimsical]

Will technology eventually eliminate the need to work? What system do you use to divide up resources when there's no need to work? Could we work less for the same money? 20 hour weeks sound quite nice!

(Perhaps you could convince everyone they need more stuff, new shiny things. Then the additional demand consumes resources and generates work, and hopefully keeps the economic machinery ticking.. Hmm.. This sounds sort of familiar.)

Robots don't reveal to the public what the upcoming products will be 1 month in advance.

The robots don't have the money either. But you don't hear them complaining.

You never know. Robots with built-in options and futures logic might be able to do that.

This has been coming since man 1st started to farm. They went from harvesting by hand and a sharp rock, to the sickle, to the large scythe, to horse drawn harvesters, to motorized harvester, to huge mechanized machines that not only harvest but process crops, clean and bundle it all in one. with each advance it reduced manual labor exponentially.

People have to find a way to move to new industries and create a new form of employment. If too many people are left unemployable due to a lack of skills that fit a new market place, there will be a mass anti-technology movement from those left out of the loop. Here in the U.S. were we no longer make anything, there has to be a switch to new industries. Some have pushed Green tech and infrastructure upgrades as a way to get people back to work.

Vitaliy: "Reading such stuff I feel how unemployment will be reduced in US. Most probably people will be moved out of labor force with faster pace and robots included to make statistics look better."

That's quite amusing :) In fact in the UK the government has been doing something similar for years!

@Aria

But why - if there's less work to do - can't we all just do a little less work? I.e. Slash working hours by a 1/3 rather than have 1/3 unemployment. I'm not suggesting this - I'm just wondering about it.

France, for example, has an interesting GDP / working-hours ratio:

http://www.businessinsider.com/are-the-french-the-most-productive-people-in-the-world-2009-8

The French have nice work life balance because competition is lower and the population is rather sparse.

Complete opposite in China. I fear for that country's future I really do, which is a shame because it's a lovely part of the world.