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A robot for every job
Rodney Brooks, the MIT robotics pioneer behind iRobot and now Rethink Robotics, looks at the robot Baxter as he manipulates objects on the table.
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More than a million industrial robots work in manufacturing plants all over the world already. And they're getting smaller, cheaper and smarter all the time. Christopher Mims has written an article for Quartz titled "How Robots are Eating the Last of America's—and the World's—Manufacturing Jobs." He begins by remembering the party at which he met Baxter, a robot made by Rethink Robotics. 
Baxter, he says, can be programmed "drunk and one handed" (he tried). Mims says you can “literally grab its wrist and show it what to do." The robot also has humanoid features including expressive eyes on a touch-screen face.
Mims notes Baxter’s low cost. One Baxter robot is expected to cost about $20,000 -- a far cry from the $100,000 and up that most manufacturing robots cost now. The average American worker making minimum wage makes around $15,000. And while Baxter is "experimental," Mims calls it "a taste of things to come, although it's an awful lot closer than previous robots have been."
In the future, a factory filled with Baxters might only have a handful of humans to run the machines, especially those that require high precision work. And of course, people will need to build the robots. But Mims says, "not surprisingly, companies that make robots are sometimes the first to adopt automation as well."
The rise of automation means -- without a doubt -- manufacturing jobs for humans continue to fade away. But economists aren't quite sure what this will mean for the jobs market. Education seems key, but Mims says "you definitely have a problem of where do no or low-skilled workers go and that has a lot of economists worried."
In his article for Quartz, Mims also says automation, not off-shoring, is the biggest threat to American jobs in the future.
Robotics is just a contemporary term for "automation" which has been a process of evolution for umpteen hundred years.
Looms were the robotics of the linen age, engines replaced rickshaws, typewriters replaced scribes, and sewing machines the local seamstress... and yet we've adapted.
There certainly is an excess of human capital for the number of available jobs, but I suspect it has less to do with automation -- er, "robots" -- than with there simply being too many people on this planet. If anything, even that is becoming more mechanized.
I always find it particularly disingenuous when articles like this one speak ill of robots and automation when we live in a world that necessarily requires both automation and robots. For example integrated circuits are manufactured using highly specialized robots which are constantly evolving. Not only do these robots support my own skilled level employment, but unskilled and semiskilled employees as well. Not to mention enabling companies like Foxconn to have large unskilled assembly lines doing final assembly of circuit boards, electronic components, and ICs.
It would be more helpful to educate people on the issue, to interview economists for information on the shift of consumption of goods requiring which require modern manufacturing methods, and interview manufacturers for information on manufacturing. People find it easy to blame the engineer for solving a problem instead of themselves for creating the problem in the first place. Si-fi movies (and articles like this) make us think robots are the enemy instead of our own economic tendencies, lack of a functioning education system, or lack of a society with an actual respect for technology. Skilled modern manufacturing does not require calculus, as the interviewee's article suggests, but is a functional understanding of simple algebra, trigonometry, and computer programming too much to ask of someone with a high school diploma, let alone a college degree?
People who think robots are going to take over the world, or their jobs, are as reactionary as people who blame illegal immigrants for stealing migrant working jobs. For all those nostalgic for stamping out metal parts on an assembly line, get over yourself, life isn’t a Clint Eastwood movie, and the world is passing the US by.
Automation and robotics are nothing new in manufacturing; and it is unfair to demonize in such a simplistic way. Thankfully technical progress continues to keep the manufacturing sector of our economy vibrant and productive. Machines have always been an extension of human brawn and brain. Look back 100 years; inventive people have been cooking up new and better ways to do the needed work of the day. Simple and labor intensive work moves offshore to the cheap labor. Better machines keep the work here. Of course as with farming history, it will require fewer bodies to serve a given level of demand.
