“Rutenberg, a robot technician and trainer at Amazon, is among a new class of workers responsible for corralling and managing the robots, fixing minor maintenance issues and keeping tabs on their locations. The professionals say the machines they work with tend to perform their tasks with precision but often also a little naiveté.”
From Wall Street Journal.
“How do employment, tasks, and productivity change with robot adoption? Unlike manufacturing, little is known about these issues in the service sector, where robot adoption is expanding. As a first step towards filling this gap, we study Japanese nursing homes using original facility-level panel data that includes the different robots used and the tasks performed. We find that robot adoption is accompanied by an increase in employment and retention and the relationship is strongest for non-regular care workers and monitoring robots. The share of specific tasks performed by robots increases with the adoption of the respective type of robot, leading to reallocation of care worker effort to ‘human touch’ tasks that support quality care. Robots are associated with improved quality (reduction in restraint use and pressure ulcers) and productivity.”
“Emerging startup Physical Intelligence has no interest in building robots. Instead, the team has something better in mind: powering the hardware with the continuously learning generalist ‘brains’ of AI software, so existing machines will be able to autonomously carry out a growing amount of tasks that require precise movements and dexterity – including housework.”
From New Atlas.
Our World in Data | Workforce Hours
“The average worker in wealthy countries now works only about half as many hours per year as in the late 19th century.
Based on data from economic historians Michael Huberman and Chris Minns, the average worker used to work between 2,700 and 3,500 hours per year, which is about 50 to 70 hours each week.
Recently, using data from the Penn World Table, workers worked about half that amount, between 1,300 and 1,800 hours a year, or about 25 to 35 hours a week.
This decrease has come from working fewer hours each day, fewer days each week, and fewer weeks each year.”
From Our World in Data.
“Taco Bell is set to expand the use of artificial intelligence voice technology in its drive-thrus to hundreds of US locations by the end of this year, parent company Yum! Brands said Wednesday.
The move means that when users pull up to place their order at a Taco Bell, there’s a good chance they will be talking to a computer, rather than a human employee, on the other end.”
From CNN.
