Robots and the Future

We have a strange spectacle going on now.  In the presidential campaign, the biggest issue is jobs and the economy, but neither candidate can really talk about what is perhaps the biggest factor in this issue, the elephant in the room.  And that is technology.  The continual growth of information technology makes it possible to build cheap robots that can do more things and are more flexible, making it possible to do work with fewer employees.  Here is an article from the New York Times that describes this phenomenon in the right historical terms.  One historical analogy that we will be talking about in History 341 is agriculture.  It used to be that agriculture occupied 90% of the population.  Now it employs 2%.  So in a similar way we will see the percentage of jobs in manufacturing and other areas fall.  Philips Electronics has a plant in China that makes electric shavers and one in the Netherlands.  The one in China depends mostly on humans, while the one in the Netherlands uses robots and employs one tenth of the workers for the same level of production.  Foxconn, a Chinese company that employs a million people to produce products like Apple's Iphone, is planning on installing many more robots.  In my time at NC State, I have known many students who have worked at UPS.  The article describes a robot that can pick up packages and put them on a conveyor belt.  The robot uses some technology from the Microsoft Kinect.  Workers can move one box every six seconds.  The company that makes the robots thinks that the robots will be able to handle one box per second.  The robot never gets tired and never files a worker's comp claim.  What is going to happen to those jobs?  And it is going to happen no matter who is elected in November.