Manufacturers have been fretting about the Skills Gap for years, seeing a looming crisis which has by now actually arrived in some areas. One of the plausible explanations for the problem is a lack of investment in training. Just 54% of manufacturers invested in worker training in 2018. Estimates say that all manufacturing employee training… Read more »
Robots are often humanoid in appearance.This seems reasonable, since they’re so often taking the place of human beings in executing tasks on a factory floor. Increasingly, they also mimic other life forms, taking on the characteristics of mammals or insects or other creatures to take advantage of evolution. By copying mechanisms that developed over millennia,… Read more »
Robots build things, clean things, and move things. Something a little different is the new robot umpire trying its robotic (and metaphorical) hands at umpiring for professional baseball. Having robots make judgements makes sense. They’re fair, consistent, and unbiased… right? In fact, experience has shown that robots, or AI programs taking on the role of… Read more »
Greg Creed, CEO of fast food behemoth Yum! Foods, reckons that robots will take over fast food joints within the next decade. Fast food is in many ways the perfect industry for automation. These jobs have been the focus of activism to increase the minimum wage. It’s been going on long enough, and with enough… Read more »
Nurses are aware that a lot of their work could be done by a robot. By and large, they believe that they should keep their jobs. Robots, they think, can’t manage the human relationships which are so important in nursing. What’s more, they believe that they train hard and work hard and generally… Read more »
A famous paper by a pair of Oxford economists classified a long list of 702 U.S. jobs according to how susceptible they would be to automation. 47% were judged at high risk for automation. The classification was automatic, as it happens. The economists built an AI program to make those judgements. This made their work… Read more »
Summer brings us warm days, balmy nights — and heat related failures in Rexroth servo drives. The most common cause of heat-related problems with drives is the failure of the powered fan found on almost all drives and power supplies. This fan is typically on the underside of the drive, centered in depth on the… Read more »
We keep an eye on the news about robots as threats to jobs. Depending who you listen to, you’ll usually find one of these claims: Robots will take our jobs. Or at least a lot of our tasks. Robots will free us for new, more interesting jobs. Oxford Economics released a report titled “How robots… Read more »
Vivian Ho wrote a charming essay on her day spent sampling robot-made food. She never mentioned drive and control systems, servos, or downtime. Instead, she wrote about the cutely wiggling automatic arm that made her tea and the claustrophobia induced by the crush of human beings gathering around the machine that made her burger. We… Read more »
