Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that manufactures devices for Apple, Nokia, and Sony, has over 1.2 million employees, mostly in factories on the Chinese mainland. By 2016, it would like to replace as many of those as possible with robots that can do the job 24/7.
That would address the human rights concerns about the company's working conditions. But is it worth putting 1.2 million people out of work? It's the classic globalization question.
Foxconn declared its intentions to go robotic last year, announcing that it had 10,000 robots online, ramping up to 300,000 this year. The goal as stated in the 2011 Xinhua article was to get to 1 million robots by 2014. This TechWeb post from January (which was brought to my attention by John Biggs at TechCrunch today) says Foxconn would reach the goal this year.
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