“Rise Of The Robots”

A new report by Price Waterhouse Coopers predicts robots will take over 38 percent of American jobs by 2030, reports WBALTV 11.

From WBALTV’s report:

Take, for example, the “taskmate” robot that bevels the edges of a metal rod just like a human would do in a machine shop. One might imagine it would take a robotics engineer hours, even days, to program this multi-step task. Not so.

“I can teach you how to use this in 10 minutes. If you can play Candy Crush on your phone, you can program a robot. That’s the goal of this technology,” said Kel Guerin, the chief technology officer of Baltimore-based Ready Robotics.

Guerin and partner Ben Gibbs see a need for industrial robots that can be used by everyday people.

“Our goal is to make robots as easy to use as your iPhone,” Gibbs said. “There are a lot of dirty, dangerous jobs in manufacturing today that oftentimes lead to injury and death. So instead of having a human doing that job, you can have a robot perform that task instead, thus freeing up a human to do more valuable and complex work that robots are unable to do.”

But in his book “Rise of the Robots,” technology entrepreneur Martin Ford predicts robots will replace human workers.

“I personally believe that, in the future, we could well get into a situation where jobs simply disappear and it will be especially any kind of job that is routine or repetitive on some level. A lot of those jobs are going to disappear,” Ford said.

Read and watch WBALTV 11‘s coverage.

Learn about how robots could transform county employment at the MACo Summer Conference session, Will Your Next County Employee be…a Robot?

The MACo summer conference is August 16-19, 2017 at the Roland Powell Convention Center in Ocean City Maryland. This year’s theme is “You’re Hired!”

Learn more about MACo’s Summer Conference: