“11,595 robots (up 28% y/y) worth $646 million (up 43% y/y), according to a June 6, 2022, Association for Advancing Automation” (Press release)
The robots came for manufacturing jobs. They have dramatically changed the look of modern factories. Software robots are coming for white-collar jobs, and they will similarly reshape the workplace.
EkaLore has been releasing analyses of topics for enterprise agility, resilience, and sustainability. Automation of white-collar work. This release focuses on investment trends
Robots are threatening more jobs than people know.
The term “robot” was introduced by Karel Čapek, a Czech writer, in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) over 100 years ago. It dealt with the replacement of factory/manufacturing workers by machinery and automated material handling. This was envisioned less than a century after the Industrial Revolution changed work from a hand-and-craft industry into the factory-production model. One hundred years further along a quiet robot revolution threatens even more jobs.
“Robotic Process Automation” is a descendent of work begun more than 40 years ago into “the paperless office”. The focus was to move the data, move the process into the computer, and eventually use the computer to do the operation (“enterprise in the system”) rather than people doing the data copying, transformation, checking, and computation. The 75-year growth of computer-based efforts focused on “management information systems”, office automation, and “white collar work”. Now, robots are coming to replace office workers.
You’ll find part two of this series at www.ekalore.com/ARS
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