Technologists agree on robotics/AI tech impact, disagree on social/economic impact

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by treffk

Last month I took a tour of one of Stihl's manufacturing plants. The biggest things I look away from that tour (comparatively to the P&G chemical plant tour I did a few years ago) was the automation and rare use of PPE. The plant was almost fully automated and even had robots driving around autonomously carrying heavy pallets. With the automation and safety features built in there was no need for safety glasses or ear plugs. Gloves were the only thing that you occasionally saw. The group I was with asked about the automation and what it does for jobs. When Stihl automates something taking the human factor out of it, they retrain that employee to do another job. Stihl's plant in Virginia Beach has not had a layoff since the early 70's. Technology has come quite a ways since then and it's awesome to see a company incorporating that without hurting their employees.

Moving the employee to a new position is a nice idea, but in reality that only happens when there is an opening.

I work in the auto-industry and we continue to automate. Robots (big ones) are already at the price point where there is financial payback in a single year if you can replace one operator with one robot. However, robots are also the most difficult machines to repair, and when one breaks it's rarely as easy replacing some weldments or grinding some spacers.

That's where robot programmers and technicians come in. These guys hire in to companies like Kuka, ABB, etc, and learn about robots. Then they quit and move into directly servicing those robots. It's a BIG $ job ($150 / hour is the standard contract rate) if you're good at it.

So the use of large numbers of robots has in turn created an industry building and servicing those robots.

We also moved to more automated measuring systems - surface finish gaging, CNC machining, Zeiss / LK measurement systems. In turn, each of those require highly trained and specialized outside contracts to build and maintain.