Are Robots Taking Our Jobs?

Daniel Lyons explores the question:

Jeff Burnstein, president of the Robotics Industry Association, a trade group in Ann Arbor, Mich., argues that robots actually save U.S. jobs. His logic: companies that embrace automation might use fewer workers, but that’s still better than firing everyone and moving the work overseas.

It’s not that robots are cheaper than humans, though often they are. It’s that they are better. “In some cases the quality requirements are so stringent that even if you wanted to have a human do the job, you couldn’t,” Burnstein says. He cites General Motors, which uses robots to lay a bead of sealant on windshields, because humans can’t do the job as precisely.

On that note, here's a morbid but mesmerizing video of a robotic arm decapitating an assembly line of pig carcasses.