The Robot Revolution

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of thermometers and lowers it into a tank of hot water (100° F to 145° F), then into a tank of cold water (40° F), then into a centrifuge that squeezes out even the tiniest bubbles. Working with two dozen different boxes, it performs its ritual three times on each box in the course of a 394-step program that takes 7½ min. A simple routine, but it used to occupy 13 employees, and now only one is necessary. Says Plant Manager M. James Dawes: "I tell our people we've got to become more productive by being smarter, not by working harder."

This sense of the robot as a helper rather than a menace is widespread among factory hands. Though robots are highly vulnerable to sabotage, there has been no trace of the Luddite violence that threatened the first labor-saving machines of the Industrial Revolution. On the contrary, working with a robot seems to confer status. And, while the machine usually looks less like a man than like a lobster, its human partners often seem unable to resist giving it a name and even lavishing on it a certain metallic affection. When one machine known as "Clyde the Claw" broke down at a Ford stamping plant in Chicago, its human partners gave it a get-well party. Chauvinism being what it is, most factory workers unthinkingly refer to a robot as "he," but at one plant in Japan the clanking automata have each been given the name of a female movie star.

The willingness of the robot to do the dirty work, like some mechanized Turkish Gastarbeiter, has muted alarms about the loss of jobs and has kept the labor unions mostly at bay. Welding cars and spraying paint are stupefying jobs, and, besides, they are ideally done at temperatures hotter than a worker can stand. "In the next five years," says Anthony Massaro, Westinghouse's chief of robotics technology, "we're going to lose 25,000 people in manufacturing due to attrition, and there's no way to replace them all. People joining the labor force these days don't want the dirty jobs."

Robert Cannon, president of an electrical workers local that represents many Westinghouse workers in New Jersey, accepts that reasoning. "Frankly, I welcome it," he says. "If we can bring in a robot here to do, say, the painting that a man does for $7, then we can move him to another job at $7.50 an hour. We say, 'Train our people for the skilled jobs that are in today's market.' "

For the present, that is what is happening, and it can continue as long as corporations do not make the shift to robots faster than the natural rate of worker attrition, which now runs as high as 15% in the metalworking plants that are ripe for robotization. (One reason why Japan has been able to shift so extensively to robots is that Japanese corporations have a tradition of caring for their employees for life.) But as the robots take over more and more jobs—and they can do the more pleasant and interesting tasks as well as the dull and dirty ones—the unions' acquiescence may change. The U.S. unemployment rate is already 7.6%, after all, and retraining programs have so far had little effect on it.

"Ultimately," predicts Harley Shaiken, a former Detroit assembly-line machinist who now works as an industrial consultant at M.I.T., "retraining will not be possible, because there will be no