Robotics: Challenges to present-day technology: Robots must be produced in great numbers with more advanced capabilities, and we must lose our fear that they are taking over our jobs

Abstract

Robots have received a great deal of publicity lately. The enormous influx of foreign cars manufactured in part by robots has aroused the awareness of the press and many politicians to the fact that robots can have a profound effect on industrial productivity. Many people today believe that the robot revolution is well under way, that factories are full of armies of these highly intelligent “steel-collar workers,” and that human workers are being displaced in droves. The facts are quite different.