Baxter is a vaguely humanoid model?a legless, two-armed, tablet-headed line worker. Its primary selling points are its low price?$22,000, exponentially less than most manufacturing bots?and the assurance that it won?t kill anyone. Baxter can perform a range of repetitive tasks without the need to retrofit assembly lines and with minimal investment. It can even be trained, with operators initially guiding it through specific motions. It?s the closest thing anyone has seen to a general-purpose blue-collar robot.
To humanity?s credit, no one panicked. Well, almost no one. While news outlets like the New York Times announced Baxter?s arrival in only vaguely ominous tones ("A Robot with a Reassuring Touch,") technology blog Gizmodo went back to the standard playbook with the click-baiting headline, "Even Small Businesses Can Afford Job-Stealing Assembly Bots Now."
There?s nothing wrong with having a little fun. What?s troubling is that this is the default attitude for covering robotics?couching the most capable new systems in the lexicon of fear. It?s a hallowed tradition, one that typically comes with casual references to the genocidal military bots of The Terminator and the knee-jerk assumption that robots and their makers are hell-bent on putting humans out of work. Even NPR went there, with a series of field reports about the ubiquity of American robotics that it called Robots Ate My Job and hyped the series with segments called "Look Out! There Are Robots All Around." (Interestingly, Rodney Brooks of Rethink Robotics was also a driving force behind the Roomba by iRobot, which human have largely embraced. Bots are much scarier when they make the jump in capability, from being able to do our chores to being able to do our jobs.)
Whether it?s expressed with a knowing wink or breathless urgency, the meme of man?s ever-looming battle with the machines runs deep. Mary Shelley may have sown the first seeds of robot fear with Dr. Frankenstein?s proto-android monster. But it was John Henry?s race with a steam hammer that mythologized the specific menace of workplace machines. It?s simple arithmetic, as heartless as that infernal hammer?add one machine, subtract one human.
If only the layered vagaries of modern economics could be boiled down to grade-school math. "When anyone says we?re losing jobs because of robots, they don?t know what they?re talking about," says Drew Greenblatt, CEO of Baltimore-based Marlin Steel Wire Products. Robots transformed Marlin Steel?not Baxter-like general-purpose models, but systems like the Trumpf TruLaser 1030, a 24-foot-long, 19,000-pound laser cutter. Greenblatt points to one current employee who went from a minimum wage job producing 300 steel bends an hour, all of them by hand, to earning $25 an hour overseeing five robots carrying out 25,000 bends per hour in sum. It?s not only a higher-paying job with a staggering boost in efficiency, Greenblatt argues, but a safer one. "Before we spent $3.5 million on robots, we had accidents. Serious ones," he says. "Now we?re at 1380 days without a safety incident. All of my employees are coming home with all of their fingers, all of their eyeballs."
And Marlin?s workplace wasn?t gutted by robots. The company has hired additional workers and cranked up the overtime and bonuses for nearly everyone thanks to an influx of new contracts. Robots allow Marlin to compete not only on speed, but also on precision. Some products have gone from a guaranteed consistency of plus-or-minus a quarter-inch, down to a few thousandths of an inch. The company is currently working on a $96,000 job for a Japanese automaker (though Greenblatt wouldn?t specify which one), scheduled to ship this month. "If we hadn?t bought these robots, we would have lost that contract to China, or Malaysia, or Vietnam," he says. "If you want to give your employees a chance to compete, you have to give them the best tools. It?s not the conventional wisdom, but robots are a job creator."
If Baxter is a hit, there?s no denying it: Jobs will be lost. But new ones will appear, as workers step back from the line to manage and maintain their so-called replacements. Just as industrialization largely called the world?s workforce in from the field, and the automation of the auto industry pulled humans out of the unsafe conditions of the body shop, the impact of low-cost, widespread robotic labor promises a staggering net gain for American manufacturing and society as a whole. There?s a promised land, of sorts, on the horizon, powered and populated by robots.
John Henry wouldn?t be caught dead there. Then again, he died trying to show up a steam drill.
sc primary bill moyers heidi klum and seal divorce craigslist killer extremely loud and incredibly close south carolina primary squirrel appreciation day
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন