Young Liu, the chief executive officer and chairman of Foxconn, has predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will destroy low-end manufacturing jobs. The Taiwanese technology giant currently assembles around 70 per cent of iPhones and is the world's largest contract manufacturer.
Mr Liu was delivering a keynote address at the Computex conference when he made the rather gloomy prediction. As per him, a combination of robotics and generative AI may engineer the change, leading to the loss of jobs.
"Generative AI and robotics will fill the void. That is the opportunity I see when a country becomes more prosperous - the low-GDP work will be done by GenAI and robotics," said Mr Liu.
"I think that is the real challenge for all developed countries. I urge leaders of developed countries to watch this very carefully," he added.
As per a report in The Register, Mr Liu revealed that Foxconn was developing its own manufacturing-centric model called "FoxBrain" that will integrate Meta's Llama 3 and 4 AI models and data drawn from its own operations. The new entity will be used to create what he described as "agentic workflow for very domain specific applications".
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AI and jobs
The popularity of AI models has left workers concerned about their careers as employers attempt to use the technology to cut costs, increase efficiency and maximise revenues. Apart from manufacturing jobs, those in IT have been fearing for their jobs as well.
Last week, Microsoft announced it was laying off around 6,000 employees or three per cent of its global workforce, to remove unnecessary layers of management as it aggressively pushes into AI.
CrowdStrike, the infamous cybersecurity company responsible for the massive global IT outage last year, also announced that it was slashing five per cent of its workforce and replacing it with AI.
Similarly, language-learning platform Duolingo announced it would "gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle". The company justified its switch in approach, stating that it had taken a similar call in 2012 by betting big on mobile.
