

Top countries by robot density (Graph) - cwan
http://spectrum.ieee.org/images/dec08/images/data02.gif

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apu
It's interesting that Europe, with its (in-)famously stricter labor laws, has
a higher robot ratio than the US. I would have thought that companies in the
US would be able to fire workers much more easily to replace them with robots,
and yet this doesn't appear to be the case.

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jonasvp
I find that very logical - in countries where employees are expensive to hire
and to let go, buying robots is a easy strategy to cut costs. Given that you
have to train a new employee with uncertain success, getting a robot with a
limited but constant output will seem a safer bet.

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HeyLaughingBoy
I'm sure that's a part of it, but a bigger reason is probably just that the US
has a very large number of manufacturers and most of them are too small to
afford the robots this survey is discussing.

I've known many small job shops turning out thousands of parts a day with
(automated, but not robotic) WW II surplus equipment; in some cases with the
stenciled words "Property of War Department" still visible on the cabinet!
Machine tools have lifetimes measured in human generations. There are also
many small manufacturers that do everything by hand -- remember that most US
small businesses are run part time -- a quick look at my bookmarks shows URLs
of a few tiny businesses making just a few thousand units of their product a
year.

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lkozma
Honest question: how do they count robots ? I mean, where does one end and the
other one start... unless we are talking about humanoid robots of course.

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ugh
Since they put the numbers in relation to manufacturing workers they surly
only count robots used for manufacturing, not Roombas.

But then the problems start: Say you have two robot arms, one to hold a part
up, the other to weld, are those two arms two robots or one? Is a CNC machine
a robot? And so on.

Those differences don’t matter so much if they managed to get their definition
of robot somewhat right (the amount of CNC machines is probably highly
correlated with the number of [other?] robots, so it doesn’t really matter
whether CNC machines are included or not) and if they counted consistently.
You probably shouldn’t read too much into the worker:robot ratio. (Oh look,
all Japan needs is a 35-fold increase in the number of robots, then they won’t
need any workers anymore …)

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hristov
This of course measures industrial robots per 10k workers, so it is woefully
inadequate as it does not take into account robot dogs.

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sofuture
Random: Iceland is part of Europe, not the Americas.

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compay
So in a Terminator-like situation, the best bet would apparently be to head
for Africa.

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joshu
I can't wait for the Creepy Robot Armageddon. I'm tracking the situation at
<http://creepyrobots.tumblr.com/>

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davidw
Italy's surprisingly high on that list, if you think about the stereotype of
the country. If you know the reality, that there are a lot of interesting
things going on in industry here, the numbers make sense.

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arethuza
Italy's economy is roughly the same size as California's - hardly a third
world country.

A _lot_ of very desirable things are manufactured in Italy :-)

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philwelch
I wish they had China on here, even though it's probably like 0.5.

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babar
How is the world average higher than any continent except Europe?

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ugh
Seems to be wrong. You get an average of about 26 (assuming 4.2 billion people
in Asia, 1 in Africa, 0.9 in the Americas and 0.7 in Europe).

– edit: no, it could be right. It’s the number of robots per 10,000
manufacturing workers, which is not the same as just population. If there are
massive amounts of manufacturing workers in Europe and only a few in Africa
the average could still be right.

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sesqu
Not quite that massive. With 3 degrees of freedom it's impossible to say for
precise (see simpson's paradox), but according to the numbers,

    
    
      europe's industrial robots = americas's*0.09 + asia-pacific's*0.51 + africa's*41.66
      europe's manufacturing workers = americas's*0.06 + asia-pacific's*0.28 + africa's*1.67
      africa's manufacturing workers = europe's*0.60 - americas's*0.03 - asia-pacific's*0.17

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karlzt
why america sucks when it comes to robots?

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sliverstorm
Robots are used for manufacturing. The US hasn't been doing a whole lot of
manufacturing recently, so it has less use for robots.

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lallysingh
The graph is per-10k manufacturing workers.

I'd say it's due to strong unions in the US.

