Economists ponder effects of robots on workforce BOSTON — At
MIT, a management robot is learning to run a factory and give
orders to artificial co-workers, and a BakeBot robot is reading
recipes, whipping together butter, sugar and flour and putting
the cookie mix in the oven. At the University of California at
Berkeley, a robot can do laundry and then neatly fold T-shirts
and towels. A wave of new robots, affordable and capable of
accomplishing advanced human tasks, is being aimed at jobs that
are high in the workforce hierarchy. The consequences of this
leap in technology loom large for the American worker — and
perhaps their managers, too. Back in the 1980s, when automated
spray-painting and welding machines took hold in factories, some
on the assembly line quickly discovered they had become
obsolete. Today's robots can do far more than their primitive,
single-task ancestors. And there is a broad debate among
economists, labor experts and companies over whether the trend
will add good-paying jobs to the ec