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posted by martyb on Wednesday January 19 2022, @07:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-has-begun dept.

Now You Can Rent a Robot Worker:

Polar Manufacturing has been making ​metal ​hinges, locks, and brackets ​in south Chicago for more than 100 years. Some of the company's metal presses—hulking great machines that loom over a worker—date from the 1950s. Last year, to meet rising demand amid a shortage of workers, Polar hired its first robot employee.

The robot arm performs a simple, repetitive job: lifting a piece of metal into a press, which then bends the metal into a new shape. And 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.

"Smaller companies sometimes suffer because they can't spend the capital to invest in new technology," Figueroa says. "We're just struggling to get by with the minimum wage increase."


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  • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday January 22 2022, @12:21AM

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 22 2022, @12:21AM (#1214673) Journal

    I'm with you. Electrically, pneumatically, or hydraulicly actuate mechanical critters, smart or dumb, are machines.

    There are more fuzzy edges when we start looking out to intelligent machines. A machine capable of locomotion, self-preservation, procreation, planning, execution, communication, and introspection is probably going to be a machine, robot, and person.

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