Understand The Evolution Of Robots

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Imagine a world where you no longer had to work; a world where all the task such as cleaning, cooking, and driving are done by a robot. Surprisingly many of these task are being done by robots now. Even though the new technologies seem primitive they are quickly as good as, if not better than humans. These robots are replacing many workers leading to large unemployment in some industries. Automation is replacing human labor and as a result taking away the jobs. To understand how robots are affecting us today we must look at the past and see the evolution of robots. Humans using machines to make life easier is nothing new. In fact since humans have been around we have been building tools to help us so less work. Everything we have now …show more content…

Take for example in 1900 over forty one percent of the United States workforce was employed in agriculture. By 2000 that number had fallen to under 2% (Autor). The most heavily affected industries in today's market where we see the highest number of people being replaced by robotic are the textile and automotive industries(McAfee). In the last thirty years we have seen over eight million manufacturing jobs vanish, with the automotive and textile industries hit the hardest(McAfee). These robots replaced jobs that involved repetitive task in a predictable environment such as putting a door on a car. The latest study done by a World Economic Forum survey in 2016 estimated that over 1.6 million manufacturing jobs will be lost to automation between 2015 and 2020(Rotman). We are already seeing the effects of job loss to automation in manufacturing today but if that survey and others like it are right than in the next few years we will be seeing a large increase in unemployment from the manufacturing …show more content…

In other words that the company would spend more on the robot then they would just hiring the worker. Even now in some areas, especially the medical field, it is true that robots cost a lot. Yet for the majority of jobs it is actually extremely cheap to buy a robot. A manufacturing robot use to cost over $100,000 per robot. Now the price of the same robot is under $25,000 a piece. The great reduction in price has lead to robot sales tripling in industries such as packaged foods and pharmaceuticals between 2005- 2016. The lower prices have also led to more robots being shipped in North America. In 2005 over 18,200 manufacturing robots were shipped in North America, in 2016 that number jumped to 34,600(Alsever). So while it is true that some robots for now are simply too expensive to be worth it, prices are dropping quickly and many of the latest robots may become cheap enough to replace

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