This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

We’re in the midst of National Robotics Week, and roboticists all over the US are celebrating robotics research, development and education through hundreds of events and demonstrations at local libraries, universities, Block Parties and FIRST competitions. The point of National Robotics week is to celebrate, educate and inspire a new generation to pursue careers in robotics. But another key goal of the week is to advocate.

Advocating for cash is one part of the job, because R&D requires lots of it. And if you’re going to acquire cash from granting bodies or investors, you have to convince them that the work you are doing is important, that it’s going to solve a problem, and (if you’re a start-up) that it has commercial potential. And as robotic technologies move from research into commercial viability, advocating for robotics-friendly legislation becomes just as important: if laws and regulations prevent your product from reaching the market, it doesn’t matter how much cash you have.

Nymann Teknik arm, from Universal Robots.

So what does advocacy have to do with jobs? Plenty. The jobs issue is a visceral one. It hits us where it counts: how we earn, how we feed ourselves and our families, how we put a roof over our heads. It’s why employment is always a key issue in election politics – it’s a topic that impacts almost every voter of working age. ‘Robots and jobs’ has become a contentious issue that, like it or not, will determine the success or failure of many new robotics technologies, so it’s no great surprise that there are plenty of people who have something to say about it.

Here are the main points of view that have been entrenched and promoted:

1. Robot replace human workers, and that is a bad thing; they are a ‘disruptive force’ that will cause irrevocable harm to our entire socioeconomic system. See 60 Minutes’ Are robots hurting job growth? and CNN World’s The jobless economy, and the Economists’ Robots don’t complain or die.
2. Robots replace human workers, and that is a good thing; they will take over dull, dirty and dangerous jobs and leave us humans with more time to do interesting/productive work. See Andrew McAfee’s TED Talk, and Wired’s Better than human: Why robots will – and must – take our jobs.
3. Robots don’t steal jobs, they create them; whether through ‘re-shoring’ or through the emergence of new robotics industries, there is tremendous job growth potential for economies that support robotic technologies. See Time’s Can robots bring back manufacturing jobs to the US? and Kuka’s infographic Robots and automation bring jobs back to the US.

To help us tease out the issues we are featuring a week’s worth of coverage on the topic from top experts in the field, including fact finding, analysis and opinion. Here’s a quick teaser of what to expect over the next week or so …

A look at the numbers:

• Frank Tobe gives us a critical walk-through of IFR’s latest Metra Martech report.
• Armed with data from the recently released Economic Impact of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the US,  Chris Mailey from AUVSI suggests that a multibillion dollar market will quickly emerge to create over 100,000 jobs in the US by 2025 once current FAA restrictions to unmanned aerial systems are lifted, as they are schedule to do in 2015.
• Plus, a fact-finding post with all the latest economic reports on the robotics industry.

A look at influencing factors:

• John Dulchinos, Executive Board Member of the International Federation of Robotics, takes us through some of the latest jobs stats and suggest that robotics is eliminating the advantage and influence that low-cost labour has had on manufacturing.
• Rich Mahoney, Director of Robotics at SRI, says that it’s too early to make any grand predictions about how robots will affect the jobs economy in the future, but that the success of robotics companies’ management teams will surely play a critical role.
• In response to the Robotics by Invitation question “Do robots kill jobs?“, Raffaello D’Andrea, co-founder of Kiva Systems, talks about how low interest rates are fuelling the jobs debate; and Mark Tilden argues that robots are just scapegoats, and that corporate ethics are to be blamed for poor employment numbers.
• Regular Robohub contributor and agribot expert John Payne echoes the many voices in the agricultural sector, which point out that agricultural robots will be replacing job vacancies, not people.

Outlook:

• Martin Ford, author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future argues that as robots and other forms of automation progress, machines will take over an ever-increasing fraction of those routine jobs and significant unemployment will become inevitable.
• Federico Pistono, author of “Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy” suggests that technological unemployment is already a reality today and argues that we should use this opportunity to rethink what the purpose of society should be.
• Matt Beane, from MIT’s Sloan School of Management asks if we are on the cusp of a robotics revolution or whether robots are distracting us from the forces profoundly affecting our economy. Matt Beane’s short answer: yes.

And don’t forget:

• Coverage of this week’s Silicon Valley Robot Block Party and Xconomy Forum: Robots Remake the Workplace by Robohub correspondents Frank Tobe and Andra Keay.
• Live streaming of Stanford’s We Robot conference on robotics and the law.
• Sabine Hauert‘s report on Jobs for Roboticists.
• Frank Tobe’s post from January 2013 on how the definition of robots affects how they are perceived in the jobs debate
• And on a lighter note, Jim Haas‘ Nate the Robot – the Dilbert of robotics. Look for Nate in the sidebar!

Managing the ‘issue’ of robots and jobs is important to the success of businesses, research institutions and politicians alike, whether they are ‘for’ robots or ‘against’, so there is no doubt that you will continue to see headlines about robots and jobs for the foreseeable future, both in the mainstream media and here on Robohub. We hope you enjoy this focus series … feedback is welcome, so send us your comments!

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During that same period the US trade deficit with China grew from $100 billion to over $270 billion as many companies chose to outsource their manufacturing to low wage nations such as China where labor costs were 1/10 that of the US. In some cases, entire industries such as mobile phones, consumer electronics, and computers were outsourced to contract manufacturers and moved offshore, creating as many as 25 jobs in these low wage countries for every job created in the US.

I can speak to this firsthand. In the late 1990s, the largest market of my company at the time, Adept Technology, was automating mobile phone and computer factories in the US. As the pace of innovation accelerated and models proliferated, our robots did not have the flexibility or intelligence to keep up with the rate of change. Additionally, these manufacturers were facing increasing pressure from low cost competition that left them with no choice but to look to low cost labor markets to produce their products, first in Mexico then Brazil then China. At the time there were less than 350 million mobile phones produced in the world with the majority produced in the US and Europe. Today there are over one billion mobile phones produced a year and not a single one is produced in the US even though the US market consumes over 200 million units.

