Robotics and Automation in Working Society

Tara Kissel

University of North Texas

Running head: ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION IN WORKING

The term robot was coined by Karel Capek, a Czech writer, in 1921. This is the modern

term we use to refer to any mechanical devices that complete some sort of service derived from

the term “robota” meaning forced labor. (Britannica) But, these mechanized items were not

invented in 1921, we see examples of early mechanical machines throughout history.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, another professional organization, a

service robot is a robot that operates semi autonomously or fully autonomously for performing

services useful to the well-being of humans and equipment, excluding manufacturing

operations. (Bekey & Yuh) Personal robots are service robots that educate, assist, or entertain

at home. These include domestic robots that may perform daily chores, assistive robots for

people with disabilities, and robots that can serve as companions or pets for entertainment.

(Bekey & Yuh) Since the unveiling of the first popular robot ELEKTRO at the 1939 world’s fair,

who had millions of visitors for his 20 minutes show (Pierini), the field of robotics and AI have

been growing exponentially. In the modern world we have robots beating grand champions at

chess, Go (an abstract strategy game from Asia) and Jeopardy.

In the 60’s robotics were introduced to the manufacturing industry to take on tasks too

difficult for humans and have found their way into assembly lines. UNIMATE, the first mass-

produced industrial robot, begins work at General Motors. Obeying step-by-step commands

stored on a magnetic drum, the 4,000-pound robot arm sequenced and stacked hot pieces of

die-cast metal. UNIMATE was the brainchild of Joe Engelberger and George Devol, and

originally automated the manufacture of TV picture tubes. (Bekey & Yuh) There are even robots

in our homes as toys and companions. Today we can find robotics and automation in all

industries. The working world is seeing more and more robotics and automation as there is

more and more innovation. We depend on technology today to make our world what it is and

many people hope for new products to create more ease in our lives. The future of robotics is

almost unimaginable for us, but predictions can be made about the direction it will head in.

2|Page
Running head: ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION IN WORKING

The consumer market wants to have robots that will make everyone’s life easier, Roombas

and other cleaning robots are all the rage. In the future many people see robots as an answer

to domestic work, such as cleaning and cooking. There is a desire to replace human workers in

dangerous situations with robotics to save human lives and conduct research no human could

ever complete. Some people want to see robotics and humans working side by side in all

industries, helping with the technical but providing the humanistic empathy. There are also

those who see the future of robotics as a destruction of the current norms of life and freedom.

There are those who fear that robotics will lead to the end of work and the end of the economy

as we know it. We need to ask what the future of work will be in terms of automation and

robotics. We must not fear the unknown but embrace these opportunities to move the human

race forward.

When people think of robotics in the workplace many reference the auto industry or

manufacturing; places we see automation, see worker replacement. The first robot on an

assembly line was UNIMATE, at General Motors. Obeying step-by-step commands stored on a

magnetic drum, the 4,000-pound robot arm is sequenced and stacked hot pieces of die-cast

metal. UNIMATE was the brainchild of Joe Engelberger and George Devol, who originally

automated the manufacture of TV picture tubes according to the Timeline for Computer History.

In 2014 it was reported that almost two million robots were being utilized worldwide for industrial

purposes, with Japan having the largest share. When we look at America’s robots, a 65%

majority of industrial robots are used for the auto industry. (Hagarty) But the digital work does

not only seep into blue collar work, we see it is high-paying high-skills work too. Expert systems

are used in legal research and translations. These are jobs that once needed humans to

complete but today we can create systems that have more data at their fingertips than any

group of people could. The world of finance uses algorithms and predictive models to

determine trading today. These parts of information technology are heavily relied upon for their

3|Page
Running head: ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION IN WORKING

speed and accuracy for current markets. The robotics industry is growing every year due to the

cost effectiveness of corporations. Humans are not always effective and require many rules

and regulations to keep them working. The cheapest worker in the world is more expensive than

the intelligent technology coming online to replace them. (Rifkin)

With the introduction of millions of robots in the workplace and the added automation which

can lead to changing job roles how will the world economy be effected by these changes? Half

of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced

significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that

this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively

unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order. (Smith & Anderson) While others (52%)

expect that technology will not displace more jobs than it creates by 2025. Current experts

anticipate that many jobs currently performed by humans will be substantially taken over by

robots or digital agents by 2025. But they have faith that human ingenuity will create new jobs,

industries, and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the Industrial

Revolution. This will be done by returning to a focus on small-scale or artisanal modes of

production, or by giving people more time to spend on leisure, self-improvement, or time with

loved ones. JP Rangaswami, chief scientist for Salesforce.com, offered a number of reasons for

his belief that automation will not be a net displacer of jobs in the next decade:

“The effects will be different in different economies (which themselves may look

different from today’s political boundaries). Driven by revolutions in education and in

technology, the very nature of work will have changed radically—but only in

economies that have chosen to invest in education, technology, and related

infrastructure. Some classes of jobs will be handed over to the ‘immigrants’ of AI and

Robotics, but more will have been generated in creative and curating activities as

4|Page
Running head: ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION IN WORKING

demand for their services grows exponentially while barriers to entry continue to fall.

