Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles Apple’s iPhones and iPads, is reportedly planning to “hire” 1 million robots to take on the boring, monotonous jobs currently performed by human workers. The Financial Times reports that the company’s CEO made the announcement at a company dance-party.
Apparently it sounded like the company would replace human workers with the robots.
But, in a statement, Foxconn says that’s not the case. It doesn’t want to ditch humans –it wants to give them more advanced tasks.
On Monday, the company refused to confirm the numbers mentioned by Gou. Instead, it issued a long-winded statement saying the chief executive had “made remarks about his vision for the company, the opportunities that the future holds for the company and its employees, and his commitment to moving the more than 1 million employees at Foxconn higher up the value chain beyond basic manufacturing work.
Foxconn has taken some heat for mistreating workers after some of its Chinese employees committed suicide. Again, from the Financial Times:
One key point was to deal with young migrant workers’ complaints that they often felt treated like machines.
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