The robots of today are smarter, more agile and less expensive than their ancestors of the 1990s. They integrate sophisticated sensing technology that allows them to adjust to changes in their environment and in the products that they produce. Some are even leaving their traditional isolated cages to work in tandem with people, making the combination even more productive. All of this makes the new generation of robots far more adaptable to today’s manufacturing world, and a much better technical fit than they were a decade ago.

At the same time wages in countries such as China have been increasing at a rate close to 20% per year. Add to this increasing transportation costs and the negative impact of a supply chain that stretches around the world, and more and more companies are rethinking their manufacturing strategies.

Back in the US, a new manufacturing equation is emerging, called Smart Manufacturing. Smart Manufacturing is the production of traditional products using advanced technologies such as computers, robots, lasers and 3D printers. Using these tools dramatically improves productivity and lowers costs as compared to traditional manufacturing approaches, while maintaining flexibility and improving time to market. Smart Manufacturing is making US goods competitive with products produced anywhere in the world, even in the lowest wage nations, and the result is that the decades old trend of offshoring is being replaced with a new trend, re-shoring.

Re-shoring is not a concept founded in patriotism or built on motherhood and apple pie ideals. Re-shoring is a powerful business tool founded on solid economics. For centuries manufacturers have employed a strategy of chasing cheap labor around the world, moving from one low wage nation to the next as costs rose in the developed world. While this has resulted in lowering direct product costs, it has also added significant expense related to managing a supply chain that extends around the world. It has also slowed the rate at which new products can be ramped with product development and production separated by thousands of miles and several time zones.

Smart Manufacturing has the potential to bring an end to manufacturer’s centuries old dependence on low cost labor, and open up a new strategy: developing and producing goods in the markets where they are consumed. Localizing and integrating marketing, product development, manufacturing and distribution is the ultimate operational model. It allows for more targeted products while eliminating the costs of managing global supply chains and disjointed product introduction processes. Automation becomes the great equalizer, allowing products to be produced anywhere in the world for the same cost, and freeing manufacturers from consolidating manufacturing in low wage nations.

Smart Manufacturing and robotics have one other benefit, the creation of high value, high wage jobs. In a 2009 study commissioned by Intel, ECONorthwest found a strong connection between Smart Manufacturing and the creation of jobs. At Intel’s highly automated factory in Hillsboro, Oregon, they employ close to 16,000 people. ECONorthwest found that for every 10 jobs created within the factory there were an additional 31 jobs created in the local community to support the factory. These indirect jobs were anywhere from 40-60% above the statewide average income for Oregon.

Other studies have pegged the jobs multiplier of Smart Manufacturing at between 2 and 10 times the number of direct manufacturing jobs. In a separate study commissioned by the International Federation of Robots (IFR), Metra Martech estimated that the robot industry has created between 8 million and 10 million jobs throughout its history, and forecast that over the next decade the industry will create between 2 and 3.5 million direct jobs and almost as many indirect jobs. The study went on to show a tight correlation between the increased use of robots and a reduction in the overall unemployment rate. They also point out that emerging economies are amongst the fastest growing users of robots. According to the IFR, Korea and China are now the top consuming nations of industrial robots, surpassing the US, Germany and Japan. China’s ascent to the top has been nothing short of amazing.

From 2008 to 2012, China’s use of robots has increased over 300% in a nation where average manufacturing wages still remain between $1.00 and $1.50 per hour.

Looking to the future, the manufacturing world is becoming flat. Robotics and other advanced technologies are leveling the playing field and eliminating the advantage and influence that low cost labor has had on manufacturing. With all manufacturers having access to the same set of tools, the winners — and ultimately the jobs — will go to those producers who can most effectively and creatively leverage these tools to their competitive advantage. In the end robots are about jobs.

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At this stage, I don’t think the core technology is the primary differentiator for the success of emerging companies. One aspect of robotics commercialization that is often highlighted, but often overlooked, is the fact that the actual business value of a robotics company can take many years to validate. The existing base of successful robotics companies, Intuitive Surgical, iRobot, etc., all took close to a decade or more to become successful. The basic premise is that low-cost hardware is helping to support more startups. But the success of a start-up is based on management ability, and it will take time to see which companies have the technology, target market, and team to succeed. Going forward, these teams will be the ones that reveal the real value of robotics, and the resulting impact on jobs.

I think there are two trends for management teams to watch regarding jobs and the emerging personal robotics market. The first is New Efficiencies.  In this case, emerging robotics technology is integrated into emerging markets as part of the overall business model and bottom line performance. In this case, there is a growth trend with respect to a new market, and robotics plays a role in the success of the emerging business solution by automating key activities that keep costs down. The jobs story in this case is usually a good one. New jobs are created as companies succeed. This is what is happening in the warehouse logistics market right now.  Driven by the competition to provide same day delivery, Amazon, Wallmart, Target, etc. are all building out new distribution facilities closer to population areas. Robotics technology (Kiva is a well-known example) is being used to create super efficient product handling.  These new warehouses become a source of jobs, although with different requirements than the traditional warehouse job.

Motorika’s ReoGo.

The second trend, and the one that is more compelling to me, is High-Value Gap Filling. In this case, the robot product works closely with a skilled human operator to augment the operator, performing functions that would not be done easily otherwise. I spent several years introducing a robot to support therapists working with stroke patients to rehabilitate arm function following a stroke. Our product focused exclusively on arm therapy, where it has been shown that intense rehabilitation can lead to better outcomes than were traditionally thought possible. The device is used by patients to perform hundreds of engaged arm movements per therapy session. Therapists know how to perform this type of therapy, but the current treatment landscape, which is very complicated for stroke recovery, rarely has room to just focus on arm movements, and actual arm engagements are in the dozens per session. In this case, the robot helps the therapist help the patient, but in no way could replace the therapist’s knowledge and experience.

A related example of Gap Filling is the use of robotics to address needs in agriculture. The opportunities are in part driven by the lack of available labor resulting from recent changes in immigration policy. It is likely that the labor market in agriculture will be impacted going forward.

Remember also, that the robotics market is where personal computing was back in the 1980s. Few would have been able to predict the types of jobs that would emerge related to personal and mobile computing, social networking, etc. Robotics has the potential to result in similar game-changing new markets, with similar implications on the jobs market.

Only time, and innovative management teams, will tell.

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“People hate me because they say robots steal jobs.”
“What jobs?”
“Low paid, extremely dangerous, repetitive, physically demanding…”
*boggle*
“I know, right?”

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John Dulchinos feature article: “The great equalizer: How robotics frees manufacturers from consolidating in low-wage nations”

These days it is hard to read an article about the future of robots that does not include a reference to jobs. As a pure roboticist, I object to the constant connection between the two, but as a concerned citizen I think it is a worthwhile discussion …

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Raffaello D’Andrea on “Do robots kill jobs?”

There is no doubt that robots, and automation in general, replace humans in the work-force: all productivity-enhancing tools, by definition, result in a decrease in the number of man-hours required to perform a given task …

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Mark Tilden on “Do robots kill jobs?”

Robots do kill jobs but they’re crappy jobs, so good riddance.  If you’ve ever had a job you were desperate for the money, but immediately regretted after you got it, then you know what I mean. …

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We hope you will join the discussion. Feel free to post your comment below.

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This Robotics By Invitation contribution is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

There may be some regional effects that result in an immediate increase in jobs (for example, setting up a new manufacturing plant and hiring workers to maintain the machines), but the global effect is indisputable: overall, robots replace human workers.

What is also true, however, is that robots create jobs as well.  This is simply Economics 101: there is a redistribution of labor from low skilled jobs – what robots can do now, and the foreseeable future – to higher skilled jobs. An analogy from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture: “In 1790, 93% of the population of the United States was rural, most of them farmers. By 1990, only 200 years later, barely 2% of our population are farmers.”  What is also true is that there are many more software engineers now than there were in 1790; or mechanics; or physiotherapists; or professional athletes; or artists.

So the debate about robots replacing human workers is, for the most part, a tired and old one; just replace the word ‘robot’ with any productivity-enhancing tool or development. And as long as the process is gradual, one can reasonably argue that society benefits as a whole.

But the question does have merit, because human workers are at an artificial disadvantage relative to their robot counterparts, and the culprit is artificially low interest rates.  Large companies such as Procter and Gamble can issue 10 year corporate bonds that have astronomically low yields of 2.3%.  With money so cheap, productivity tools – such as robots – that would not be economically viable under normal interest rates and yields are now a bargain.  Why should a company ‘rent’ labor (a human worker) when it can ‘buy’ it (a robot)?  Have we not seen this storyline before?

Read more answers →

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[Photo credit: Petr Kratochvil.]

This Robotics By Invitation contribution is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

The anxiety occurs when robots have anthropomorphic similarities that people wrongly associate with human ambition.  When a (semi) humanoid takes away the whole menial job that used to be done by a person, there’s an instinctive focus to blame the machine, not the corporation optimizing its bottom line.  Optimizing tasks to reduce costs is a good thing.  It’s just a shame we haven’t kept up with the social reforms needed so people who had those jobs before could find better jobs now.

So the short answer is robot-brained corporations kill jobs.  Robots are just the anthropomorphic patsies that get blamed.

Still, now I have to go and stare worriedly at my toaster.

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A strong argument can be made that a very large percentage of jobs are, on some level, essentially routine and repetitive in nature. In other words, the job can be broken down into a discrete set of tasks that tend to get repeated on a regular basis and can be predicated based on historical data. It seems likely that, as both computer hardware and software continue to progress, a large fraction of these job types are ultimately going to be susceptible to robotic or software automation, and in particular to machine learning technology.

Recent innovations like IBM’s Watson computer suggest that machine learning algorithms may soon be able to take on a number of cognitive tasks. As technology accelerates, I think there is little doubt that these systems will begin to match or exceed the capability of human workers in many routine job categories — and this includes a lot of workers with college degrees or other significant training.

As robots and smart algorithms increasingly take on the more routine, predictable jobs, this will leave much of our workforce with an unprecedented challenge. Historically, most workers have been able to move from routine occupations in one area to similarly routine jobs in a new emerging area, perhaps acquiring some new skills as part of the transition. However, as technology impacts virtually all routine work across the board, workers will have to find work in areas that are genuinely non-routine or creative in order to remain relevant. There are good reasons to be concerned that a significant fraction of our workforce will have great difficulty with such a transition: after all, if we assume a normal distribution or capability, then by definition, 50% of workers are average or below average.

None of this is intended to argue against continuing progress in areas like robotics, big data and AI. However, as these technologies continue to accelerate, the impact on employment and income inequality is likely to become more and more visible to the general public. Ultimately, I think that in order to solve the distributional problems that will be created by automation — and to ensure continued, broad-based prosperity — we will need to reform our economic systems. If we fail to do this, it seems very likely that a public backlash against automation technologies, as well as significant social and economic upheaval could well result.

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus. 

Those of us who have been speaking about the tremendous impact of automation in the workforce know very well that this isn’t a fad about to pass, but that it’s a problem that will only exacerbate in the future. Most of us agree on what the problem is (exponential growth of high-tech replacing humans faster and faster), and we agree that education will play a crucial role; but very few seem to suggest that we should use this opportunity to re-think our entire economic system and what the purpose of society should be.

We have come to believe that we are dependent on governments and corporations for everything, and now that technology is ever more pervasive, our dependence on them is even stronger. And of course we don’t question the cycle of labor-for-income, income-for-survival and the conspicuous consumption model that has become dominant in virtually every country – and that not only is ecologically unsustainable, but it also generates immense income inequality.

Well, I do. I challenge the assumption that we should live to work, and even that we should work to live, for that matter. In an age where we already produce more than enough food, energy, and drinkable water for 7 billion people with little to no human labour, while 780 million lack access to clean water and 860 million are suffering from chronic hunger, it follows that the system we have in place isn’t allocating resources efficiently. And rather than going back to outdated ideologies (i.e. socialism), we can try new forms of societal structure; starting with open source philosophy, shared knowledge, self-reliance, and sustainable communities.

There are many transitional steps that we can take  – reduced workweek, reform patent and copyright laws, switch to distributed and renewable energies – and there will be bumps along the road, no doubt. But if we move in the right direction, if we are ready to abandon ideologies and stick to whatever works best, I think we will prevail – simply because we will realise that there is no war other than the one we are fighting with ourselves.

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Recently, many of these explanations, predictions and proposed solutions focus on robots. Robots seem to have found their way into an increasing number of titles, photos and articles about our economic future, whether from economists like Paul Krugman, journalists like John Markoff, roboticists like Rod Brooks or futurists like Ray Kurzweil.

Disagreement about robots and our future is flying fast and furious. Are we on the edge of a robotics revolution, analogous to the PC revolution of the 70s? If so, will we see similar patterns of economic activity – automation of a great deal of work, death of some occupations, birth of others? Are current-day robots a harbinger of times to come, just as canaries were for coal miners until the early 20^th century? Or are we experiencing a “robot revolution” in name only? Are cutting-edge robots like Baxter a red herring – do they misdirect our hopes and fears about our future?

If you’re looking for the punch line of this piece, here it is: we have evidence that robots are both red herrings and canaries in a coalmine. We are arguing about this issue as if it’s either/or when both views can be usefully seen as true.

Robots as Red Herrings
Imagine a robot that costs almost nothing to produce (as in less than a cent), costs almost nothing to ship, that runs on almost no power, that could be customized for a wide variety of applications and that could execute billions of tasks every second. Obviously this robot would be software. We’d be excused for assuming it would sell pretty well, and for assuming software might play some role in the economy.

Because it already has. According to the BES, there was an installed base of 1.85 trillion dollars of software and related hardware in the US in 2011, which has grown an average of about 3.3%/year since 2004. Though there is ongoing disagreement about the role of IT in our economy, recent analysis lends strong support for the view that IT is mostly being used as a substitute for human labor on routine, non-physical tasks. Many economists point to IT as a key contributor to the “hollowing out” of the global economy – otherwise known as the “death of the middle class”. As Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT is fond of saying, it’s hard for a tax preparer to compete with TurboTax – especially when this software is actually free these days to new users, and integrates seamlessly with Mint.com, a free, online tool for personal finance.

From this angle, software has had a truly massive impact on the kinds of tasks humans can do and get paid for. On a global scale, we’re talking hundreds of millions of jobs and livelihoods, broad changes to the structure of work and occupations, and dramatic shifts in the way we encounter each other and the working world.

Yet when we talk about change associated with technology in the economy these days, we talk mostly about robots.

This seems a little strange, given that the IFR (a global authority on the robotics industry) estimates that there is an installed base of just 9 billion dollars of robotic systems in US and Canadian industry put together. That’s less than half a percent of the installed IT base. While recent growth numbers are large (38% in 2011), the IFR projects the global annual growth rate at about 6% through 2015. At quadruple this rate, it would take robotics 23 years to catch up with IT, assuming IT stood still. So if we want to investigate the technologically-related automation of jobs, work and the economy, maybe we should be focusing more (maybe a lot more) on Watson, Google and Robo-Traders on Wall Street. Maybe robotics is a red herring.

Robots as Canaries
But then again, maybe not. Many roboticists, economists, and journalists are claiming that we are on the cusp of a period of discontinuous progress in robotics technology. If this is true, then maybe we’ll soon see exponential – not linear – growth rates in robotics. Then again, maybe we already have.

How could we tell? One promising first step is to judge robotics based on performance per unit of time. While Moore’s law predicts the number of transistors on a chip as a function of the passage of time, its progress is almost perfectly correlated with performance-oriented metrics in other domains, such as processing speed, memory capacity and sensor quality. From this perspective, it is reasonable to assume that robots’ performance of basic tasks would correlate well with progress in underlying technical domains. If it hasn’t, then a revolution seems less likely.

Given that we all seem concerned with robots that may replace non-routine physical labor, Rod Brooks has suggested in a few talks that we should look at performance in autonomous robotic navigation as an indicator of progress. This does seem like a reasonable proxy: autonomous navigation requires a system to sense its environment, plan next steps and enact those steps through actuated movement, more or less without human input. The greater the performance of such a system, the more sophisticated each of the component technologies (sensors, AI and actuation). These requirements and related technological progress seem likely to generalize to other physical tasks in a dynamic environment.

So where do we stand on this front? Hans Moravec’s (Stanford) lab robot could navigate 20 meters in six hours in 1979. Ian Horswell’s (MIT) robot could navigate 2000 meters in six hours in 1992. The best car in the second (2005) Darpa Grand Challenge navigated 212 kilometers in 6.52 hours (about 194,500 meters in six hours). The winning car in the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge navigated 96 kilometers of dynamic urban environment in 4 hours and 10 minutes (about 23,000 meters in six hours). By 2010, the Google Car was capable of autonomous navigation for six (or more) hours straight in normal traffic. If we presume it obeyed the speed limit and did this driving on a highway (at 65 mph), the car could travel 390 miles during that time (or roughly 627,000 meters). Here is a plot of these achievements (on a logarithmic scale) over time:

If anything, this approach may underestimate the rate of change; the task has gotten more difficult. The 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge cars would have made much better time if they had to traverse 212km in a straight line, indoors, with no obstacles. Incidentally, the cost of just the camera on Moravec’s 1979 robot was $159,000 (in 2012 dollars); a far superior camera can be purchased today for less than $1.

Put together, this indicates the cost of robotic systems is dropping rapidly just as performance is increasing exponentially. While it is all the rage to predict the future based on exponential technological trends, this “back of the envelope” exploration should put us on notice: stories of linear progress in robotics should be justified, not taken for granted.

Robots as Red Herrings and Canaries in a Coal Mine
Work is scarce and wealth is increasingly in the hands of a few. This leads many of us to be scared, angry and curious about the future. Robots are a lightning rod for these emotions and questions – they move with apparent intention, they do tasks that sit at the core of what most of us define as “good, honest work”, and they’re rapidly getting cheaper and more capable. If we want to point a finger at technologies that are “responsible” for the inequities and challenges in our economy, however, it seems pretty clear that we should be pointing to IT. The vast majority of tasks that are being handed off to technology are still going to software and computers, and the evidence indicates that this will be true in the short and medium term. Robots are a red herring from this perspective.

