Rent-a-Robot
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The use of robots in North American workplaces has increased by 40% since the start of the pandemic and the small to medium sized businesses, which never automated before, are getting in on the act. The robotics industry has responded to the global increased demand by creating more and more customisable robots, which can be leased or hired.
Ivana Davidovic explores what effect this has had - and could have in the future - on the labour markets, innovation, but also on social inequality.
Ivana hears from a small restaurant owner from California who wouldn't be without her server robot Rosie any more, after months of being unable to fill vacancies. Joe Campbell from the Danish company Universal Robots and Tim Warrington from the British company Bots explain how they are taking advantage of the post-pandemic "great resignation" and which industries are next in line for a robotics boom.
Karen Eggleston from Stanford University explains her research into the consequences of the use of robots in over 800 nursing homes in Japan and Daron Acemoglu from MIT discusses whether robots in workplaces will liberate their human colleagues or simply entrench inequality.
Presented and produced by Ivana Davidovic
(Photo: Robot waitress serving dessert and coffee on a tray in a cafe. Credit: Getty Images)
*This episode was originally broadcast on 10 February 2022.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Winning the gold medal in Paralympics was a dream. |
| 0:02.8 | Singing is a part of storytelling for me. |
| 0:04.7 | I need to tell my story to the world. |
| 0:06.6 | This is the sound of my Indian life. |
| 0:09.7 | The podcast exploring what it means to be young and Indian in the 21st century. |
| 0:14.4 | We young people are being impacted by climate crisis. |
| 0:17.9 | Find out more at the end of this podcast. |
| 0:23.8 | Hello, this is Business Daily and I'm Elizabeth Hotson. On today's program, |
| 0:29.3 | will space be the final frontier for meat grown from animal stem cells? |
| 0:34.6 | When we're able to produce meat on the international space station or on the moon, for instance, we're able to produce meat on the International Space Station or on the moon, for instance, |
| 0:41.2 | we're able to produce meat in the middle of the Sahara or in the middle of the Antarctic. |
| 0:46.6 | And once the regulatory and practical barriers of growing and selling cell-grown meat are overcome, |
| 0:52.5 | how do you combat the, well, er, factor? |
| 0:55.6 | I think that meat grown in a lab from animal stem cells |
| 0:58.9 | sound really quite disgusting. |
| 1:01.5 | It's kind of a bit like having a science experiment as a meal. |
| 1:05.5 | This is Business Daily on the BBC. |
| 1:15.0 | Music. on the BBC. Picture the scene. |
| 1:16.5 | In a galaxy far, far away, but without the Star Wars music, as we can't afford the rights, |
| 1:21.7 | colonies of human settlers are sitting down to dinner. |
| 1:25.0 | It's state night and the meat has been freshly harvested, but there are no cows in sight |
| 1:29.6 | or sheep or any other livestock for that matter, just a clinically clean kitchen with a few steel |
... |
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