Robot uprising in China
I was reading the latest MIT Tech Review last night, and these tidbits caught my eye: “China accounted for just 3 percent of global manufacturing output in 1990. Today it produces almost a quarter… In recent years, though, China’s manufacturing engine has started to stall. Wages have increased at a crippling 12 percent per year on average since 2001… Automation appears to offer an enticing technological solution, but the country lags far behind competitors in the ratio of robots to workers. In South Korea, for instance, there are 478 robots per 10,000 workers; in Japan the figure is 315; in Germany, 292; in the United States it is 164. In China that number is only 36. The Chinese government is keen to change this.”
“HIT estimates the new factory could reduce human labor by as much as 85 percent. But it was also evident that as a country with a history of seemingly endless cheap labor, China had to date been outpaced in the robot revolution. Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based company, was showing off a pair of flexible and intelligent industrial machines. Unlike conventional industrial robots, these products, called Baxter and Sawyer, require very little programming, and they are equipped with sensors that allow them to recognize objects and avoid hitting people. They also cost between $20,000 and $30,000 instead of the hundreds of thousands typical of an industrial robot. Speaking to me after the event, Rethink founder and robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks said that China represents a huge potential market for his company”
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