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Jobs to come and go. In a
A worker teaches Baxter to perform a task by moving its arms
Meanwhile, a March 2013 report, “A Roadmap for U.S. Robotics From Internet to Robotics,” by researchers at leading robotics institutions including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon outlines how robots will penetrate sectors from manufacturing to service to health care and defense, becoming as transformative as the Internet in the years ahead. It cites three drivers of the adoption of robots: economic growth, quality of life in the aging society, and safety of respondents and soldiers to immediate danger. “More effective use of robotics, through improved robotics technologies and a welltrained workforce, will increase U.S. jobs and global competitiveness,” according to the report. An updated study, “Positive Impact of Industrial Robots on employment” by the International Federation of Robotics, suggests that robots create jobs. The report, conducted by the U.K.-based METRA MARTECH, says the robotic industry will add more than 2 million jobs in the next eight years.
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February 2012 blog, Thomas Frey, senior futurologist at the Colorado think tank DaVinci Institute, predicted that over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030, or roughly half the total jobs in the world, largely driven by advances in TED technology. On the next page is the list of jobs that Frey thinks will be gone, along with the jobs that will likely replace some of them over the coming decades.
Bots at work. Previously, The CenSEI Report’s own “From Low-Cost Labor to High-tech Robots” article (Vol. 2, No. 31, Aug. 6-19, 2012), as uploaded on the digital publishing site Issuu, discussed the adoption of robots in a number of fields, including manufacturing, pharmacy, laboratory research, agriculture, search and rescue operations, and the military. Foxconn, a Chinese manufacturer of electronic goods for giant companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo, said in 2011 it would employ 1 million robots to do welding, spraying, and assembling, to replace some of its 1.2 million workers in the next three years. At the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, robot pharmacists pick, package, and dispense up to 350,000 doses of prescription medication without making a mistake.
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