Another article just appeared on my news feed—Will Robots Take My Job?
OK, that’s just click bait. People searching for something to touch a fear emotion have written these articles for probably 40 years. I first worked with robotics in the 1980s. Writers tripped over themselves to write doom articles either about Japan having so many more robots than America or about how robots will take all the jobs.
Consider another look at the situation.
1. Robots took the place of humans in many applications that were backbreaking, monotonous, dangerous (welding, painting, press loading).
2. Jobs requiring continuous precision at process speeds and consistency impossible for humans to match.
3. Other quality and inspection tasks difficult for humans to perform minute-by-minute without blinking or mind-drifting.
4. Demographics—women are having fewer babies world wide with a recent survey in the US revealing many women of child-bearing years don’t even want a child. Fewer people to work, more need for automation.
5. Collaborative robotic technologies have enabled robots to work with humans performing complex tasks.
By the way, it’s the same with artificial intelligence (AI). First comes a glimmer of the new technology. Then doom-and-gloom pundits start writing about all the negative effects on people. Then we learn to work with the technologies in order to do better jobs more effectively.
