The Co-Botic Future: Robots Don't Always Take Our Jobs -- Sometimes They Save Them

[Narrator] At Professional Finishing

in Richmond, California

humans are getting used to a new kind of coworker.

Robots that paint and sand cabinets

alongside their colleagues.

That's a striking contrast to how robotic arms

have traditionally operated in the factory.

Namely, on their own,

because otherwise they'd crush any human workers.

This painting robot is part of a vanguard of machines

that are transforming how humans work.

So, meet the collaborative robots

AKA the cobots.

(computer beeping)

This machine is no brute.

Bump into it and it stops

instead of batting you across the room,

and it's become an indispensable part of this workforce.

Just months after Chad and Dawn White

bought Professional Finishing in 2013,

local and state minimum wages went up.

It was a matter of survival for us.

We would've closed in less than two years

if we had not brought in the robots

and continued to remain competitive.

Everyone here would've lost their jobs.

[Narrator] So, they brought in there robotic arms

made by Universal Robots to help with repetitive tasks

like sanding and spray painting,

which unsurprisingly struck the human employees

as problematic.

We did hear that it can never do my job

and I think that that was mostly spoken out of fear.

We did have one employee tell us,

'Hey, let me know when one of the robot's up and running

and I'll just quit'

and we said, 'Just bear with us.

Just stick with us, watch what happens,

help us, and everybody will keep their jobs.'

[Narrator] And everyone did.

(speaking Spanish)

As promised, the robots were there

to make the workers' lives easier.

Humans would still be there

to handle some of the more precise tasks

like assembly and oversight.

Some of our long-term employees

were starting to have some issues with their back

or their elbows from the constant spraying motion

that they do every day.

The robot now does all that for them

and now the operators who used to paint these parts

are now actually running the robot,

they're now robot technicians.

[Narrator] Automation has

and always will be about productivity.

Yes, that can mean robots replacing humans in the workplace,

but the machines can also complement humans.

So, instead of stealing jobs, robots can help preserve them

because it isn't necessarily that a particular job

will be outright automated, a portion of the job might.

For instance, in hospitals a robot called Tug

delivers food and drugs,

automating that part of a nurse's job.

And in warehouses machines like these

from Fetch Robotics do much the same,

delivering goods to workers

so humans don't have to run around all the time.

This is the essence of collaborative robotics.

The machines sometimes complement human labor

and don't necessarily replace it.

We think more jobs will change their activities

than completely disappear.

And so, we'll see more of these collaborations

between machines and people.

When you actually have a robot next to a person

or artificial intelligence next to a person

they work better together, produce higher quality products,

than any one of them working alone.

[Narrator] Still, as robots grow more advanced

they'll be able to master more and more tasks

and completely replace more and more workers.

Hundreds of millions of them, by some estimates.

It's not just the assembly line and manufacturing

where you have the potential for automation occurring.

We're seeing this happen in white collar work.

There's a lot of interesting discussion

about whether or not radiologists

will have a significant percentage of their activities

automated in the future.

[Narrator] Bottom line,

the machines are here to boost productivity.

To what extent they take over the workforce

isn't yet clear,

but in one shop in California

the machines are still entry-level

and at least a few humans hope they stay that way.