Rise of the Robots

Robots have been becoming increasingly important to the workplace over the last few years. This trend will only accelerate in the next few years. As the skill shortage deepens, robots will become economically viable in many more roles. These applications won’t just be in manufacturing roles as most often found today, but in many other areas including catering and even professional occupations, such as the medical field. According to Association for Advancing Automation in the US, orders leapt by a massive 40% in the first quarter of this year to $1.6bn.

A report from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) also highlights the extend of the growth of robots in a new report, which shows a there are now 3 million industrial robots operating in factories around the world – an increase of 10% in the last year. Sales of new robots grew at 0.5 despite the global pandemic, with 384,000 units shipped globally in 2020.

“Global robot installations are expected to rebound strongly and grow by 13% to 435,000 units in 2021, thus exceeding the record level achieved in 2018,” said Milton Guerry, president of the IFR. “Installations in North America are expected to increase by 17% to almost 43,000 units. Installations in Europe are expected to grow by 8% to almost 73,000 units. Robot installations in Asia are expected to exceed the 300,000-unit mark and add 15% to the previous year’s result. Almost all Southeast Asian markets are expected to grow by double-digit rates in 2021.”

It is no coincidence that the rise in orders for robots happened at exactly the same time as US job openings have reached a record high of 11.5 million in March. As it becomes more expensive to hire staff, the economic calculations swing towards using robots instead for any task that can be automated. Until now, these have normally been the most boring and repetitive jobs. The integration of AI into the mix changes things and robots can take on more advanced tasks. It may sound good, bringing in automated workers who don’t need regular breaks or holidays, but there are some issues that employers need to take into consideration. The biggest of these issues is liability if something goes wrong. Normally it is easy to apportion blame for an incident, but today’s advanced robots have more entities contributing to the hardware and software. Previously, any incidents would be blamed on the machinery being defective or being used wrongly by staff. Incidents involving robots could have several hardware manufacturers to blame, or the software developers, the AI training algorithm coding or the communications system to blame in addition to the usual suspects. For that reason, businesses need to pay careful attention to the contracts they sign with the robotics vendors. That is not the only issue when implementing automated solutions, businesses also need to pay attention to data protection laws, health and safety concerns and maintenance, particularly the ability to get spare parts over the whole lifetime of the robot. If the business doesn’t include those issues in their calculations, automation might just turn out to be a lot more expensive than using human employees.