Robot Sales Are Exploding

Roland Piquepaille writes "The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) just released its 2003 World Robotics survey. The original press release by UNECE has 15 pages in PDF format, while the full report represents 380 pages. Here are the three essential findings: robot orders in first half of 2003 were up by 26% to the highest level ever recorded; worldwide growth in the period 2003-2006 will reach an average annual rate of 7.4%; and household robots are starting to take off. "It is projected that sales of all types of domestic robots (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning and other types) in the period 2003-2006 can reach some 638,000 units." This overview contains more details including a chart showing the growth of domestic robots for the period 2003-2006."

Comments

Quality not quantity

[PhysicsExpert]

While this is good news for the geek community I think that it would be more important if the qualtiy of the robots were improved rather than the quantity.

The first robots actually predate the computer, they came about over 100 years ago and were purely mechanical with a babbage style difference engine for a 'cpu'. The problem is that in these early days the foundations of robotics were established and now that new techniques are available we cannot break free from those shackles.

I would like to see robots that are based upon living things as opposed to inanimate opjects. We should use organic molecules instead of steel and plastic, and move to neural nets instead of SParC processors. Maybe then we will be able to design a robot that is useful outside a car production plant.

YOU FAIL IT

[users.pl]

YOU FAIL IT SIR. Your FP attempt foiled by a karma whore who got modded as funny for saying "bite my shiny metal ass". Funny? I think not. I feel your pain but YOU STILL FAIL IT.

Better than immigration for a greying population

[Baldrson]

Since immigration is destroying the long-term economies of the States most relying on it for short-term growth it makes no sense to continue importing labor to care for an aging population. Robots are immensely superior for a wide variety of reasons -- not the least of which they don't stand a high probability of voting Social Security into oblivion once they are the majority of the support for the old and infirm with whom they share very little heritage. Another reason is their percapita resource utilization is likely less than that which would result from a population explosion in the United States at current levels of affluence.

One way to encourage reindustrialization adequate to the task of lowered population and higher resource efficiency might be to allow people threatened by imported disease to sue the globalist companies importing the cheap labor.

My GI generation father lives with some life-threatening conditions, and does he have some stories to tell since he moved from Iowa to the border with Mexico!

I rarely see the man anymore, however, so the change is hardly gradual and is quite palpable.

Sitting in a waiting line with illegals ahead of him for medical service is finally getting to him. Never a racist act nor word from him during his entire life, and now at the end of his life, he's having to think about what he was fighting for when he, before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, left the Quakers, where he could have easily evaded the draft, and volunteered to go fight the Germans. He is probably going to die quite a few years earlier for the want of a small amount of service from Medicare to which he is entitled. He will likely lose these years of life due to the degradation of Medicare by immigration promoted by globalist companies forcing wages for American workers down. He could actually get better care if he were an illegal rather than a WW II vet.

As Paul Craig Roberts reports - Friday, Oct. 3, 2003:

So you think your government looks out for you? Not nearly as much as it does for aliens.

On Sept. 24 Robert Pear reported in the New York Times that the Bush administration has quietly decided to stiff 6 million poor elderly and disabled Americans by denying them Medicare drug benefits. According to the Bush administration, these Americans are already covered under state Medicaid programs.

President Bush should read the newspapers. On Sept. 23 Robert Pear reported in the New York Times that "rising costs prompt states to reduce Medicaid further." It seems that the job loss recovery has forced virtually every state to take action to cut back on Medicaid.

Not to worry. All the 6 million poor and disabled Americans need to do is to acquire Mexican citizenship and recross the border as illegal aliens. Once Americans acquire the status of illegal aliens, their medical care is provided free without even a co-pay.

Can you imagine what things will happen when the boomers, whose economic and therefore reproductive viablity has already been decimated by government policy which is now compounded by immigration-induced age, if not race, discrimination, hit retirement and all that imported labor that was supposed to keep Social Security solvent is voting?

I'll admit I'm angry about this; however, the public health menace facing those on Medicare is a drop in the bucket compared to what is starting to become obvious to even the most dogmatic proponent of globalism:

Globalist companies are using immigration to drive down labor costs at the expense of profound risks to the public health from epidemics.

When SARS turned out not to be the threat so many feared, some thought this might have been due to quick rea