But from another perspective, they are also canaries. We have seen apparently exponential progress in robotic capacity over the last 30 years. How many of us think that, in a hundred years, we won’t have highly autonomous, mobile, dexterous robots that can adapt to a wide range of tasks in a wide range of environments – for less than the cost of human labor? Are we willing to bet our national education and job training investments on the assumption that this is a hundred years away? Fifty years? Thirty? If this transition is going to happen on a mass scale, at best we probably have seventy years to prepare for it. That’s only two generations away, and that means we should be planning for it now.

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Bottom line, a multibillion commercial market will quickly emerge in the United States with applications ranging from precision agriculture to precision medicine delivery, creating over 100,000 jobs by 2025 just in manufacturing of these new products.

Why UAS?
In the most basic sense, UAS allow for similar capabilities of manned aircraft except without the added weight and size of the pilot and related pilot protection equipment. Once that weight and space (up to several hundred pounds) is stripped, suddenly the platform can be operated in new safer, more accurate ways. For hobbyists, these vehicles are an end unto themselves. For commercial use the vehicles must justify their use through making existing operations cheaper, more effective or less risky. In the report, we focused on markets that have existing data (agriculture and public safety) and made our projections from this data. However, when it comes to new applications, soon the sky will no longer be the limit.

Legislative Barriers
Though the FAA will find safe, effective ways to integrate UAS in the nation’s airspace, lifting what is the only current hurdle to mass commercial adoption, new legislation is under development that will may hinder commercial adoption of UAS. Michael Toscano, President and CEO of AUVSI, recently testified before the US Senate on the matter. Looking purely at the economic implications, states or municipalities that limit UAS use will miss out on the benefits of such systems and will likely quickly change their ways after other states prove the potential of UAS and alleviate current concerns. However, it may be too late for states that adapt slowly, as companies will likely already be established in states without excess restrictions.

Get Ready
Once current FAA restrictions are safely lifted, expect companies to move quickly to capture a piece of the multibillion dollar market. We’re two and half years away and companies in the defense market are already developing new commercial vehicles and new companies are springing up, cutting their teeth in other countries waiting for the right time to enter the U.S. market. These are exciting times and I cannot wait until I don’t have to leave my doorstep to catch a piece of the action.

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Well, not quite. According to Rodney Brooks, robotics has too much Steve Wozniak and not enough Steve Jobs. And perhaps that’s where the jobs part of a very full afternoon forum should have ended. Xconomy’s forum “Robots Remake the Workplace” featured a stellar line up of robotics companies, startups and investors who covered a wide range of views about where robotics industries were going. Vivek Wadhwa, VP of Academics and Innovation at Singularity University and Wade Roush, Xconomy Chief Correspondent and moderator of the sessions, tried hard to represent the recent negative view of robotic’s impact on jobs and the economy. But in the end, it was clear that robots vs. jobs was a far less compelling discussion than diving deeper into what sort of robotics businesses are taking shape and what issues they face.

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus. 

Some of the key points made about robots vs. jobs included the reminder that information technology ie. the computer and spreadsheet, have already ‘taken’ far more jobs than robots will in the next 10 years and that robots vs. jobs was not a debate in other parts of the world, although arguably China will be one of the most affected countries. Curt Carlson, President and CEO of SRI International opened the afternoon by saying that the number of robots is growing faster than the number of people and predicting the emergence of a new smarter manufacturing with ‘zero inventory, zero delay and absolute personalized production’.

Wade Roush framed the debate in US economic terms, will robotics make things worse when the US is in a prolonged period of unemployment? Scholars and media talk about a workplace not ready to change and an education system failing low skilled and low wage workers. Rodney Brooks points to declining number of ‘peak 19yr olds’ in both China and the US and said that factory workers were going to become a scarce resource. Studies that he’s done show that current factory workers do not want their children to follow in their footsteps. Women make up a high percentage of factory workers and that as they age, they’d like less strenuously physical factory work. Brook’s believes that Rethink Robotics is solving these problems with Baxter. Baxter can safely work alongside people and is simple to reprogram. Brook’s keynote address ended with a call to bring tooling back to the US and to improve supply chain dynamism, make quick scale up possible and develop new business models. He believes robotics is on the verge of becoming pervasive and very interesting but there’s still too much Wozniak and not enough Jobs.

“Industrial augmentation not automation” was Aaron Edsinger’s catchphrase talking about turning people into problem-solvers not factory workers. Rich Mahoney wants to see robot business models that democratize our access to quality. Aldo Zini echoes Rodney Brooks – we need tool making facilities back in the US – not just for robots but all manufacturing. Zini also said that robotics was going to be successful when it was solving problems. And a robot that solved a problem was not replacing a human and wouldn’t be seen as ‘evil’. Whether it’s stroke therapy, logistics, factory work or agriculture, that robots were going to be introduced in jobs that were dangerous and difficult or that people were unable to do at all.

The next panel suggested that telepresence robots will make it easier to fill jobs but out of the 3 companies, Double Robotics, Revolve Robotics and Romotive, 2 have made their marketplace ‘family presence’ rather than making a workplace play. Wade Roush offered a discount on Xconomy tickets next year if you attend via telepresence. One interesting point made was that in mobile technology everything is ‘design driven’ innovation whereas in robotics most things are still ‘technology driven’.

Chris Anderson provided a lively keynote for the second half of the afternoon, opining that “robots are the peace divident of the smart phone wars.” The smartphone revolution is “the Cambrian explosion of Robotics…If we hit a hard problem, just wait 6 months.” Chris Anderson was the Editor-In-Chief at Wired but is now CEO of 3D robotics, a company that is about to be larger than Wired. “5 yrs ago I was playing Lego with my kids – today it’s a multimillion $ robot business. It’s never been easier to start a hardware company than now.”

For a full list of speakers and perhaps some videos – go to Xconomy.

See all the posts in Robohub’s Jobs Focus →

Source: KUKA, 1983

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

There are at least 350,000 people directly employed by and in the industrial robotics industry. However, industrial robots are not made in the US; they are made in Japan, Korea and Europe, consequently more than half of those 350,000 jobs are offshore.

