50 Things That Made The Modern Economy with Tim Harford

It's about the size and shape of an office photocopier. With a gentle, wearing noise, it

traverses the warehouse floor while its two arms, rays or no of themselves on scissor lifts

ready for the next task. Each arm has a camera on its knuckle. The left arm eases a cardboard

box forward on the shelf, the right arm reaches in and extracts a bottle.

Like many new robots, this one comes from Japan. The Hitachi Corporation showcased it in

2015 with hopes to be selling it by 2020. It's not the only robot that can pick a bottle

off a shelf, but it's as close as robots have yet come to performing this seemingly simple

task as speedily and dexterously as a good old-fashioned human.

One day, robots like this might replace warehouse workers altogether. For now, humans and machines

are running warehouses together. In Amazon's depots, the company's Kiva robots scurry around,

not picking things off shelves, but carrying the shelves to humans for them to pick things

off. By saving the time workers would otherwise spend trudging up and down aisles, Kiva robots

can improve efficiency up to fourfold. Robots and humans are working side by side in

factories too. Factories have had robots for decades, of course, since 1961, when General

Motors installed the first Unimate, a one-armed robot resembling a small tank that was used

for tasks like welding. But until recently, they were strictly segregated from the human

workers. Partly to stop the humans coming to any harm, and partly to stop them confusing

the robots whose working conditions had to be strictly controlled. With some new robots,

that's no longer necessary. A charming example by the name of Baxter can generally avoid

bumping into humans or falling over if humans bump into it. Baxter has cartoon eyes that

help indicate to human co-workers where it's about to move, and if someone knocks a tool

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