Toyota to Employ Advanced Robots

olegalexandrov writes "Toyota Motor will introduce robots which can work as well or better than humans at all 12 of its factories in Japan to cut costs and deal with a looming labor shortage. The robots would be able to carry out multiple tasks simultaneously with their two arms, achieving efficiency unseen in human workers and matching the cheap wages of Chinese laborers, a report said on Thursday." The Motley Fool has a humorous take, and Toyota emphasizes that goodlife, err, humans will continue to have a place in Toyota factories.

Comments

bow down...

[The Barking Dog]

I for one welcome our new robotic overlords...

They Took Our Jobs!

[thesonicboom]

er took er jhobs!

Future..

[t_allardyce]

On the plus side this will put an end to cheap labour and bad working conditions. On the other hand eventually those millions of people who make your clothes and mp3 players for 50p will now starve to death and Topshop will still charge £80. Ok so this is nothing new, robots have been taking over jobs since the loom (spelling?) but its pretty obvious that the time will come when robots will be advanced enough to take over jobs that previously only a 12 year old could do. Im just interested to understand the new economics that will come into play here? Eventually computers are going to take most jobs, one by one going up the scale of complexity, physical labour and ingenuity and if true AI is ever created then humans won't need to do anything, robot slaves would serve everyone even producing our art and entertainment and we would melt into some sort of communist utopia? (assuming the tacky robots-tacking-over cliché never happens). But before that the very real scenario of millions more jobs vanishing will come, so what will happen?