Earlier this month, Bank of America Merrill Lynch warned that 45pc of all manufacturing tasks would be automated within a decade, up from 10pc today.

 

The International Federation of Robotics says the number of robots in factories across the world rose by 225,000 last year, and will rise even further in the coming years – and it is not just in manufacturing.

 

The Henn-na hotel, which opened in Nagasaki, Japan, this summer, is the world’s first to be staffed by humanoid robots.

 

Even the great and good are paying attention. “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution” will be the theme of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, next year.

 

Of course, there were fears about the consequences of the previous three industrial revolutions. Lord Byron argued that “nothing but absolute want” would have driven the Luddites to smash the new machines in the factories of the 1800s.

 

John Maynard Keynes predicted that leaps in technology would bring abundance and leisure, but also the threat of a “new disease” of what he called “technological unemployment”.

 

But it is not just mindless, repetitive jobs that are under threat from robots. Computers are demonstrating their ability to perform complex tasks.

 

IBM’s Watson supercomputer has beaten the brightest minds at the quiz show game Jeopardy!, and has now teamed up with oncologists to develop a system that could diagnose cancer.

David Fuller's view

Here is a PDF of The Sunday Telegraph article.

This is more of a popular than serious article on robots but interesting nonetheless. 

For instance, we already know that robots are fantastic at tasks which require endless identical replication from a stationary position, ranging from placing small cakes in packaging to handling many assembly line tasks for automobile manufacturing.  However, they are considerably more challenged by tasks which require mobility, and they currently lack the discretion for picking soft fruit.  

Presumably the software for these functions will require many more options to be considered, but for how much longer in our era of accelerating technological innovation?  The biggest beneficiaries, I maintain, will be corporations which will be able to produce much more, and more accurately, at much lower costs.