Corona Daily 378: Asimov Now, Part III

China was the first country affected by Covid-19, and the first country to recover successfully. When reopening the economy, China focused on factories with a high level of automation and robots. Cobots are collaborative robots who share tasks and space with humans.

In Dallas, Axis Machining, a metal fabrication company, has eight robots performing machine-tending, sanding, deburring, inspection, laser marking. A couple of supervisors team up with the robots. The pandemic convinced the company that using robots is now cheaper. The use of robots has doubled company productivity with the same headcount. The company spent $85000 per robot, and will recover it in five months.

Another popular cobot by the Danish company Universal Robots, the market leader, costs $35000 and the payback period is 3-4 months. Normally, companies employ temporary workers to deal with the surge in orders. But in Covid times, bringing in new workers and keeping them socially distanced is both risky and less productive. Californian company DCL logistics found that robots led to a 300% increase in productivity and 60% savings in labour costs.

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Some dystopian sci-fi movies show robots taking over control of the world. Is that threat real?

I don’t think so.

Way back in 1992, a factory manager took me around British American Tobacco’s Southampton factory. It was part of my induction. ‘Fifteen years ago,’ the lady manager said with a sigh, ‘this part of the factory had 1500 workers, now we have only six.’

‘How has that affected the productivity?’ I asked.

‘We are now producing 20 times more cigarettes with the six workers.’ She replied.

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Automation is a process that has never stopped. Take the example of an ATM. In the first half of my life, if I needed cash, I had to visit my bank, take a metal token, queue up, and then collect the cash from the human teller. The Automated Teller Machines changed all that. I don’t think even diehard communists would like to abolish ATMs and go back to human cashiers. The emergence of ATMs created many new jobs. Now delivery vans are needed to input cash into ATMs, security guards as escorts, engineers to develop and technical staff to maintain the machines.

We get more worried if a machine looks and talks like a human being. We call them robots. ATMs look different, but they have taken away millions of cashier jobs.  

Why should people do the jobs that machines can do better and safer? Surgeons now routinely use laser precision machines to operate. The role of modern pilots is essentially to supervise and control mechanical systems in the plane. The same goes for driving. A hundred years hence, humans driving cars may be considered primitive. It is unsafe for those who drive and for others. Delivery robots are essentially driverless cars that transport packages. In one of the future articles, I will give details of the project of self-driven electric cars that is expected to put an end to ownership of cars. The pandemic is a godsend for these benign initiatives to be speeded up.

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We should be thankful to robot butchers and robot gutter-cleaners. Whatever jobs machines can do should be delegated to machines. That leaves human beings to invent and progress to jobs that are more developed. The human race has managed that process for centuries.

Philosophically speaking, what is the point of a human life if it must be wasted in working as a robotic slave?

Ravi