“OUR ROBOTS PUT people to work,” says the rejected slogan still on the whiteboard in Rodney Brooks’s office. It was meant to convey the belief that led Mr Brooks to start Rethink Robotics: that robots in small manufacturing businesses can create new jobs, or at least bring old ones back from China, thus helping to launch an American manufacturing renaissance. But the message could also be read another way: robot overlords forcing human helots into back-breaking labour. Better left unsaid.Small and medium-sized companies are between 20 and 200 times less likely to use robots than large ones in similar sectors, according to a study carried out by Metra Martech, a consultancy, for the IFR. They could thus become an important market if someone were to offer them the right robots, which would open up new sectors of the economy to the productivity gains that can come with automation. Such robots would still do routine tasks but would be able to switch from one set of tasks to another as required, perhaps every few weeks, perhaps a couple of times a day. They would therefore be heavily dependent on their human fellow workers to set them up and get them going.Rethink...
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1rFKhUy
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