Courtesy: Softwear Automation

National Public Radio (NPR) has published a series of stories about robots and the future of employment in the U.S. and abroad. It begins with the story about the Luddites war on industry and a more recent podcast about the sewing robot DARPA has contracted to research for the production of U.S. military garments.

Enjoy.

Episode 621: When Luddites Attack (link)

Episode 622: Humans vs. Robots (link)

Episode 623: The Machine Comes To Town (link)

Episode 624: I, Waiter (link)

Episode 715: The Sewing Robot (link)

If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to read:

• Robohub roundtable: Job loss through automation, Foxconn controversy
• In automation we trust: senior thesis project examines concept of over-trusting robotic systems
• Bringing automation and robotics to the farm
• Robots Podcast #202: Automation and Employment, with Michael Osborne

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

This post is part of Robohub’s Jobs Focus. 

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.

See all the posts in Robohub’s Jobs Focus.

Much of what I saw at CES 2012 was about products being upgraded to “smart” under the premise that smart connectivity enables consumer convenience. It was definitely on the minds of most of those attending. That’s why the CES keynote speeches were so well attended: they were slated to offer insight into the near-term future. But this year there were competing visions of that future. The industry leaders seemed to have divergent approaches to the development and marketing of “smart.”

• CES is a show focused on near-term product releases… those that will be launched later this year, in time for Christmas, and into next year. Throughout CES, almost all of the consumer products were demonstrating smarter products – smarter in the sense that they are connected to the Internet or a local net and have sensors or artificial intelligence that gather and process data and make decisions based on that information.
• The Apple iPad, with it’s multi-touch capability, has already changed our expectations as to how we interact with our computers, tablets and phones. And Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Kinect are leading us on to even newer ways — smart ways of interaction between users and their devices.… all to add value to the product by providing convenience or entertainment to the buyer.
• One of the most interesting areas of CES was focused on Digital Health – where one could easily see benefits from sensors and smart apps providing data that affects consumers. Digital Health was an area packed with healthcare inventions and eager young inventors, and the many new products and apps epitomized our “nurse in your purse” future.

To make my point I must first describe three seemingly disparate events:

Ford and NPR Press Conference:
Ford and NPR held a joint press conference to launch NPR’s new app which runs within the infotainment system (called Sync AppLink) on new Ford cars. NPR has the 1st and 2nd rankings of Morning Edition and All Things Considered among U.S. news radio programs. Their new app gives Ford drivers voice control over their NPR programming. In a menu-driven series of commands, a driver can call up the latest news of the hour, select a live stream of his or her favorite station, or access programs or topics from NPR’s large library of podcasts by using a set of simple commands like “hourly news” or “stations” or “programs” followed by the name of the program. The resulting selection may be playing on the FM band, streaming live, or streaming from the archives of NPR over the Internet. It could take as many as five commands to get the desired program. Underneath the Ford Sync system is Microsoft’s operating system. Executives from Ford and NPR, when asked about future improvements to the system, said that a more free-form natural language voice recognition system would be ideal but is not yet capable and reliable enough to work with safety and convenience in a car. But think how Siri would get to the same program in just one short sentence: “Find and play today’s ‘All Things Considered.’”

Keynote Speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:
Shortly after this presentation I went to the Steve Ballmer Microsoft Keynote Speech. Bizarre is a charitable word to describe this off-putting, fever-pitched yet unexciting sales pitch for everything Microsoft. Very little news, less information about new product introductions, and much puffery about the new Windows 8 Operating System coming sometime this year. Not a word about robotics even though Microsoft supports and sells a robotic operating system. Ballmer presented Windows 8 and Metro – the same systems that are limiting NPR’s app by not having a capable and reliable free-form voice recognition system similar to Apple’s Siri – as the cat’s meow; the very highest tech and best you can buy anywhere. I actually felt bad from the presentation – to see such an unappealing sales pitch while omitting Microsoft’s vision for the future. [MS announced that this would be Ballmer’s and their last keynote at CES – a fact which underscores how the shift toward mobile devices has kept MS re-allocating talent and resources to adapt.] As an aside, Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine just did a cover story about Ballmer turning the company into a more relevant powerhouse with cooler technology and also a serious player in cloud computing. In that article, Businessweek describes what I saw: “For many, the lasting impression of Ballmer is the sweaty, breathless, booming clown seen in countless YouTube clips [or in my case, in person at CES]. He plays the cheerleader in an apparent effort to prove that no one can top his love of Microsoft – and he succeeds cringingly well.” The article goes on to describe Ballmer as pretty normal except in public presentations. Still, I left that night without any new information and with a headache and bad feeling.

Keynote Speech by Mercedes Chairman Dieter Zetsche:
The next morning I went to see Dr Dieter Zetsche present Mercedes’ first-ever CES keynote speech, an inspiring, informative and well thought out “big picture” focus on the next generation of connected cars. When asked whether cars were going to become autonomously-driven commodities built to carry around consumer products, he responded that Mercedes builds cars that people want to drive and that will continue – but when the traffic or the road is boring, there will be a switch to turn on a temporary autopilot. Zetsche, in his interesting and responsible presentation, described the auto industry and Mercedes cars in terms of freedom and included new offerings within each of five “freedoms.”

1. Freedom not only from the horses, buses and trains of the past, but from the limits of distance, from the tethers of things local, to distancing yourself from your parents.
2. Freedom of time via connectivity so that seamless updates are pushed to in-vehicle communication systems negating the need to bring your car in for system updates. Their new MBrace2 system regularly updates and monitors their cars but also connects today’s digital lifestyle into a digital drive style.
3. Freedom of speech to communicate with your car in the most safe and expeditious manner. The current iteration of MBrace2 has a much enhanced (but not yet freeform) voice recognition system and in many instances the system will be proactive, eg, choosing to not answer phone calls or read messages at those times when the driver is fully occupied with hazardous driving situations.
4. Freedom of energy – where Zetsche described new hydrogen-based fuel packs just waiting for the national (political) infrastructure to support them.
5. Freedom of information where car-to-car communication can provide alerts about road hazards and conditions by taking advantage of the already present in-car virtual private network system and link.

All three of these presentations occurred before the doors for CES opened, and when I walked the massive exhibition space, those visions peppered what I saw with what I believed to be the immediate future in mobility, communication and apps. It is clear to me that despite Mr. Ballmer’s sales pitch to buy today’s systems and products because they were great, free form voice recognition (a la Siri) is the future of communication with our machines and “smart” is the pathway we are following to that end goal.

The most advanced manner of communicating with smart products is by voice and gesture. Today’s technology is menu-driven (like the NPR example) but the future is free-form and natural (think IBM’s Watson or Apple’s Siri). Hence the flurry of acquisitions into the language processing space: Apple’s acquisition of Siri; Google just bought CleverSense; Aldebaran recently purchased Karotz. New startups of note in this arena include True Knowledge and their Siri-like product Evi.  Nuance (of Dragon Dictate fame) is already established in this arena. Nuance voice processing is repackaged and used by many car companies for their in-car systems including both Ford and Mercedes.

It appeared to be an afterthought in Ballmer’s presentation (Microsoft has been slow to react to it’s popularity and multiple uses), but Microsoft’s Kinect voice and gesture recognition device was the wonder of 2011 and seen in many non-Microsoft boothes at the 2012 show. Hacked from its Xbox gaming origins, it provides a low-cost alternative to expensive LIDAR and collision avoidance systems, and all sorts of other applications.  It is a wonderful invention that other companies are hacking and incorporating into their products. PrimeSense, the Israeli inventor of the Kinect device and it’s software, has been doing a booming business selling the device for non-gaming applications, research and who knows what else.

Consequently, it was easy to see that at CES 2012 the path to the next level of “smart” products is through the use of better communication with those products – gesture and voice recognition, and natural language, to command and control them – just like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible!