Manufacturing Magazine September 2015 | Page 13

THE ROBOT REVOLUTION
humans could look very different years from now and some will feel the effects more sharply . Automation in the first industrial revolution made us stronger , made us faster in the second , and in the third will give tremendously greater insights . The possibilities are enormous .”
Grant Thornton is not the only consulting firm to consider the looming effects of automation . Research by Aecus finds that robotic process automation is already implemented by a large minority ( 32 percent ) of manufacturing firms , with 44 percent more planning to deploy the technology in the next three years . Alsbridge expects , with the help of robots , clients of their robotics hub may be able to achieve a 60 percent reduction in the cost of many IT services . While recent research from Deloitte and the University of Oxford finds up to 1 / 3 of UK jobs might disappear in the near future with the wide spread social and economic consequences still needing to be carefully considered by stakeholders .
It ’ s clear that the robot revolution is coming , but how quickly and to what scale , we are still unsure .
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