The robot can, for example, carefully pick tomatoes after using artificial intelligence to identify only the ripest fruit. Photograph: vanit Janthra/AlamyĪnother startup company, Xihelm, which received venture funding from the UK government in 2018, has built a robot capable of harvesting fragile fruits and vegetables in greenhouses. Today’s most advanced distribution centres employ fully autonomous robots. Once this data has been collected, a second, somewhat frightening, five-armed robot follows, killing the weeds by administering a powerful electric shock. The first robot autonomously prowls a wheat field, and with precision and patience that no human could match analyses each individual wheat plant using several cameras, mapping the exact locations where weeds are beginning to encroach. The UK-based startup Small Robot Company, for example, has developed two robots capable of killing weeds in wheat fields while cutting down dramatically on the use of chemical pesticides. As British farms confront the absence of seasonal workers who once flooded in from eastern Europe, interest in agricultural robots is growing. At least 200,000 EU nationals, primarily from eastern Europe, who once filled roles in areas such as agriculture, transportation and logistics, have left the country and may never return.Īll of this has created a powerful incentive for businesses to invest in automation as a way to adapt to the worker shortage. In the UK, Brexit has greatly exacerbated the situation.
Many workers may have simply reassessed their willingness to do difficult and often unrewarding jobs in return for low pay.
However, evidence from a number of US states that moved to discontinue unemployment benefits early suggests that the extended payments may not have played a major role. A common assumption is that extended payments to furloughed workers allowed people to remain out of the workforce. The reasons behind the worker shortages are not entirely clear. Even as a quarter of a million of British workers who held jobs in 2019 remain unemployed, job vacancies are up 20% from pre-pandemic levels as employers struggle to fill many positions. While overall unemployment rates remain elevated, both the US and the UK are experiencing widespread worker shortages, focused especially in those occupations that tend to offer gruelling work conditions and relatively low pay. With the worst days of the pandemic hopefully now behind us, the jobs story has turned out to be unexpectedly complicated.
The American fast food chain White Castle began using hamburger-cooking robots in an effort to create “an avenue for reduced human contact with food during the cooking process”. Some enterprises found that, given the new emphasis on hygiene and social distancing, robotic operations offered a marketing advantage. Floor-cleaning and microbe-zapping disinfecting robots were introduced in hospitals, supermarkets and other environments. A s the coronavirus pandemic enveloped the world last year, businesses increasingly turned to automation in order to address rapidly changing conditions.