Automation is reaching more companies

# · 🔥 140 · 💬 271 · 2 years ago · www.wired.com · geox · 📷
Last year, to meet rising demand amid a shortage of workers, Polar hired its first robot employee. Like a person, the robot worker gets paid for the hours it works. Jose Figueroa​, who manages Polar's production line, says the robot, which is leased from a company called Formic, costs the equivalent of $8 per hour, compared with a minimum wage of $15 per hour for a human employee. Deploying the robot allowed a human worker to do different work, increasing output, Figueroa says. The International Federation of Robotics, an organization that tracks robot trends globally, projected in October that the number of robots sold last year would grow 13 percent. One study of robot adoption in Japanese nursing homes, from January 2021, found that the technology helped create more jobs by allowing for more flexibility in working practices. Another study, from 2019, also found that robot adoption among Canadian businesses had often affected managers more than workers by changing business processes.
Automation is reaching more companies



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