Shopping robots on the march in Ocado
11:19 AM
There is growing concern about the impact of automation on employment - or in crude terms - the threat that robots will eat our jobs.
Be that as it may, on the off chance that you need to perceive how imperative mechanical autonomy and manmade brainpower can be to a business Ocado is a decent place to begin.
"Without it we essentially couldn't do what we do at this scale," the online retailer's main innovation officer Paul Clarke let me know. With edges in the general store business slender, persistently hunkering down on expenses and waste has been key.
At its Hatfield dispersion focus I got a look at how far the way toward robotizing the sorting of thousands of basic supply orders has come. For the present, you will battle to detect a robot - unless you check a machine that supplements plastic shopping packs into boxes - yet programming is making an extremely complex showing with regards to of sending the correct merchandise in the correct cases to the correct human pickers.
That is certainly the view of Laura Gardiner, of the Resolution Foundation, who points out that jobs are becoming more multi-faceted, so that even if one task is taken by a robot, there will still be others left for the humans.
But she does accept that for certain categories of worker life may get harder: "It is right to be concerned about specific occupations - secretarial work, processing jobs in factories - moderately skilled jobs which used to pay quite well."
What is clear is that in an evolving job market, some skills will become redundant, while others will be in higher demand. And the best advice? Train as a robotics engineer.
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