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Americans turned off by robots
Friday, October 04 2002
by Ciaran Buckley


Americans could turn against robots, after it emerged that the machines designed
to be low-cost servants are increasingly taking the place of older workers. 











These findings are contained in a new report, by the United Nations Economic
Commission for Europe (UNECE), which reports a 17 percent fall in robot
investment in the United States in 2001. By contrast, British and Spanish
investment in robots increased last year by 26 percent and 22 percent
respectively. 



The report also concluded that robots are gradually taking their place in the
world's industrial workplace. There are around 270 robots per 10,000 employees in
Japan, 130 in Germany, 100 in Italy, 90 in Sweden and between 50 and 70 in
Finland, France, Spain, Benelux and the United States. 



This increasing infiltration of robots into the industrial workplace is driven by
two factors -- robots' ability to withstand harsh working conditions, and the
increasing value for money they offer.



Indeed the report predicted that robots will gradually replace people in jobs
with bad working conditions, involving smoke, heat and chemicals. Over the next
10 or 20 years robots will form an even greater part of the industrial workload,
as the population of the industrial world grows older and it gets harder to find
workers to perform unpleasant manual tasks.  



Moreover, the performance of robots has increased enormously, while prices have
been plummeting. Using a cost index that begins at 100 in 1990, the cost of
robots has fallen from 100 down to 63 and would fall to 31 if the index were
adjusted for quality, the report said. Over the same period, the cost of labour
in the UK has increased from 100 to 165. 



A robot sold in 2001 would have cost less than a fifth of what a robot with the
same performance would have cost in 1990 and the payback period for robots can be
as short as one or two years.



"Falling or stable robot prices, increasing labour cost and continuously
improved technology are major driving forces which speak for continued massive
robot investment in industry," concludes Jan Karlsson, Team Leader in the
UNECE's statistical division. 





The report said that there are 760,000 robots in the world, of which 360,000 are
in Japan, 220,000 are in the European Union and less than 100,000 are in the
United States.  Germany has the most robots in Europe with 100,000 units,
followed by Italy with 44,000, France with 23,000, Spain 16,000 and the UK with
13,000. 



And despite a recent slowdown in robot investment, the report predicted that the
number of robots would increase to one million by 2005. 



Industrial robots make up half of the value of robots and the most common
industrial robots are demolition robots, medical robots, underwater robots,
surveillance and security robots, laboratory robots and agricultural robots. 





Although industrial robots are more valuable than domestic robots, domestic
robots performing menial tasks such as vacuum cleaning and lawn-mowing are more
common and the market for these devices will grow more quickly than the market
for industrial robots.  Entertainment robots are the third segment of the
robots industry, a segment that is primarily constituted by robot toys.