Robot Population

By the end of 2005 the World Robot population was estimated at 910,000. This is based on new robots and does not take into account the number of re-manufactured robots which have been re-deployed. This of course is the beauty of the Industrial robot. When the product line comes to an end, when the company goes into liquidation, when the manufacturing process moves from East Anglia to the Philippines, the robots still have some residual value and some additional manufacturing potential.

Anyway, at around January 2006 the human population of the world was reckoned to be 6,600,000,000 (6.6 Billion everywhere except the UK). Assuming 5% growth on the 2005 population, that puts the robot population at around 950,000.

This means that the robot population represents .000145% of the worlds population. Assuming they are all working in 3 shift operations, that would mean that they have replaced 2.85 million operatives. When you consider all the staff involved in building, training, applying, selling, maintaining and remanufacturing robots, along with all the secondary jobs which are created in the usage and application of associated engineering products, and all the system builders and integrators, I wonder what the net job losses would be?

I also wonder if those net jobs are the sort of jobs that anyone in the Northern Hemisphere would want. Before you write in, I know that a job is a job, but surely we aspire to be the robot technician rather than the machine loader.

So! Here are some facts (projections), and I use that word advisedly.

2005 - 950,000 Robots Worldwide

Breakdown as follows:

Japan 430,000

USA 160,000

Germany 140,000

Korea 60,000

Italy 55,000

France 40,000

Spain 30,000

UK 20,000

Others 15,000