The Robot Apocalypse Is Hard To Find In America’s Small and MidSized Factories When researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology visited Rich Gent’s machine shop here to see how automation was spreading to America’s small and medium-sized factories, they expected to find robots. In all the other Ohio plants they studied, they found only a single robot purchased in the last five years. In Massachusetts they found a company that had bought two, while in Arizona they found three companies that had added a handful. Anna Waldman-Brown, a PhD student who worked on the report with MIT Professor Suzanne Berger, said she was “surprised” by the lack of the machines.
A worker operates one of the metal cutting machines at Gent Machine Co.’s factory in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., May 26, 2021. REUTERS/Timothy Aeppel
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hen researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology visited Rich Gent’s machine shop here to see how automation was spreading to America’s small and medium-sized factories, they expected to find robots. They did not.
Among the 34 companies with 500 employees or fewer in Ohio, Massachusetts and Arizona that the MIT researchers visited in their project, only one had bought robots in large numbers in the last five years - and that was an Ohio company that had been acquired by a Japanese multinational which pumped in money for the new automation.
“In big factories - when you’re making the same thing over and over, day after day, robots make total sense,” said Gent, who with his brother runs Gent Machine Co, a 55-employee company founded by his great-grandfather, “but not for us.” Even as some analysts warn that robots are about to displace millions of bluecollar jobs in the U.S. industrial heartland, the reality at smaller operations like Gent is far different.
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Automate Sept-Nov 2021
A worker operates one of the metal cutting machines at Gent Machine Co.’s factory in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., May 26, 2021. REUTERS/Timothy Aeppel
“We had a roboticist on our research team, because we expected to find robots,” she said. Instead, at one company, she said managers showed them a computer they had recently installed in a corner of the factory - which allowed workers to note their daily production figures on a spreadsheet, rather than jot down that information in paper notebooks.
“The bulk of the machines we saw were from before the 1990s,” she said, adding that many had installed new computer controllers to upgrade the older machines - a common practice in these tight-fisted operations. Most had also bought other types of advanced machinery - such as computer-guided cutting machines and inspection systems. But not robots. Robots are just one type of factory automation, which encompasses a wide range of machines used to move and manufacture goods - including conveyor belts and labeling machines.
