A study out today by Boston Consulting Group claims that we’ve reached an inflection point for the proliferation of advanced manufacturing robotics. According to the report, U.S. productivity could be boosted between 10-30% in certain industries and costs could fall by more than 18% by 2025 due to an onslaught of new automated technology. This would, however, come at the cost of human labor, with around 40% of that labor being replaced in major manufacturing industries.
The industries most affected by this change include computers and electronics, electrical equipment, transportation equipment and machinery.
Hal Sirkin, managing director of Boston Consulting Group and author of the study joined Yahoo Finance to discuss his findings.
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“The economics of using human labor and the economics of using automated labor are changing very rapidly,” he says. “A lot of companies are going to China because labor is low-cost, this will allow us to produce in the United States because labor costs will start to match the Chinese labor rate,” he says.
Either way, the jobs are going away says Sirkin and this way the country benefits from having production taking place onshore. In fact, says Sirkin, it’s possible that we end up adding jobs by building robotic-based manufacturing plants within the confines of the U.S. Plus the decreased cost of goods made by robots will be a big boon to consumers.
This is the tipping point for robotics because their cost has decreased so significantly and their ability has increased sharply. “Every two years, robots double their processing power,” says Sirkin “Where if you’re working in an experience curve, which is a more human way of doing things, it takes many years to do it. For a lot of products it’s now cheaper to manufacture in an automated way.”
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