Rise Of The Robots

The word robot was coined by Czech playwright Karel Capek in 1920. In "Rossum's Universal Robots," Capek imagines an artificial, fully functional servant. Yet for most of the history of robot development, they have always been dumb, vulgar mechanics in factories, out of sight.

Things are starting to change. The rapid innovation of smartphones has brought cheap cameras and sensors, fast wireless communication, powerful and tiny computer chips, and robots have benefited from them. Recent advances in machine learning have enabled the software of robots to better understand their environment and make informed decisions. Robots are making their way from carefully managed factory settings into everyday life, with applications set to expand in supermarkets, clinics, social security and more in the next few years.

The timing of the robot's arrival is just right. Many factories are facing labor shortages—demand for workers has recovered much faster than expected due to the changing circumstances of the pandemic, while some people (especially in the U.S.) have left the workforce. Thanks to the boom in e-commerce, cargo space has grown rapidly. Robots are now integral to picking items from shelves and helping people pack (exponentially growing) packages. They even started moving slowly along sidewalks, delivering goods or food to people's doorsteps. In a world ravaged by the pandemic, where workers are in short supply and there are many elderly people to take care of, having more robots to boost productivity is a good thing.

But some fear robots will destroy jobs. Oxford University economists published a paper in 2013 that was misinterpreted as saying that 47% of US jobs are at risk of being automated.

In fact, fears of mass unemployment are overblown. Evidence shows that robots are disruptive to the labor market, but ultimately beneficial. Japan and South Korea have the highest penetration rates for robots, but the labor market is also strong. Yale University studied Japan's manufacturing industry from 1978 to 2017 and found that adding 1 robot unit for every 1,000 workers could increase a company's employment by 2.2 percent. Research by the Bank of Korea found that robotization shifted jobs from manufacturing to other industries, but did not reduce total employment. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others have studied Finnish companies and found that their use of advanced technology has led to an increase in hiring.

All of this suggests that the arrival of robots will bring dramatic changes to jobs, as will the skills and companies that can benefit, but not the catastrophe many feared. An example of a so-called "bad automation" is self-checkout in supermarkets, because it replaces manual labor. But it's not the end of the world at all—robots can do unpleasant or contemptible jobs like slaughtering. Retrained supermarket cashiers can help customers pick items from aisle shelves, and may even find that dealing with people in need is more rewarding than scanning barcodes in front of a laser machine all day.

Inevitably, even if robots benefit society as a whole, some people will suffer from change. One of the lessons of liberal globalization in the 1990s and 2000s was that even with the enormous benefits of increased trade, there was a political backlash because the losers felt abandoned. This is one reason why companies and governments must recognize the value of retraining and lifelong learning. As jobs change, workers deserve help acquiring new skills, including how to work with the growing number of robotic colleagues and how to manage them.

The potential gains from the robotics revolution are huge. In Capek's play, robots rebel against their human masters, causing mass unemployment and worse. In the real world, the robot's beginning doesn't line up with Capek's satire, and there's certainly no reason to think the end would be the same.