THEY are, in every respect, an HR manager's dream.
They work round the clock, spurning lunch-breaks and having no desire to spend time with their families in the evenings. Give them Christmas Day off and they're happy. They are extremely unlikely to ballot for industrial action. Such are their efficiencies that the warehouse that employs them has increased its stock by 50 per cent and can despatch three times as many products than used to the case.
They are - of course - robots.
Some 3,000 of them are to be deployed when Amazon opens a colossal a 'robotic fulfilment centre' in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Reports have likened the robots to "flattened versions of R2D2 from Star Wars". They will work alongside flesh-and-blood workers, and millions of packages will be sent out from Dunstable across the country every year.
It's a development that reminds you not only of our growing taste for online shopping (latest figures suggest that UK online sales saw double-digit growth last month, even if overall growth for the year to date is still short of expectations) but also companies' growing taste for automation.
There has been much speculation lately about this latter trend and its possible (for which read 'feared') impact on jobs and wages. Some economists believe that automated technology has been killing jobs and having an adverse impact on middle-class salaries, but others assert that other factors shoulder most of the blame.
In an interview last March, Larry Summers, the US economist and former Treasury Secretary, spoke of the early innings of "what appears to be labor-substitutive innovation". Technology - whether it was robots in manufacturing, automated check-out of retail establishments, or information technology replacing work done by white-collar managerial or clerical labour - "is permitting very large-scale substitutions."
Summers was, however, at pains to caution that globalization, "which in substantial part has been made possible by technology, has also had an impact, particularly on the lowest-skilled."
Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, has spoken persuasively of robots' potential impact on jobs. Today's IT, he has said, "will ultimately bring sophisticated artificial intelligence and robotics capability to every industry and employment sector."
Boston Consulting Group said last month that by 2025, either robots or smart software will have replaced up to a quarter of all jobs. An Oxford University study has claimed that 35% of existing UK jobs are at risk of automation in the next 20 years. The Chinese are in the process of creating a robot-only factory, in Dongguan city.
It has been widely acknowledged that some of the tasks undertaken by journalists, lawyers and doctors could at some point be done by machine. In some instances, this is already happening.
A quick look online reveals that the subject of robots' potential and humans' jobs has generated a rich harvest of reports and predictions. It makes for interesting, if cautionary. reading. As you read through them, it's painfully clear that, to quote the BBC's technology reporter, Jane Wakefield: "The debate about whether machines will eliminate the need for human employment is no longer just academic."
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