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