Tech Crunch – Shahin Farshchi
“John Dulchinos is VP of Global Automation at Jabil Circuit, which employs 177,000 workers in 90 facilities over 23 countries worldwide, including the U.S. He did an interview with IEEE Spectrum in 2012, when he was CEO of robot maker Adept Technology, on whether robots are to blame for dwindling manufacturing jobs; and the answer was N-O. He cited that over the 15 years leading to the interview, 10-15k robots had been deployed in the U.S., totaling around 200k robots, which, at best could have replaced 500k jobs. In reality, the U.S. lost millions of manufacturing jobs over that same period; so robots aren’t the culprit, it’s the U.S. not being competitive with cheap labor overseas. As of 2012, China had grown to become the #4 user of industrial robots on the planet, which at that rate of adoption, was expected to outpace America’s use of robots, while employing over ten times more factory workers.”(more)