They don’t answer back; they don’t get sick and they can toil away 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no comfort breaks and only intermittent need of replenishment. On the face of it, robots are the perfect workers. But bungle their initiation and the consequences can be dire. “I’ve seen people literally sabotage robots by unplugging them. They were afraid that they or their friends would lose their jobs,” says David Bourne, the principal systems scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.
All the same, wanton acts of destruction are rare. The fact they can occur is a salutary reminder of what can happen if a workforce feels so threatened by a technology that it tries to block it. Yet industrial robots – machines programmed to perform a variety of tasks automatically – have made car plants more productive by relieving employees of the dirtiest, most hazardous jobs, such as welding, paint spraying and hefting heavy parts. Now a new robot generation that can pick up an egg without crushing it or spot a snail on a lettuce leaf is taking on chores that once relied on manual dexterity and keen eyesight.
Deployed effectively, robots allow businesses to create interesting jobs for existing and new employees, reduce costs, increase output and stop manufacturing flying out of the door to low-cost labour markets. Germany, for example, has held on to more of its engineering roles than the UK while installing five times as many robots for every 10,000 employees.