The invisible robots

The topics of robotics, Industry 4.0 and automation are omnipresent. What used to be industrialisation is now the entry of robotics into our everyday lives, both privately and professionally. A hoover robot for the home? The service robot in the old people's home? The dog-like ANYmal or Spot for inspection? The shelf robot in the large dispatch centre? The robots are visible, the progress is visible, the robots are getting smarter and thus hopefully more useful. More useful for whom? More on that later.

 

So much for the visible area of robotics and artificial intelligence. But along the way, there are quite a few other tasks that will no longer have to be carried out by humans in the future. For example, there is "Robotic Process Automation" (RPA). Here, software robots are used to automate processes on the PC, just as a human does, by clicking buttons, moving documents and processing them according to predefined procedures. Without breaks, weekends or holidays, of course. And hopefully with fewer errors. To use such software robots, you have to teach them the processes manually by demonstrating and recording it. In my opinion, however, this is only an intermediate step. On the one hand, you can avoid the diversions via user software, where the human is intended to be the operator, and use digital interfaces between the different software architectures straight away. On the other hand, artificial intelligence will make its entrance here, so that a process no longer has to be taught by hand, but the tasks can be learned independently. Furthermore, with the use of artificial intelligence (as opposed to hard-coded processes), a wider range of tasks can be covered and some of the decisions can be made automatically. The potential of applications and fields of use is huge, especially in a country like Switzerland, where there are a lot of office workplaces, many of them with repetitive tasks.

 

What are the challenges we face as a society? Robots in production are one thing, but they mainly affect countries where there is a lot of production, such as China. However, as we can see, the labour market in Switzerland will also be transformed because of software algorithms, there will be shifts, new jobs will be created, but jobs will also disappear. This presents us with new challenges, but can and must above all be seen as an opportunity.

 

Repetitive and thus partly less challenging tasks will disappear, may lead to restructuring and retraining. Since robots can and should take work away from us humans, the workload will also decrease. How do we deal with this? There could be shifts to other areas in the labour market where there is a shortage of staff, for example in the health and care sector. We could reduce weekly working hours overall or introduce more holidays. There are also new ideas like levying a robot tax or introducing a basic income. Caused by the social change with the entry of robots into our everyday life, these and many other challenges will soon be a reality.

 

As we have seen, there is a lot coming our way. On the technical side, there are many exciting challenges. On the social side, we have to decide how to deal with progress and what to make of it. We at Ronovatec are working on exciting solutions that will appear in everyday life in the form of robots. We create robots that relieve the burden on humans and free up human resources so that qualified personnel can take on more demanding tasks. We are committed to ensuring that humans and robots work together and complement each other ideally.