New manufacturing robot to displace millions from work

The reality of ‘technological unemployment’ continues to grind away at the economy. Sooner than we think, the entire work force will be automated. But who then will be able to afford the goods produced by the machines since all will be out of a job? -GJK

Kurzweil — Baxter is the first of a new generation of smarter, more adaptive industrial robots. Conventional industrial robots are expensive to program, incapable of handling even small deviations in their environment, and so dangerous that they have to be physically separated from human workers by cages.

So even as robotics have become commonplace in the automotive and pharmaceutical industries, they remain impractical in many other types of manufacturing.

Baxter, however, can be programmed more easily than a Tivo and can deftly respond to a toppled-over part or shifted table. And it is so safe that Baxter’s developer, Rethink Robotics, which loaned Baxter to Vanguard Plastics, believes it can work seamlessly alongside its human coworkers.

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