The Hewitt Times

It’s hard to imagine having an eight to ten feet tall coworker with a single arm and multiple joints. But then again, you probably wouldn’t expect your coworker to be a robot. As time progresses, this scenario becomes more and more common.

Factories all around the world are getting work done without any help from human hands, an idea no one did so little as to consider a few decades ago. While many robots in auto factories normally perform only one repetitive function, in some places, like the new Tesla Motors factory in Fremont, California, a robot can perform up to four. Not to mention, these employees do their work for free, 365 days a year, and without breaks for coffee or lunch – quite a step up from any ordinary, caffeine-craving human.

At a Dutch Philips Electronics factory, hundreds of robot arms assemble electronic shavers without using hands and specialized tools. Compared to its Chinese sibling, the Philips factory in The Netherlands has ten times fewer human employees.

With robots replacing workers in large factories (especially in the manufacturing industry), it seems as if we are witnessing a wave of the future.

Factories of this sort using robots offer stark contrast to those used by large consumer electronics companies like Apple, which employ hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers for extremely low wages.

It is fairly evident that the former is overtaking the latter. Even Foxconn, Apple’s main manufacturer, which continues to build new plants and hire thousands of employees, plans to install over a million robots within a few years to enhance its current production. Foxconn’s chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed the use of robots in the past and has recently spoken with some frustration about having to deal with over a million workers, stating,

“Human beings are also animals. To manage one million animals gives me a headache.”

Robots are transforming industries other than manufacturing as well. To improve the distribution sector, which employs millions of workers worldwide, robots can now zoom at the speed of world class sprinters while storing, retrieving, and packing goods for shipment far more quickly than people can.

As is often the case with any type of change, technological change in particular, many people are unclear as to whether the benefits here outweigh the disadvantages. One large benefit is efficiency, which  lends itself to big profits companies. The problem, though, is that this profit does not benefit a significant number of people. especially those who lose their jobs to robots.

There is an inverse relationship between the growing number of robots and the availability of jobs. In turn, robots increase our unemployment rate, especially if they are based in the United States. When robots are added to a workforce to improve the efficiency of a human’s work, that job then becomes unavailable to a human. But at the same time, robots can save people from horrible, low-wage factory jobs and, quite often, mistreatment, like that of Foxconn factories, by replacing humans in those areas of manufacturing.

All of this may not seem particularly important to us as consumers because it does not affect us directly. However, the whole situation is put into a different perspective when we think of all the people struggling to find a job, having been replaced by the next generation…of robots.

This is where some of those benefits and disadvantages may come into play. If a robot from the Tesla Motors factory in California destroys someone’s job, possibly a relative’s job, you may choose not to buy a car from them. But if an iPhone you buy from Foxconn in China, made by a robot, saves thousands of low-skilled workers from horrifying factory conditions and actually leads the workers to better, safter jobs, you might gladly stick to your iPhone decision and play Temple Run at ease. All depends on your knowledge–or lack thereof–regarding the origins of consumer products.

It is very possible that, in the years to come, everyone’s new iPhone and our annual shipment of Dell laptops will have been ‘handcrafted’ by robots, a phrase used frequently without acknowledgement of its true irony–a testament to how pervasive these robots are and how integrated they have become into our world.