Automation in Manufacturing: Rise of the Machines(?)
In an age of constant technological development, machines are put to new uses daily to make life easier and work more efficient. The word “robot” comes from a Slavic word meaning “labor”, and was first used in the way we use it now in the 1920 Czech play R.U.R., about artificial humanoids put to work for humans. While the robots we have now are far from the depictions of artificial intelligence and sentient machinery in science fiction, it seems inevitable that we’d put robots to use in the workplace once they got advanced enough, and much of the work once done exclusively by people is now partially or entirely automated.
Just as science fiction stories raise the concern in their futuristic settings, there’s an ever-present modern concern that automation will do away with many positions in certain fields or even do away with them entirely. While automation is undoubtedly on the rise, where does it stand at the moment, and how widely has it been adopted? The Annual Survey of Manufactures, a survey conducted by the Census Bureau to gather data on U.S. manufacturing, added three questions to its 2018 survey about the presence of robots in manufacturing plants.
In measuring the overall distribution of manufacturing plant sizes, the survey found that most plants without robots tend to fall between the 6–20 and 51–150 employee range, but most plants with robots tend to fall between 51–150 and 151–500 employees. They also found that a greater percentage of plants with robots have employee counts of over 500, in comparison to the much lower percentage of plants without robots. Thus, plants with robots tend to have more employees than plants without them.
The survey also found that exposure to robots steadily increased with the size of the manufacturing plant. While not always an exact match, the percentage of employees exposed tends to match up with the percentage of plants exposed. About half of all employees in plants with over 1000 employees have been exposed to robots, indicating a significant presence of robots in larger plants despite these making up a smaller percentage of the total amount of manufacturing plants with robots.
Notably, manufacturing plants in the Midwest tend to have higher rates of employees exposed to robots. Many of the states with higher robot exposure rates were prominent manufacturing capitals in the past, but fall into the region now known as the Rust Belt for the overall decline that’s occurred in industrial production since the 1950s. While manufacturing plants in these states have shut down in large numbers, and many of the jobs that are there have been automated, the jobs that do exist there increasingly bring employees into contact with industrial robots.
From this data, we can see that robots are more prominent in larger manufacturing plants in areas associated with manufacturing, and that employees in these regions tend to have higher rates of exposure to robots. There’s no survey data currently available on the presence of robots in the following years, but the 2018 data shows an already strong presence in industry. As long as domestic manufacturing has a place in the economy, it seems that robots will play a major role in it.
