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I have
been collecting links on robots and the roles they play in manufacturing,
fashion, and even writing sports updates of major league games.
Let's take a look at some of them starting with an article in yesterday's New
York Times, Skilled
Work, Without the Worker.
Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
While the many robots in auto factories typically perform only one function,
in the new Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., a robot might do up to four:
welding, riveting, bonding and installing a component.
At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers
use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is
the old way.
At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same
work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well
beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.
One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and
slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so
fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people
supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee
break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year.
All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth
as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.
at Earthbound Farms in California, four newly
installed robot arms with customized suction cups swiftly place clamshell
containers of organic lettuce into shipping boxes. The robots move far faster
than the people they replaced. Each robot replaces two to five workers at
Earthbound, according to John Dulchinos, an
engineer who is the chief executive at Adept Technology, a robot maker based
in Pleasanton, Calif., that developed Earthbound’s
system.
At an automation trade show last year in Chicago, Ron Potter, the director of
robotics technology at an Atlanta consulting firm called Factory Automation
Systems, offered attendees a spreadsheet to calculate how quickly robots
would pay for themselves.
In one example, a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250,000 and
replaced two machine operators, each earning $50,000 a year. Over the 15-year
life of the system, the machines yielded $3.5 million in labor and
productivity savings.
Manufacturing Returns Without the Jobs
Manufacturing may be returning to the US, but the jobs are nowhere to be
found. Moreover, the higher the salaries of workers, and the more benefits workers
demand, the greater the incentives of manufacturers to eliminate humans.
The article notes that Apple plans to install a million robots in China to
"supplement" its work force.
A large banner at Flextronics plant near San Francisco proudly proclaims
“Bringing Jobs & Manufacturing Back to California!” but the
assembly line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week with nearly all robots
and few human workers.
China, NAFTA Not To Blame
If you want to blame something for the loss of manufacturing jobs, blame increased productivity, not China or NAFTA.
A couple of graphs will show what I mean.
Manufacturing Jobs
That graph makes it appear as if the decline began in 1980.
The following chart suggests something else entirely.
Manufacturing Jobs as Percentage of All Jobs
Except for the spike in World War II, manufacturing has been in perpetual
constant decline since the beginning of this data series.
China, Robots, and Unemployment
I picked up this idea, recreating the above chart from the Econfuture article China,
Robots/Automation and Unemployment
One of the most interesting things about
the graph above is that, if technology is the primary driver, then employment
in China must inevitably follow the same path. In fact, there are good
reasons to believe that manufacturing employment’s download slope will
be significantly steeper for China. The U.S. had to invent the technology to
make manufacturing more productive, while in many
cases China only needs to import it from more developed nations. It is also
true that China is beginning its journey at a time when information technology
(which is the primary enabler of automation) is many orders of magnitude more
advanced than in the 1950s when U.S. manufacturing employment was at its
peak.
In the U.S. (as well as in other advanced countries), workers shifted out of
manufacturing and into the service sector — which now accounts for the
vast majority of jobs. Will China be able to pull off the same transition?
In the absence of consumer spending, China’s economy remains highly
dependent on manufacturing exports and, especially, on fixed investment. An
astonishing 50% of China’s GDP is driven by investment in things like
factories, housing and infrastructure (the U.S. figure is around 15%). The
problem is that all that investment has to ultimately pay for itself, and
that happens via consumption. Once a factory is built it has to then produce
something that gets sold at a profit. Homes, retail buildings and apartment
complexes likewise have to be sold or rented out. Obviously, no economy can
indefinitely invest anything like 50% of its output without eventually
finding a way to get a positive return on that investment.
Achieving that return requires consumers — either at home or abroad.
China continues to rely heavily on consumers in the U.S. and Europe, but
that’s unlikely to be a sustainable formula for growth. The debt crisis
and the resulting austerity is cutting into economic
growth and consumer spending in both Europe and the U.S.
The real problem China faces is that it is late to the party. Just as it
reaches its manufacturing employment zenith, it faces a potentially
disruptive impact from automation technology. And that will happen roughly in
parallel with similar transitions in the service sectors of the countries
that currently consume much of its output. In the face of that, can China
succeed in re-balancing its economy toward consumption, increasing personal
incomes, and building a vibrant service sector to keep its population
employed?
Breast Cancer Diagnosis
Extreme Tech reports that a computer system called C-Path (Computational
Pathologist) is more
accurate than human doctors at breast cancer diagnosis
Since 1928, tissue samples have been
screened for breast cancer by hand. Pathologists examine the tumor under a
microscope and, by measuring a handful of cellular features, can produce a
fairly accurate diagnosis and prognosis for the patient. C-Path replaces the
human looking down the microscope and uses computer vision to look for the
same cancerous indicators. Furthermore — and this is what makes C-Path
so accurate — by looking at a large number of human-diagnosed samples,
the system learns.
For example, one of the features that human doctors look for is the speed at
which tumor cells divide by mitosis — through learning, C-Path
might’ve discovered that mitosis isn’t actually the most accurate
indicator.
Learning also allowed C-Path to discover new, cancer-related cellular factors
— 6,642 in total — which it then used to diagnose and prognose new cancer patients with better accuracy than a
human doctor. One of these indicators, related to the stroma
(connective tissue between cells), was a completely new discovery — in
other words, C-Path’s automated learning process just saved the lives
of innumerable breast cancer patients around the world.
Robots to Replace Women
In Japan, Robots to
Replace Women
A new walking, talking robot from Japan
has a female face that can smile and has trimmed down to 43 kilograms (95
pounds) to make a debut at a fashion show. But it still hasn't cleared safety
standards required to share the catwalk with human models.
"Technologically, it hasn't reached that level," said Hirohisa Hirukawa, one of the robot's developers. "Even as a
fashion model, people in the industry told us she was short and had a rather
ordinary figure."
To add to the literal objectification of women, the robot will appear in the
fashion show, naked, so that the public may come up with fun things the robot
can do.
HRP-4C was designed to look like an average Japanese woman, although its
silver-and-black body recalls a space suit. It will appear in a Tokyo fashion
show — without any clothes — in a special section just for the
robot next week.
The robotic framework for the HRP-4C, without the face and other coverings,
will go on sale for about 20 million yen ($200,000) each, and its programming
technology will be made public so other people can come up with fun moves for
the robot, the scientists said.
The robot can apparently move enough of her body that human-robot sexual
contact doesn't appear out of the question, and--just like a woman--she can
show such emotions as "anger and surprise"
That was written in 2009. By now I am
quite confident they have improved upon the "rather ordinary"
figure.
Sports Stories Written by Computers
When it comes to sports stories, Gadget Lab reports on an iPhone app called GameChanger that uses pitch-by-pitch game data to
generate sports stories. Please consider Can an
Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?
Last year GameChanger
produced nearly 400,000 accounts of Little League games. This year that
number is expected to top 1.5 million. And the articles don’t read like
robots wrote them:
Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite
racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the
dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys
Ranch pitching. Sundre singled in the third inning
and tripled in the fourth inning … Friona piled up the steals, swiping
eight bags in all …
The grandparents of a Little Leaguer would find this game
summary—available on the web even before the two teams finished shaking
hands—as welcome as anything on the sports pages.
Stats Monkey
NPR reports on a program called Stats Monkey that can do the same thing.
Sample story generated by SportsMonkey from April 25, 2009:
UNIVERSITY PARK — An outstanding effort by Willie Argo carried the
Illini to an 11-5 victory over the Nittany Lions on
Saturday at Medlar Field.
Argo blasted two home runs for Illinois. He went 3-4 in the game with five
RBIs and two runs scored.
Illini starter Will Strack struggled, allowing five
runs in six innings, but the bullpen allowed only no runs and the offense
banged out 17 hits to pick up the slack and secure the victory for the
Illini.
The Illini turned the game into a rout with four in the ninth inning.
Strack got the win for Illinois. It was his fourth
victory of the season. Strack allowed five runs
over 6 2/3 innings. Strack struck out two, walked
three and surrendered six hits.
Mike Lorentson suffered his sixth loss of the
season for Penn State. He went four innings, walked none, struck out two, and
allowed six runs.
Illinois closer John Anderson got the final seven outs to record his second
save of the season.
Hammond says StatsMonkey can do more than analyze
Little League games.
"Our goal is to genuinely model human thought, intelligence,
reason," he says. "I have to admit, we are doing it not only in
sports; we're looking at what other realms we could apply this [technology]
to."
Wikipedia Written by Robots
Here is an interesting item you might not be aware of: 22 of Top 30
Wikipedia Editors are Robots.
Scholars studying Wikipedia tend to
ignore or quickly dismiss the influence of bots on the site, even though of
the top 30 most prolific editors on the site, 22 are bots. In fact, Wikipedia
itself erases their contributions; according to Geiger, when a Wikipedia
"user account is flagged as a bot, all edits made by that user disappear
from lists of recent changes so that editors do not review them."
Got that? Changes made by Wikipedia
robots are automatically approved. Changes may by human editors need review.
I have to ask: by computer robots or humans?
Inquiring minds might be interested in the list of articles on robots that I
accumulated recently.
List of Robot Articles
·
Meet Bina48,
the robot who can tell jokes, recite poetry and mimic humans with startling
ease
·
Robots Are
Coming to Take Your Job
·
Computers
Are Replacing The Middle Class
·
Scientists
build robots with joints and muscles
·
Artificial
intelligence and robotics, the next disruptive force?
·
Robotic Nation
·
The robots
are coming! The robots are coming!
·
In Case You
Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
·
Robots will Work
·
Robots to
Take 500,000 Human Jobs...for Now
·
Precise Path
Robotics: Purveyor Of Hat-Wearing Lawn Mowing Robots, Raises $4.5 Million
·
Are Robots
Writing Books – Or This Blog?
I will have some thoughts on jobs, unemployment, rising productivity and
issues related to robots and technology in a follow-up post in which I will
answer the questions posed in the title of the article. For now, study some
of the links and articles to form your own opinions.
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