Robotic Nation Evidence

Completely Robotic Factories in Japan

In Japan, as in the U.S., Companies Fear China

From the article:

From high atop the 52nd floor of the Tokyo Opera City Tower, one of Tokyo's most prestigious corporate addresses, Yamada, a former Mitsui Metal executive, is plotting the next industrial revolution. It begins with a powerful computing system nicknamed Pharaoh, the general of his high-tech tooling company. Every morning, Pharaoh sends tooling orders to engineers who design the digital blueprints that are transmitted to a small factory in Ota City.

There, a barebones crew of part-time technicians reads Pharaoh's instructions and inputs data into a bank of 3-D stereolithography machines that fabricate the prototype parts. The small factory floor is eerily silent as robots glide along, inserting the raw metal into the machines and pulling out the finished product. Since last year, the part-time crew has shrunk to 40 from 200. By the end of the year, the tooling factory will be entirely robotic, Yamada said.

As this article describes, total factory automation is already a reality today. It is only a matter of 10 to 20 years before nearly every factory in the U.S. and Japan is entirely automated. In the U.S., more than 10 million people will lose their jobs and need to find something else.

The problem is that, during those same 10 to 20 years, robots will be moving into the service sector as well. Tens of millions of service sector jobs will also be evaporating. See Robots in 2015 for a discussion.

[See also this article on robotic warehouses.]