Robots: From isolation to automation
The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the economy’s rush to automation, said Michael Corkery and David Gelles in The New York Times. “Fully automated stores, like Amazon Go, might have seemed like a technological curiosity a few months ago,” but now such “contactless” options look like a necessity. The lockdowns are providing some businesses snapshots of their future: PayPal, for instance, has been using chatbots to handle most customer inquiries. Some worries about “having machines control vital aspects of daily life” are fading “as society sees the benefits of restructuring workplaces in ways that minimize close human contact.” Businesses are already enlisting a “robotic army” to help stem the spread of Covid
19, said Christopher Mims in The Wall Street Journal. At the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, “an autonomous robot has been patrolling terminals” with disinfectants, while hospitals are using robots equipped with UVC lights—a type of UV lamp that kills microbes but is dangerous to humans—to “rove about public spaces” and rooms, “shining their baleful glow all over everything.” Another company has designed robots with thermal cameras to detect “if someone is running a fever.”
Automation is only going to increase as the economy worsens, said Rani Molla in Vox.com, as it has historically done during recessions. What’s different this time is that “middle-skill and even higher-skill professional and white-collar work” is now more susceptible to “replacement, either by robotics or office software.” The technology is getting better and cheaper, and offices are already reorganizing around work-from-home orders and lengthy lockdowns. Businesses that “might have been thinking about automating” before the coronavirus crisis are “under a lot of pressure” to switch now.
Our economy is still not going anywhere without human workers, said Matt Simon in Wired.com. Machines are “far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity.” Amazon has been at the forefront of automation; it recently started “deploying squat little robots” that autonomously lift heavy packages at warehouses. Yet the company is still planning to hire 100,000 additional workers, so tech isn’t making human labor obsolete yet. Remember, somebody also has to fix all these robots, said Sareeta Amrute in Slate.com. Silicon Valley might “promise to eliminate the dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs through machine learning and automation,” but it can’t protect workers entirely. Self-checkout at grocery stores still requires cashiers standing by to help, and drone deliveries still require people to pack boxes. Many of these innovations end up just “hiding the people who are at risk.”