Automation arrives at restaurants

McDonald's will start using automated ordering:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2837810/automation-arrives-at-restaurants-but-dont-blame-rising-minimum-wages.html

An army of robot baristas could mean the end of Starbucks as we know it

"...Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesn’t need sleep. It’s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It can’t quit. It has memorized every one of its customers’ orders. There’s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks.

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It doesn’t require health insurance..."

More at: http://qz.com/134661/briggo-coffee-army-of-robot-baristas-could-mean-the-end-of-starbucks-as-we-know-it/

No more cowboys, GPS will do just fine!

Herding and fences are so last century, a GPS unit can do it!

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671913/gps-sensor-tags-that-make-cowboys-and-fences-obsolete

Robot named Baxter Promises to Bring Jobs Back to US

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509296/small-factories-give-baxter-the-robot-a-cautious-once-over/

Paul Krugman on Automation and Third Industrial Revolution

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/is-growth-over/

"Better Than Human" article in Wired

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs/

Paul Krugman on the Rise of the Robots

A must read NYT editorial: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/

The End of Work

The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era by Jeremy Rifkin is an intellectually stimulating piece of non-fiction that is right up this blog's alley. Written in 1995 is talks about many issues we are facing today in early 2000th: rising "technological" unemployment, governments trying to fix the situation, trickle down non-effect and many others.

Cannot agree more on the "the robots are replacing the working class" thesis, the question is of course not how to save all the worker from loosing their often dehumanizingly repetitive jobs. Could it be: how to retrain the workers to make them a productive force of the emerging knowledge economy?

I am sure, we will see this book referred to more and more in the coming years, so read up!

Robots Start Replacing Human Workers at Foxconn

First robots have arrived to replace Chinese workers at FoxConn. Full article at singularityhub.com

Fujitsu Building Robot To Pass Math Exams

The title says it all. Read more here http://www.itworld.com/software/294250/fujitsu-build-software-robot-pass-college-entrance-exams
Brings up an eternal Turing test question: how will you tell a robot passing the exam from a human?

Target: students

Four-fingered robot hand as dexterous as a human's.

Researchers at Sandia don't stop to impress. A robot hand recently unveiled in Nature publication shows some impressive skills. What is even more impressive is the price tag: an estimated $10K instead of the usual $250K for this type of a robot.

Target profession: bomb squad

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

Assembly lines to feature more robots

Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group, known for assembling Apple's iPhones and iPads, plans to use more robots, with one report saying the company will use one million of them in the next three years, to cope with rising labor costs. 

This and similar developments might actually be good for US, since more and more manufacturing jobs can compete not on the labor price but on robot price.

Target profession: assembly line workers

7 Jobs Robots Will Do

Dvice has a nice rundown or 7 jobs to be replaced by robots. Most have been covered here a new and ... I'm surprise I forgot about it (Roxxxy!) ... prostitutes.

Target profession: Sex workers, drivers, teachers, farmers, construction workers, soldiers, doctors and nurses

Photographers are being replaced by software

Photo blogger Mark Meyer ponders the inevitable delegation of the basic photography functions from humans to software in his post Photographers: you’re being replaced by software

More and more simple and complex scenes can be arrange by and average Joe with a set of CG techniques often available for free in software like Blender.

By the way, do you remember this robot with a Kinect that takes wedding pictures?

Target profession: photographers

Robotic Architects. Skynet is Getting Closer (Video)

Robotic autonomous helicopters building with bricks: http://megadgets.info/reuters/robotic-architects-skynet-is-getting-closer-video 

Target profession: construction workers

DARPA Robotic Challenge: $2M Prize

DARPA is giving out 2 million dollar prize to the contestants who can create robots "... to develop ground robotic capabilities to execute complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments" 

Target profession: nuclear waste cleanup crews, disaster response professionals

Humans vs. Robots: Who Should Dominate Space Exploration?

Wired Science poses a question in its Humans vs. Robots: Who Should Dominate Space Exploration? Don't we know the answer to this one already? Robots are cheaper (or will be soon), don't get sick and can do pretty much anything a human can - even better.

 Target profession: spacemen

Robo-Graders For Student Essays

"American high school students are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots. Or, more accurately, robo-readers — computers programmed to scan student essays and spit out a grade

Target profession: teaching assistants (TA's)

A Day in the Life of a Kiva Robot

Here is a little video of Kiva robots working in a warehouse.

Target profession: warehouse workers