For many classes of jobs, robots will continue to be poor labor substitutes.”

Along with the human factor on the economy there is another economy—a second economy—

of all of these digitized business processes conversing, executing, and triggering further actions,

silently forming alongside the physical economy. (Arthur) Labor productivity (output per hours

worked) in the United States had grown approximately 3 percent annually, since the major

introduction of digitalization in 1995. Current studies have shown some 65 to 100 percent of

productivity growth to digitization. It can be predicted than in the long term the second economy

will be responsible for roughly a 2.4 percent annual increase in the productivity of the overall

economy. If the labor force is held constant, this means output grows at this rate, too. An

economy that grows at 2.4 percent doubles every 30 years; so if things continue, in 2025 the

second economy will be as large as the 1995 physical economy. In two to three decades, it will

surpass the physical economy in size. (Arthur) The second economy is not producing anything

tangible, not physical services re being offered through it like a traditional economy, but it is

running many of the services needed for the tangible economy. It’s helping architects design

buildings, it’s tracking sales and inventory, getting goods from here to there, executing trades

and banking operations, controlling manufacturing equipment, making design calculations,

billing clients, navigating aircrafts, helping diagnose patients, and guiding laparoscopic

surgeries. Such operations grow slowly and take time to form. In any deep transformation,

industries do not so much adopt the new body of technology as encounter it, and as they do so

they create new ways to profit from its possibilities. (Arthur)

There are 3 key fears that come along with the automation of industry and the creation

of our second economy. First, these impacts from automation have thus far impacted mostly

blue-collar employment but the coming wave of innovation threatens to upend white-collar work

as well. It may seem elitist but the fear of robotics becomes much more palpable when you look

5|Page
Running head: ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION IN WORKING

at the high-skills industries. Second, certain highly-skilled workers will succeed wildly in this new

environment—but far more may be displaced into lower paying service industry jobs at best, or

permanent unemployment at worst. And third, our educational system is not adequately

preparing us for work of the future, and our political and economic institutions are poorly

equipped to handle these hard choices. (Smith & Anderson) There are parallels with what has

happened before. In the early 20th century, farm jobs became mechanized and there was less

need for farm labor, and some decades later manufacturing jobs became mechanized and there

was less need for factory labor. Now business processes—many in the service sector—are

becoming “mechanized” and fewer people are needed, and this is exerting systematic

downward pressure on jobs. Society does not have paralegals in the numbers we used to.

(Arthur) Legal services are also being affected by the ability of computers to store and process

big data. In particular, algorithms are increasingly substituting for tasks performed by paralegals,

contract and patent lawyers. More specifically, law firms now make use of systems that can

scan thousands of legal briefs and precedents to perform document review and to assist in pre-

trial research. (Frey & Osborne)

Many politicians in Europe and America believe that the jobs are going to China – thinking

that if they could get them back, the jobs would come back to manufacturing centers. What is

overlooked is that China has eliminated 15 percent of all its factory workers in seven years.

(Rifkin) Even if you retrained the entire workforce of Europe so that they would be qualified for

these high-tech jobs, there would never be enough work in this sector to absorb mass labor.

(Rifkin ) Physical jobs are disappearing into the second economy, and this effect is dwarfing the

much more publicized effect of jobs disappearing to places like India and China.(Arthur)

Role of robots in the furture

The future of robotics is here and people need to recognize that changes are needed to

embrace this technology while still maintaining expected part fo human life. There is not a shift

6|Page
Running head: ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION IN WORKING

form the need for workers but a shift for different skills in these workers. (Frey & Osborne)

Advances in technology may displace certain types of work, but historically they have been a

net creator of jobs. At Ford, the new assembly line introduced in 1913 turned a one-man job into

a 29-man operation, reducing the overall work time by 34%. This allowed complex products to

be assembled from mass-produced individual components; work that required less skill, but

more workers, to perform. (Frey & Osbone) Overall through people still anticipate that cultural

and sociological factors—including regulatory inertia, liability fears, and public resistance to

widespread displacement of jobs by robots and AI—will prevent new technologies from taking

too big of an employment bite. (Smith & Anderson) Still experts anticipate that advances in AI

and robotics will produce dramatic changes in the service industry by 2025. Glenn Edens, a

director of research in networking, security, and distributed systems within the Computer

Science Laboratory at PARC, a Xerox Company, predicted, “It is likely most consumer services

(banking, food, retail, etc.) will move to more and more self-service delivery via automated

systems.” (Smith & Anderson) But that does not spell the end of service based jobs. On the

contrary, overall demand for remaining human activities in service jobs has continued to grow after

the introduction of automation. (Chui, Manyika & Miremadi) For example, the large-scale deployment

of bar-code scanners and associated point-of-sale systems in the United States in the 1980s reduced

labor costs per store by an estimated 4.5 percent and the cost of the groceries consumers bought by