There are ancillary providers of components, software and other services for robots and installations but these jobs are hard to quantify. In general manufacturing there are known multipliers, but in robotics there is no known formula to extrapolate just how many jobs in these ancillary businesses are attributable to robotics.

The deployment of robots into a factory situation involves even more complex computations and assumptions — which is why the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) commissioned the UK-based research firm Metra Martech in 2009 to figure out how to compute the effect on jobs of the deployment of industrial robots.

The IFR annually collects, reports on shipments and sales, computes robots at work (versus idle or abandoned), and makes five-year sales and deployment projections of industrial and service robots worldwide. They summarize their data into two comprehensive books: World Robotics Industrial Robots 2012 and World Robotics Service Robots 2012 reflecting data for 2011. The 2013 books covering 2012 data will be available later this year.

Original Metra Martech Report
Metra Martech’s original report was delivered in February, 2011. It concluded that they had determined a job-creation ratio of 3.6 jobs for every robot deployed, and that with more robots, fewer jobs are lost. That’s why Germany, with hourly rates almost 50% higher than in the US, has remained globally competitive: they have twice as many robots per 10,000 workers as do Americans.

Their research claimed that 3 million jobs were created in factories where accuracy and consistency could not be achieved without robots, and another 300,000 jobs were created where poor working conditions were overcome by the use of robots.

Much has happened during and since 2008, the unfortunate base year for that report, which is why the IFR re-commissioned Metra Martech in 2012 to update their findings for more recent data.

Robots, Robotics and the 2013 Metra Martech Report
Early this year CBS News 60 Minutes aired a segment asking but not answering the question: Are robots hurting job growth? Much criticism from robotics industry professionals followed, including an International Federation of Robotics CEO press conference where an abstract of the updated version of the Metra Martech report was presented. Under the banner Robots Create Jobs, they cited the following reasons why they opposed the CBS 60 Minutes piece, and why robotics really does create jobs:

1. Robotics is a critical factor in rebalancing world manufacturing economies because it reduces the threat from low-cost-of-labor countries.
2. Although the recession temporarily drew attention away from unsatisfactory work conditions, enhancing work conditions is a driving force for using robots. Replacing dull, dirty and dangerous tasks with robots is the low-hanging fruit of robotics.
3. There are many new industries where only robots can produce precision and consistency standards at an affordable cost as demanded by the competitive global economy.
4. Job creation by robotics, between 2012 and 2020, will be 2.15 million to 3.5 million:
   1. This is the sum of new robotic products (.80 to 1.4 million),
   2. Current industry expansion (.45 to .70 million),
   3. Downstream jobs (.9 to 1.4 million).

It is the #4 items that are of interest to most readers and particularly Americans who, by and large, perceive a different set of “facts.”

US Facts
Americans are living through a confusing economic period. They see things in “home economics” terms: job creation is up but nowhere near covering population growth; unemployment has dipped slightly but hides the broader unemployment rate; stock markets are reaching new highs; and house prices and disposable income are both rising. Yet public sentiment is focused on jobs and job creation, and for good reason: millions have fallen off the employment grid and the employment figures don’t reflect the true numbers nor the hardships this has caused.

Hence the concern about jobs being taken away: about being left behind, about off-shoring, robots, relocation, acquisition, closures, consolidation or otherwise.

Reviewing the Revised Metra Martech Findings
John Dulchinos, former CEO of Adept Technologies, said at the IFR press conference when the revised report was launched (and reiterated in a recent email):

“Assessing job creation driven by robots is not an exact science and requires piecing together data based on a consistent set of assumptions. Over the past decade the US has lost 6 million manufacturing jobs. This is not the result of robots. It is largely due to offshoring by contract manufacturing companies who have taken a large slice of the manufacturing pie. What is not captured in all the government data is the number of downstream non-manufacturing jobs that disappear when a factory is no longer competitive with low-wage nations and is shut down.”

Part of the complexity of the Metra Martech report is that it must take into account the economic, population, industry variables and downstream multipliers unique to each of the main countries in the study. For example, manufacturing accounts for only 11% of employment in the US, but 24% in Germany and 27% in South Korea.

I asked Metra Martech’s Peter Gorle whether they relied solely on the IFR data or if they supplemented it with other data. Gorle responded by saying:

“The basic data on robot use came from IFR, but we at Metra Martech carried out considerably more research into the employment and unemployment figures and the growth rates in the main user sectors. This provided the fundamental position against which the use of robots was analysed.”

Then I asked how they attempted to report the number of people employed through the use of robots net of the number of workers displaced by robot deployment:

“While it is clear that robots can and do replace unskilled, dirty or dangerous occupations, there are two main drivers for added employment resulting from the use of robots. The first is the need to use the repeatability and accuracy which they can provide. Note that this is evident throughout the world no matter what local labour costs.

The second driver is the need for industrialised countries to overcome the benefit which the low wage countries offer in production. This tends to result in the loss of some jobs, but it enables companies to retain employees in parts of industry which would otherwise be lost to lower cost areas.”

Since most of the conclusions reached by Metra Martech are global in scope and conjectural in nature, it is important to examine the extent of their assumptions. One can see their process at work in the discussion of the chart shown below for the Electrical and Electronics sector:

“Hypothetically, if robots were removed, some products would become unviable, while others would move to low cost countries and be assembled by hand. Many tasks carried out in this sector [Electrical & Electronics], particularly by SMEs (SME refers to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, i.e., small shops, factories with less than 100 employees), are still done by hand. The loss of jobs would thus be greater in the developed countries, and the gain in jobs greater in the lower cost industrializing countries. There are no statistics on this type of dependence and we have made broad estimates based on the above and the number of robots in use in the country in the sector.”

Bottom Line
Many of the assumptions in the updated Metra Martech report are sufficiently transparent such that one can readily accept their position and therefore their conclusions. Thus their projection of 2.15 to 3.5 million new jobs from 2012 to 2020 appears correct:

Although they don’t really address statistically what happens to displaced workers, they do say that they are often kept, retrained, and utilized in upscale jobs created as a result of the efficiencies reaped from the new robots. But they don’t provide any numbers or formulas to support this thesis.

