Amid all the job losses of the Great Recession, there is one category of worker that the economic disruption has been good for: nonhumans. From self-service checkout lines at the supermarket to industrial robots armed with saws and taught to carve up animal carcasses in slaughter-houses, these ever-more-intelligent machines are now not just assisting workers but actually kicking them out of their jobs. Automation isn’t just affecting factory workers, either. Some law firms now use artificial intelligence software to scan and read mountains of legal documents, work that previously was performed by highly paid human lawyers.
It’s not that robots are cheaper than humans, though often they are. It’s that they are better. In some cases the quality requirements are so stringent that even if you wanted to have a human do the job, you couldn’t. Same goes for surgeons, who are using robotic systems to perform an ever-growing list of operations—not because the machines save money but because, thanks to the greater precision of robots, the patients recover in less time and have fewer complications. The surgery bots don’t replace surgeons—you still need a surgeon to drive the robot. Prices go as high as $2.2 million. Nevertheless, Intuitive sold 400 of them just last year.
More information:
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/07/17/the-threat-of-automation-robots-threaten-american-jobs.html
More information:
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/07/17/the-threat-of-automation-robots-threaten-american-jobs.html