1.4 percent. It also enabled a number of innovations, including increased promotions. But cashiers

were still needed; in fact, their employment grew at an average rate of more than 2 percent between

1980 and 2013. (Chui, Manyika & Miremadi)

People must adapt to these changes through technology by inventing entirely new types

of work, and by taking advantage of the capabilities only human possess. (Smith & Anderson)

Humans are capable of empathy, creativity, judgment, and critical thinking, metal tasks that will

never succumb to widespread automation. There are already cars that talk to us, a phone we

7|Page
Running head: ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION IN WORKING

can talk to, robots that lift the elderly out of bed, and apps that remind us to call Mom. An app

can dial Mom's number and even send flowers, but an app can't do that most human of all

things: emotionally connect with her. Advances in AI and robotics allow people to cognitively

offload repetitive tasks and invest their attention and energy in things where humans can make

a difference. The future of technology also has the potential to free people from day-to-day

drudgery, and allowing a new relationship with “work” in a more positive and socially beneficial

way. Ultimately, we as a society control our own destiny through the choices we make. (smith

Anderson) The new high-tech specialists and professional jobs will not be mass labor; they will

be boutique; those with specialized skills from specialized education. Mass workers will not be

in software companies or nanotech companies. (Rifkin)

Conclusion
As technology advances society needs an army of talented coders and technology

specialists, but we will still need folks to do packaging, assembly, sales, and outreach. Many

human qualities are not able to be automated with the current technology. While the concern

over technological unemployment has so far proven to be exaggerated, the reason why human

labor has prevailed relates to its ability to adopt and acquire new skills by means of education.

(Frey & Osborne) A general manager at Microsoft replied to Smith and Anderson, “It is clear that

advances in automation will eliminate some jobs, but it will create others as well as free up

some resources that could be applied to other pursuits. I do not foresee a situation where we

will have successfully automated humans out of work. On the contrary, I see a situation where

we have greater need for higher-skilled workers who are comfortable with using and creating

technologies.” Technology, robotics and AI generate new categories of work, giving rise to

second- and third-order effects. Also, there is likely to be more human-robot collaboration—a

change in the kind of work opportunities available. The second economy that is silently forming

due to these advances in automation and robotics is creating for us a new economic world.

8|Page
Running head: ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION IN WORKING

(Arthur) The second economy will certainly be the engine of growth and the provider of

prosperity for the rest of this century and beyond, but it may not provide jobs, so there may be

prosperity without full access for many. This suggests to me that the main challenge of the

economy is shifting from producing prosperity to distributing prosperity. (Arthur)

Our world is steeped in robotics, automation and AI. One cannot escape its impact

monetarily, socially, or personally. Depictions of robotics and artificial intelligence in popular

culture often lean towards powerful anthropomorphic robots (Transformers, The Terminator)

and hulking mainframes with human-like intelligence (HAL in 2001). But technology has shown

its potential to evolve in the opposite direction, with machine intelligence being hidden deep in

the complex workings of outwardly simple or even invisible devices and digital interactions.

(Smith & Anderson) In the end, none of the potential outcomes human fears have created

though Hollywood—from the most utopian to most dystopian—are prophetic. Although

technological advancement often seems to take on a mind of its own, humans are in control of

the political, social, and economic systems that will ultimately determine whether the coming

wave of technological change has a positive or negative impact on jobs, employment and the

economy.

9|Page
Running head: ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION IN WORKING

Karel Capek. (n.d.). In Encyclopedia Britannica online. Retrieved from

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karel-Capek

Timeline of Computer History (2017) Computer History Museum. Retrieved from:

http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/ai-robotics/#169ebbe2ad45559efbc6eb35720f05e8

Arthur, W. B. (2011). The second economy. McKinsey Quarterly, 4, 90-99.

Bekey, G., & Yuh, J. (2008). The status of robotics. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 15(1).

Chui, M., Manyika, J., & Miremadi, M. (2016). Where machines can replace humans-and where they can’t

(yet). McKinsey Quarterly. Retrieved from: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-

mckinsey/our-insights/Where-machines-could-replace-humans-and-where-they-cant-yet

Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. (2015). Technology at Work. The Future of Innovation and Employment. Citi

GPS. Saatavilla. Retrieved from:

http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/Citi_GPS_Technology_Work.pdf

Hagerty, J. (2015, June 2). Meet the new generation of robots for manufacturing. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-new-generation-of-robots-for-manufacturing-1433300884

Pierini, David (2015 February 26) Once-famous robot lives quietly away from limelight [Blog post].

Retrieved from: http://www.cultofmac.com/313544/famous-robot-lives-quietly-limelight/

Rendall, M. (2016, October 9). Insustrial robots will replace manufacturing jobs – and that’s a good thing.

TechCrunch. REtrived from: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/09/industrial-robots-will-replace-

manufacturing-jobs-and-thats-a-good-thing/

Rifkin, J. (1996). End of work.

Smith, A., & Anderson, J. (2014). AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs. Pew Research Center.

10 | P a g e