More on Chinese Innovation

The Jetsons, life in a garden of leisure

By Thomas Neuburger

Following up on several recent reflections, here’s a short group of links that illustrate Chinese innovation.

• Highly automated Xaiomi EV car plant (YouTube)

A promotional video (with subtitles) from the Xaiomi smartphone and (now) automobile company. The factory does almost everything, from stamping to painting to final assembly.

There are other highly automated car plants in the world, mostly in Asia and Europe, but the degree of automation at this plant is impressive. More here.

• Xiaomi ‘lights-out’ smartphone factory (YouTube)

Another promotional video from Xiaomi:

There aren’t many fully automated factories (you get a sense of that here), though there are some partially fully automated factories — plants where there are two shifts, one peopled, one lights-out. This is the future of manufacturing — until the Climate Jackpot changes everything.

• The highly automated shipping port of Guangzhou (YouTube)

This port isn’t fully automated, but none of the physical work is done by humans. Every activity involving materiel is directed by joystick jockeys, rows and rows of them.

The saving in cost of labor is considerable; smart ports typically require 25% of the staff as traditional ports, and few of the workers are subject to accidents, spilled coffee and paper cuts aside.

All this, of course, leads to a discussion of unemployment, a subject for another day. But there’s an obvious solution, if not hope that it will be implemented. Remember the Jetsons? They solved the automation problem in 1962, when the New Deal still lived and Reagan had yet to betray us.