The number of installed industrial robots globally has increased by 517 thousand units in 2021, brining the total number of operational units to 3.5 million. With 74 % of installations being in Asia and UK being the only major country where installations decreased.

The article stated that while humanoid robots attract fanfare the humble industrial robots are doing more to transform the economy. The humanoid robots do not yet perform as good as humans

While I agree that the hype of humanoid robots is currently overblown, I can't say that the article itself was particularly enlightening.

It points out that the number of industrial robots are increasing rapidly, but it's not clear what jobs they are doing exactly, what areas that are being quickly replaced by robots and what areas within industry that are not, what areas are ripe for replacement in the near future and which will remain the province of humans, and why. Humans are replaced by robots when 1. the technology is there, so they can and 2. they are cheaper than humans. Both of these are changing: the technology improves, human costs change, but neither of these is smooth, and they interact, since the availability of a robot can cause the cost of a human to decrease, and you need people to fix robots (currently).

Also, the flat out statements that humanoid robots will not, for example, make you a cup of tea and other 'it will never happen' similar comments seems foolish. There is no principled reason that humanoid robots won't be successful; the only questions are the timeline and the economics.

For example, sex bots already exist (not me, of course, don't be silly). As the technology improves and costs go down, there will be more of them. So the scifi future of people having sex with robots already exists, it's just not very evenly distributed (with apologies to Gibson).

Sex bots are a poor example because the internet porn economy has all but demolished any practical application for them.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/darth_nadoma:

The number of installed industrial robots globally has increased by 517 thousand units in 2021, brining the total number of operational units to 3.5 million. With 74 % of installations being in Asia and UK being the only major country where installations decreased.

The article stated that while humanoid robots attract fanfare the humble industrial robots are doing more to transform the economy. The humanoid robots do not yet perform as good as humans

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yfmpv3/forget_the_humanoids_industrial_robots_will/iu43j65/

Going by that logic, companies like Realdoll and Silicon Wives would have been out of business years ago.

Robotics/ai are going to keep growing - how we deal with the new economic changes is going to be interesting and novel.

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I can't read the article because of paywall, but industrial robots have been a thing for roughly 85 years or so (1937 according to a quick googling), so I'm actually surprised there's only a few million of them.

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Weren’t they invented in 1956?

Until relatively recently technology was too immature and expensive and human labor was too cheap for them to be used en masse.

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Don’t worry about any of this. Everything is going to be fine!!

-Definitely not a robot

Are we not already at the point where industrial machines have transformed the world ? The amount of work which they do is certainly immeasurable already, and increases daily. The amount of work they do which humans simply cannot do is the foundation of the world we live in already.

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> The earliest known industrial robot, conforming to the ISO definition was completed by "Bill" Griffith P. Taylor in 1937 and published in Meccano Magazine, March 1938. The crane-like device was built almost entirely using Meccano parts, and powered by a single electric motor.

Yeah I probably read a bit too quickly. 1937 was just the first robot that met the ISO definition, but it was not a real industrial robot.

Industrial robot guy here. Robots replace dirty dangerous dull jobs. They’re great at doing the same thing all day long. Every task you add to the list makes them 10x less reliable.

Basically if your job involves you sitting on your ass and doing one thing all day long you are in trouble. I can buy a $25k robot arm that is safe to work around humans and has a 10kg payload. It can sit there and do a simple task. It’s also a complete idiot and will fault out, wait for a human with the slightest disturbance.

You still need human operators to babysit them when things go wrong. The answer here is instead of 4 poorly paid idiots doing a repetitive task all day long, you pay one guy a decent living wage to keep those robots fed and happy. That guy might be able to figure out some basic programming like teaching some new points. Any serious integration or tooling work needs a guy like me who makes a pretty penny.

But I am sure there are punishments in hell less severe than sitting stationary for 8 hours a day and doing a repetitive task. I have zero issues with getting rid of those jobs. Especially when you discover those robots doubled your productivity and all of a sudden you need to hire another warehouse guy, another truck driver and another sales guy. Automation tends to simply shuffle jobs around while making a company grow.

But there is a need for those jobs as when I said you hire idiots I mean it. Smart people quit. You hunt for the most empty sad pathetic CV you can find to find a production worker who won’t quit by noon. Idiots need work too and I don’t know what society is going to do to keep them working. Tax the robots and pay the idiots to sit at home and make Lets Play videos?

I figure it won't be all that long before the average factory is effectively fully automated, with people only involved to install & fix the robotics, or to perform QA and administrative tasks. The input streams will likely be highly automated as well, more than they already are.

No I won't forget about humanoids I can't f¢€k with an industrial bot.😤

Not to mention prostitution. Porn hasn't made that obselete yet.

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Machines took us out of the fields, from which we almost all worked. Robots will remove us from the factories. AI will keep us out of administration, accounting.

And this has happened, will continue to happen, because we can build machines which can do work better than we can do it, and can do work which we are simply not capable of doing. The people who build these machines are the real heroes.

We need to make all education life long and free. It's the only way to keep people in the economy with more and more automation. As things get automated people need to be able to leave decade long careers and become researchers, electricians and whatever else is still around.

Industrial robots represent just a very small fraction of the machines on assembly lines. I don't know that it means anything if their use is going up or down, it's just another way that an assembly line could be designed.

I'll never understand who buys those things honestly, how to fuck a piece of cold rubber is better than just fapping?

Allen Bradley and Siemens pretty much run society in my part of the world. Forget the one ring to rule them all. If there was one person left in the world with an RS Logix license they would be unstoppable.

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The Boston Dynamics robot costs 74k. A low end manual laborer in the US costs 30k per year. I believe we are 5 to 10 years from having a suficiently dexterous robot to replace most manual laborers. It will be a bloodbath.

It won't be much better for most desk jobs either. The safest jobs are in STEM, in my opinion, and only the most innovative sector of it. Lab technicians, assistants, and entry level programmers are on the line too.

It’s definitely going to be industrial robots. I can’t see the need for nor the viability energy wise of humanoid robots. Even in war applications I imagine they will be more drones/RC vehicles.

Yes this is the next step of automation. A lot of office jobs will be replaced by highly effective automation programs. People laugh about how dumb AI is but with machine learning they can make programs that can track and match data very accurately over time. Where they needed 10 people before, they now need only 2 to supervise the accuracy output of the automation program and make some adjustments.

A functioning "true" AI is going to be highly lucrative for a couple of people. You can bet your ass the brightest minds we own on this planet are trying to be the first to make it work. Its going to happen, human greed knows no boundaries.

I can’t wait. I hope it booms fast

Or at least be able to follow a passion. The catch is, who pays for it?

Everyone, we set aside a portion of our economic output for it, aka a tax. It would be a net positive output since a productive useful workforce is a million times better than a population which can not do anything economically productive.