We love robots – tireless, productive workhorses of the modern assembly line. But we also hate robots – sinister mechanical simulacra of the human workers they make redundant.
In the latest episode in our complicated relationship with automatons and automation, it is appropriate that Foxconn should have a lead role. The Taiwanese company manufactures the chattering classes’ favourite piece of science fiction come true, the Apple iPad, as well as devices for Nokia and Sony. It employs 1m people in China. It was the epicentre last year of concern about pressure on low-paid young workers, following a series of suicides at its Shenzhen factories. It is, in short, iPad users’ window on to dilemmas of assembly-line politics and management that the developed world last grappled with on this scale decades ago.
In developed economies, Lynda Gratton writes in her new book The Shift, “when the tasks are more complex and require innovation or problem solving, substitution [by machines or computers] has not taken place”. This creates a paradox: far from making manufacturers easier to manage, automation can make managers’ jobs more complicated. As companies assign more tasks to machines, they need people who are better at overseeing the more sophisticated workforce and doing the jobs that machines cannot.