Tens of millions of workers could lose their jobs to automation, particularly in southeast Asia, over the next 20 years.
Garment workers among those most at risk of losing their jobs, finding few low-skill alternatives and facing exploitation, according to the Verisk Maplecroft report.
The rise of robot manufacturing will dramatically alter the labor market in southeast Asia and result in a spike in human trafficking, slavery and other labor abuses, according to a report released Thursday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for a robot revolution in manufacturing to boost productivity.
Wages in China are rising, and it’s becoming harder to compete with cheap labor.
An aging population in China also necessitates automation. The working-age population, people age 15 to 64, could drop to 800 million by 2050 from 998 million today.
Chinese robotic growth is forecast to exceed 20 percent annually through 2020.
Combining human creativity and automation is unlocking new efficiencies.
The increased presence of robots on factory floors has been a boon to manufacturers, who have embraced automation as a way to increase efficiency and cut costs. But there’s been less optimism among human workers, who worry that the rise of robots will render human workers inessential.
In recent years, however, a new school of thought has gained ground: Rather than replace their human counterparts, the manufacturing robots of the future will work alongside them. This future can be seen in the arrival of “cobots,” robots designed to complement human workers. While humans excel at abstract thinking and problem solving, robots shine at bringing speed and accuracy to repetitive, sometimes dangerous tasks. Imagine a factory where robots do the heavy-lifting as humans focus on more meaningful work, where production lines can run unsupervised for weeks with minimal manufacturing defects. In the connected industrial workforce of the future, robots complement workers, improve productivity, and increase operational efficiency.
BALTIMORE – The construction of an American house embodies the spirit of the nation’s workers and the dreams of its citizens.
It’s also perhaps the least-efficient endeavor in the U.S. economy.
Dozens of workers turn a plot of land into a small factory, sawing wood, nailing it together, cutting holes for windows, running wires and pipes and installing drywall and other finishes. Four months or so later, voila: A home for generations of families.
Foxconn Technology chairman Terry Gou on Friday reiterated a pledge that the world’s biggest assembler of iPhones has made many times: that in a matter of years, human workers will be in a minority at the company.
Creator’s transparent burger robot doesn’t grind your brisket and chuck steak into a gourmet patty until you order it. That’s just one way this startup, formerly known as Momentum Machines, wants to serve the world’s freshest cheeseburger for just $6. On June 27th, after eight years in development, Creator unveils its first robot restaurant before opening to the public in September. We got a sneak peek…err…taste.
When I ask how a startup launching one eatery at a time could become a $10 billion company, Creator co-founder and CEO Alex Vardakostas looks me dead in the eye and says, “the market is much bigger than that.”
One author says we have plenty of time before robots take over humans’ jobs.
As technology has advanced, Thomas Malone has watched his old family farm change drastically. The farm he grew up on once employed 15 people full-time and another 30 or 40 seasonally. Now, five people and many more machines farm about three times as many acres in land to produce significantly more goods.
JD.com, one of China’s big e-commerce companies, has unveiled a warehouse in Shanghai that, it says, only keeps humans on board so they can service all the robots.
The baristas at Cafe X can make two drinks in under a minute and will get your order right every time.
They’re also not human.
The robotic coffee bar employs assembly line-style robots to build your coffee orders for you, making Cafe X a player in San Francisco’s automated eatery scene that’s also gaining traction across the country.
As if the line between human and machine wasn’t already blurry enough, researchers in Tokyo have developed a new method for using living rat muscle tissue in robotics.
The “biohybrid” design, described today in the journal Science Robotics, simulates the look and movements of a human finger. Video shows how it bends at the joint, picks up a loop, and places it down. It’s a seemingly simple movement but one that researchers say lays the groundwork for more advanced—and even more lifelike—robots. (Meet Sophia, the robot that looks almost human.)
Automated robots now have the tools to grow imitation, simplified human organs out of stem cells. Thankfully, we weren’t transported to a sci-fi dystopia where the machines have risen up and started to farm humans, but rather a world where pharmaceutical and other biomedical research just became much easier and faster.
Give these robots some pluripotent stem cells (stem cells that can become any type of cell), and 21 days later they’ll have finished a complicated experiment testing out the effects of a drug or genetic manipulation on some human-like, lab-grown kidneys. According to research published yesterday, May 17, in Cell: Stem Cell, the process is much faster and more reliable than when humans grow the same mini-organs.
