"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