The updated report moves away from a strict focus on industrial robotics, suggesting that SMEs and healthcare/medical robotics will show broad job growth in the next few years. Thus 21% to 24% of Metra Martech’s potential new jobs projections include service robots marketing and manufacturing. They rationalize this contradiction by saying that service robots can be likened to consumer products and therefore will need new manufacturing requiring robotics.

Two areas stand out as seriously unsubstantiated in the report:

1. Offsets for jobs displaced
2. Downstream jobs

Offsets for jobs displaced, although frequently mentioned in the report, could not be measured with the data available.

Downstream jobs include (1) employment in ancillary businesses that are needed to support robot construction, robotic installations, robot control, and (2) jobs created by adding well-paid robotics industry employees into the community. Metra Martech suggests a third group to be (3) other types of jobs in support of the use of the products manufactured where the products can only be produced by robots.

In manufacturing, an industry statistic to reflect downstream ancillary jobs is 1.3 jobs in a support business for every new job in manufacturing. This multiplier effect is frequently validated in general manufacturing. But applying that figure in the robotics industry is difficult because it relates to jobs, whereas the Metra Martech projections apply to robots deployed predicated on the data provided by the IFR. Nowhere in their report is there a correlation of the number of jobs replaced by a single robot; thus a true downstream jobs figure cannot be tabulated.

Consequently, I find the Metra Martech report somewhat flawed but not for lack of trying. It was a noble effort and remains a valuable tool showing that the robotics industry really does create jobs.

See all the posts in Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• The great equalizer: How robotics frees manufacturers from consolidating in low-wage nations
• Jobs by the numbers: Economic reports on the robotics and manufacturing industries
• In agriculture robots replace job vacancies
• Jobs isn’t the issue for robotics
• Ability to do creative, non-routine work will be a must in the coming automation era. Is this realistic for most workers?
• Effect of robots on jobs? Only time — and management teams — will tell

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

A few simple facts emerged:

1. It’s true: industrial robots do take away jobs, often in big numbers. Generally, these are jobs that humans don’t want to do or shouldn’t be doing. After a short time, the displaced workers are replaced in higher level tasks (and perhaps re-distributed downstream or elsewhere). This process has already begun, and will continue.
2. On the other hand, Service Robotics create jobs that didn’t exist before, often in respectable numbers — numbers that today,  as Service Robotics grows, may very well equal or exceed jobs lost by the use of industrial robots. And these new jobs could grow to much greater numbers as the industry continues to flourish. These are jobs that people want and that pay well.
3. There is a political component not presently being adequately addressed as automation transforms the workplace by replacing humans with machines that have encapsulated their skills and can perform those skills flawlessly. Retraining and upgrading the general educational system to enable the higher tech skills needed for these new jobs needs a shot of reality instead of spin.
4. Under the rubric that success breeds success, each recent successful robotics venture was less focused on the metrics of labor cost reduction than on enabling growth limited by hard-to-find labor.

Curt Carlson, President & CEO, SRI

As we move quickly toward what Curt Carlson, CEO of SRI International, said is a “zero inventory, zero delay, and 100% personalized” world, it will likely be true that fewer people will be working in manufacturing.

Carlson’s catchy phrase encapsulates both the complexity and simplicity of the process — and the momentum required for it to happen. The process will likely be driven by (1) lower costs of sensors, CPUs and hardware and (2) more capable AI; and the drivers propelling it forward will be the aging population and global competitiveness.

Thus jobs were not the main topic at the Xconomy Forum; the issue was an aside. The main topic was really the progress and inroads robotics are adding to the global automation and business solutions process.

The jobs issue did lend itself to the two best jokes of the day:

1. Ten years from now all the robots will be out on strike saying, “Those damn 3D printers are taking away our jobs!”
2. Let’s reconvene this debate 10 years from now when we have all this time on our hands [after our jobs have been replaced by robots].

It used to be that it didn’t matter how grueling the work was, so long as it was safe enough that a worker could get through the day uninjured by being careful. If the boss paid cash at the end of the day and didn’t ask too many questions, there’d be someone waiting to jump in the back of his pickup truck when he went out early in the morning to collect workers. The pay wasn’t great, of course, but it was better than what the workers could expect for equivalent work back where they’d come from, and if they were frugal they could save a bit and send some home or eventually bring their families to the U.S. Moreover, there really weren’t any serious consequences for employers who hired undocumented workers.

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

One who’d made a nuisance of himself and had come to the attention of the authorities might be picked up from the worksite (usually a farm) now and then, but there would be another to take his place the next morning. Sure, knowingly hiring illegal workers was itself technically illegal, but violations of these laws were routinely overlooked, and political rhetoric demanding their enforcement was largely insincere. This was the situation in the orchards of the Northwest, throughout the Central Valley of California, east from Texas across the southern United States, and anywhere else hard manual labor was common. In the Midwest and the Great Plains, where crops like wheat, corn (maize), soya, and others easily handled in bulk predominate, most farm labor had already been replaced by mechanization.

Then new, tougher US immigration laws came into effect after 9/11, and everything began to change. Not all at once, of course, but the rhetoric immediately became more serious and more convincing, and the border with Mexico gradually became more of a barrier. Laws regarding the hiring of undocumented workers were strengthened and began to be enforced. Migrant workers without visas and work permits found themselves being squeezed out, as well as drawn to better opportunities back home, and farmers were faced with an increasingly serious shortage of workers, to the point that, in 2012, many crops were left unharvested, and in some cases even perennial crops, like asparagus, were plowed under, because not enough workers could be found to harvest them.

Congress is now considering a range of options to soften the blow, but there’s no chance of things going back to the way they were before, and, despite high unemployment in this country, Americans aren’t stepping up to take the place of the migrant laborers.

This is the situation into which companies like Harvest Automation hope to introduce robots as a replacement for workers already gone missing. With the introduction of robots, remaining human workers are converted from manual laborers to robot tenders, a task American workers are more willing to perform. Ostensibly, this is the wave of the future, with machines taking over more and more of the dull, dirty, and/or dangerous work, while humans move into maintaining, repairing, complementing, and managing the machines. How significant this wave turns out to be will depend in no small part on improvements in education. Here I refer not only to robotics and computing (nor even only to computing, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), but also to the many aspects which have yet to be implemented in hardware or reduced to computer code of the various types of work robots might eventually be trusted to do.

To begin with, for as long as the machines remain relatively crude, their senses will need human augmentation. Humans will be needed to help distinguish objects the machines cannot distinguish for themselves, such as larger rocks from hunched rabbits (without IR vision) or smaller rocks from mushrooms (without radar). Humans will also be needed to perform operations the machines are unable to perform, for example binding branches split by wind, snow, lightning, or in danger of being split by being heavily laden with fruit. For the moment the list of operations which can’t yet be performed by machines remains long, but in almost every case this is only because the engineering hasn’t yet been done; there are few, if any, gardening operations that cannot, in principle, be performed by machines. However, even once these gaps in their abilities have all been filled, the machines will still need human assistance with making sense of patterns found in the data they collect and with making decisions about how the operational system might be improved, and human guidance with regard to aesthetic considerations – the art of gardening.

Initially there will be a need for technicians who work alongside the machines, but before long there will be a need for people who are thoroughly familiar with the context of the work to be performed (gardening), domain experts, whose task will be to evaluate the net result of the operational system directing the machines and to suggest improvements. These domain experts will fit in a triangular relationship with the technicians (who will still be needed, gradually moving from working alongside the machines to supervising more and more machines) and the engineers who design the machines and the operational system. In the ideal case, many of the technicians would also be domain experts.

So as new types of machines find their way into the fields, rest assured that they are not, for the most part, displacing workers who would otherwise be in those fields, but rather, in some cases, moving them into more technical work as robot tenders, and in other cases taking over work that fewer and fewer people are willing to do for the money it pays, and that, for those few who are displaced, there will be other farmers nearby anxious to hire them. Meanwhile, a new industry will be germinating.

Fast forward to today, roboticists now have a variety of career options to choose from. Of those who did their PhD with me, one third ended up in a startup (I’m looking at you Sensefly), one third went to industry or consulting at great companies like Sony or Google, and one third stayed in academia. The number of open positions posted to the main robotics mailing-list for academia has quadrupled in the last 7 years. Wanted Analytics, an expert in talent placement, reports similar increases in hiring demands for artificial intelligence and robotics. Career Builder has over 1000 robotics related jobs posted in the past 30 days. More than 950 robotics-related jobs paying more than 70’000$ were posted on Indeed in the past 15 days alone. O*net, expert in US occupational information, reports Robotics Engineers as having a “bright outlook”.

Hiring Demand for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Skills. Source: Wanted Analytics.

There are a variety of wonderful articles in Robohub’s Jobs Focus analyzing the impact of robotics on the job market or the economy. Few of the articles have considered the inevitable increase in jobs for roboticists. Today you can apply to jobs at Aldebaran, Rethink Robotics, Intuitive Surgical, Kiva Systems, Boston Dynamics or start your own company like several of my colleagues. These possibilities didn’t exist beyond the manufacturing industry just a few years ago. So if you’re still looking at Academia like me, or interested in industry or startups, robotics will continue to develop into a new and emerging job market.

Are you a roboticist? Where do you work? Was it hard for you to find a job? Let us know in the comments section below.

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

Title
Economic Impact of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the US

Released
March 2013

Authors
Darryl Jenkins, Dr. Bijan Vasigh

Published By
Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI)

Shows the economic benefit of UAS integration into the FAA regulation scheme. “AUVSI’s findings show that in the first three years of integration more than 70,000 jobs will be created in the United States with an economic impact of more than $13.6 billion. This benefit will grow through 2025 when we foresee more than 100,000 jobs created and economic impact of $82 billion.”

Title
Report on the Positive Impact of Industrial Robots on Employment

Released
February 2013

Authors
Peter Gorle, Andrew Clive

Produced By
Metra Martech

Commissioned By
International Federation of Robotics (IFR)

“The report´s authors studied companies with more than 250 employees in automotive sector, electronics sector, food and beverages, plastics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The Report focused on six countries, Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, Republic of Korea and USA, which are considered to be representative of the global economy. Findings show that one million industrial robots currently in operation have been directly responsible for the creation of close to three million jobs. A growth in robot use over the next five years will result in the creation of one million high quality jobs around the world.” See also the 2011 report.

“Smart manufacturing requires at least three to four times the number of indirect jobs for outside support compared with direct jobs—versus the much lower employment multiplier of traditional factories today, which is only about one-half of a non-manufacturing support job for every job in a factory. That’s because smart factories typically use more non-manufactured supplies, high-tech services, IT support, transportation, and logistics companies to accommodate their significantly increased productivity and higher output, often exported globally due to its cost-competitiveness.”

“We find that previous measures of the health of the US manufacturing sector such as employment do not accurately capture the new face of US manufacturing that is now more capital intensive in the form of technology. This adoption of technology requires fewer, more highly skilled and productive workers than in the past. We use this structural change in the industry as a framework for analyzing the manufacturing sectors of emerging market economies. We also explore the future of US manufacturing in light of increasing demand for US factory technology among emerging market economies. We find that on an output basis, the manufacturing sector of the economy remains stronger and more productive than at any other point in the past. Furthermore, the future of the US manufacturing sector will likely depend more than ever on exporting our accumulated manufacturing knowledge and technologies to assist emerging market economies increase their capital intensity, productivity, and improve their manufacturing processes. We expect that this trend will help support further growth in US exports, which in turn will provide support to US economic growth.”

“Manufacturing employment has fallen by one third over the past decade. Some Members of Congress contend that foreign trade has allowed American employers to offshore these jobs. In fact, technology has driven down manufacturing employment. Computers have made manufacturers more productive by automating many routine tasks. American manufacturers now employ fewer workers to produce more goods. This means less expensive manufactured goods, more manufacturing jobs for highly skilled workers, and the elimination of millions of low-skill assembly line positions. These same forces have reduced manufacturing employment around the world. Increased productivity led Chinese employers to eliminate millions of manufacturing jobs in the late 1990s.”

See all the posts in Robohub’s Jobs Focus.