A wave of new workers is infiltrating Maine’s job market, and employers are more than happy to accommodate them. These employees are hardworking and dependable. They never miss a day of work. And, most appealing of all, they’ll work for next to nothing.
But these are not recent immigrants or foreign telecommuters. They're robots.
Before your mind wanders to childhood memories of Rockin’ Sockin’ Robots or Jetsons-esque images of affable aluminum servants, note that most industrial robots take the form of a pre-programmed machine on an assembly line or a driver-controlled arm on a truck (or the space shuttle).
As robotic technology becomes increasingly affordable and productive, more Maine businesses and local public works departments are using it for everyday tasks. Robots replaced thousands of factory workers in the past; now they’re collecting garbage in South Portland. What's next for Maine’s working class?
Timothy Gato, operations manager of South Portland’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Public Works, explains that vacancies in his department allowed the city to seamlessly integrate robotic technology into its curbside trash pickup program without needing lay-offs. He says the use of hydraulic arms, put into place on South Portland’s garbage trucks about a year ago, has increased the efficiency of the service without any safety hazards.
Other Maine businesses and public service organizations are also using robots for dangerous tasks, educational purposes, and risky police operations.
At Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, a Da Vinci Surgical System robot can perform gastric bypass surgery with better precision than a human surgeon. In Westbrook, three-foot-tall robot Sparky the Fire Dog teaches children about fire safety. And in April, a Portland police robot detonated a mailbox bomb in Gorham, saving lives without danger to officers.
Tom Bickford, president and director of Maine Robotics, which uses events like a "robot track meet" to get students to explore robot building, says the benefits of robotic technology currently outweigh any threats to Maine’s workers.
“Anytime you’ve got a repetitive nature, where you’ve got to do the same thing over and over and over again, hour after hour, day after day, we humans tend to break down faster than machines do,” said Bickford. “The more repetitive our world becomes, the harder it hits us. With a robot you can engineer around those.”
With well-made hardware and intelligent software, he says, “there’s not much left that robots can’t do.”
In his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings, cybernetics expert Norbert Wiener pondered a future where robots dominated the work force, plunging the world’s working class into unemployment and despair. However, as time passed, the robots’ boost in productivity put an end to global poverty.
Is Wiener’s theory feasible?
Only time will tell. For robots to become a serious threat to Maine’s workforce, their intelligence capabilities would have to equal or exceed that of a human employee. Bickford compares the intelligence capacity of a modern robot’s operating system to that of a crab.
“We still have a ways to go before they would approach human intelligence,” said Bickford. “But if you’ve been around for a while, you know how computer capacities have changed over the past 20 years. So who knows where things will be 20 years from now?”
