Robotics

A

The manufacturing industry is demanding industry, and for the past decade human labor had not been able to keep up with the worlds demands. Thus the manufacturing industry have replaced human workers with robots and as computers and robotics enhance ever so quickly manual labor is being left behind. Many industries have taken this enhancement in technology and used it for manufacturing profit. The industries that have profited from this enhancement in technology, is the car industry. This is due to efficiency and accuracy which many industries especially vehicles industries due to the fact that their products must be reliable and safe and made at optimum accuracy. The question here is whether the need for perfection and efficiency which is the result of the enhancement of robotics and IT is more important than the huge increase in the loss of employment in the manufacturing industry?

B

Robotics as an area of engineering is very broad, a robot can be from anything like a robotic arm found in a manufacturing plants, or robotic waiter found in many restaurants in countries such as Japan. However, the robots which seem to be more dominant robots in the economical scale are the ones found in manufacturing plants and factories, due to the fact that they are the most demanded robots today.

The robotic arm follows commands and can tell whether its should act or not. This shows us that it has somewhat of an A.I. (Artificial intelligence). The robotic arm is given somewhat of commands from a computer which is found externally or the more usual one which is found internally. The robot process the information through a camera or any sort or sensor, and is able to follow its commends without the initial state of the robot or the object which is being altered, being the same every single time. Thus making the robot adjust to its environment allowing it to work in many different situations. Robots nowadays are even able to correct their own mistakes and are able to communicate with every other robot found within the network thus allowing the next robot to correct or finish what the previous wasn’t able to do. This sort of communication and accuracy found in robotics is why they are more preferred to humans, due to the fact that robots are more efficient both in accuracy and, in time management. However, overall the main advantage robots have is that they are changing, evolving and getting better, more efficient, and less dependent on human maintenance.

C

The impact that this "uprising" of robots in the manufacturing industry has both been devastating and extremely helpful. The devastating factor of this is that unemployment has risen drastically from the substitution of humans and robots. According to www.economist.com unemployment in the manufacturing industry has risen dramatically due to many factors and of the most potent factors is the substitution of labor workers for more efficient robots. This has made a lot of people dislike robots extremely due to the fact that they can not handle the fact that they have been replaced by a non-living machine which is more efficient and reliable. The extremely good impact on society due to robotics is that nowadays with robots doing all the work death rates in the manufacturing industry have plummeted and efficiency has risen dramatically. This is mainly due the fact that robots are both safe and fast. Today important products such as medical drugs can be produced in the millions per hour due to robots thus allowing the society to acquire these drugs a lot more easily and quickly. Overall the impact that robots have imposed on the society could differ enormously due to the perspective of which the society looks through.

D

The solution to this problem is simply education. Education as in a knowledge of the background of robotics. This solution will not only increase employment in the manufacturing area it will also increase efficiency. This is due to the fact that robots need to be overlooked all the time to insure maximum efficiency and if the robot to human ratio within the factory is high the possibility of a malfunction to happen without it getting corrected in time is high thus allowing malfunctions to occur a lot more often. This of course will not bring back employment back to what it was before robotics was introduced however, overtime the employment rate will increase in that area due to excessive exposure to technology which is being taught at schools today. This solution overall enable employment to improve and efficiency to increase thus making it a win-win situation where both the employers and the employees are all satisfied. Today this sort of solution is being applied to other areas of work such as the airports which like factories are being overrun with high end technology, thus making employment an issue. Which shows that not only that workers in factories will need a background in technology but in all lines of work which required some sort of labor.

E

"Manufacturing loses 122,000 jobs as unemployment falls to 20-year low." independent. 9 Nov. 2008

          manufacturing-loses-122000-jobs-as-unemployment-falls-to-20year-low-722514.html>.

"Nothing to lose but their chains." economist. 9 Nov. 2008      displaystory.cfm?story_id=11575170>.

"Robot factory predictions." ieet. 9 Nov. 2008      treder20060519/>. 

" Test explores if robots can think." BBC. 9 Nov. 2008      england/berkshire/7666246.stm>.