I noticed a flurry of Foxconn propaganda, reported in all the usual western media, that tried to make this argument about 7 years ago. They said that they had robots that would shortly render something like 800,000 factory workers obsolete.

It coincided with a period of worker unrest in their factories.

They didn't though. They now employ something like 400,000 more people than they did.

It was just a ploy to terrify Shenzhen factory workers.

The apparent abysmal failure of their "project" to replace all those people seems to have gone 100% unnoticed in the business press. Foxconn just forgot to issue that press release I guess.

I think back to that story and subsequent non-story every time I read the latest news article about "the robot takeover of our jobs that's just around the corner".

Heard this one second hand from an email directly from bezos. It's nothing that people don't already know. He said something along the lines of we don't have to worry about treating employees well as automation will be replacing most of them.