NY Times writes about a new wave of smarter camera-equipped robots that are already replacing the manufacturing workers for Philips electronics. The article provides an easy to understand example "... a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250,000 and replaced two machine operators, each earning $50,000 a year. Over the 15-year life of the system, the machines yielded $3.5 million in labor and productivity savings.". As I reported earlier, FoxConn and the likes are next in line to replace their human workers with robots.

There is a nice chart over at econfuture that illustrates an ongoing drop in manufacturing jobs in US and highlights automation (aka robots) as one of the main reasons. One of takeaways from the article could be: expect serious problems with unemployment in China and other manufacturing-heavy economies.

It makes me glad that more and more people will finally be able to occupy themselves with more creative tasks other than operating a machine assembly line.

Target profession: assembly line workers