Should We Curse the Legacy of George Devol's Robot Arm?
AUGUST 16, 2011 TAGS:
In the time-traveling, robots-versus-humans masterpiece, Terminator 2, an intriguing plot device brings the boy protagonist, John Conner, his mother and their Terminator companion to the home of Miles Dyson, an engineer at the company Cyberdyne Systems. Their mission: to stop him from inventing artificial intelligence. Once his smart robots become self-aware they will launch the world's entire nuclear arsenal and humanity's reign as the planet's dominant species will end.
Sarah Conner's mission is to kill. Nip the whole idea of sentient automatons in the bud by offing the inventor. They end up enlisting Dyson in their explosion-laden attempts to change the future. After Dyson realizes the consequences of his invention, he's on board to stop it.
The movie casts the inventor as the origin, the locus vivendi, of mankind's fall. Would those who loathe the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. come to the same conclusion about George Devol, the inventor of the first programmable robotic arm? Devol died Thursday at 99.
Devol's robot arm, which he marketed as the Unimate, changed modern industrial production forever. After 1961, when G.M. introduced the first Unimate on an assembly line in a company plant in Trenton, New Jersey, ("Trenton Makes the World Takes"), Detroit's other two giants and factories around the world would integrate the technology into their methods too. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame the arm represented "the foundation of the modern robotics industry."
Even by 1961, when certain types of automation had already trimmed payrolls, hands were wringing about the effect of automatization on American jobs. In a 1961 a Time magazine story quoted Congressman Elmer J. Holland, a Democrat from steel country Pennsylvania, who headed up a subcommittee exploring automation and the workforce:
"One of the greatest problems with automation is not the worker who is fired, but the worker who is not hired."
The American industrial workforce has shrunk from its peak in 1979 at 19.5 million. Last year the number of manufacturing workers was around 12 million. Automation, as much of a bogeyman as it seemed, proved to be a lesser worry than low-wage foreign workers.
So we'll spare George Devol the label of job killer and toast his irrepressible piece of human ingenuity and evolution, the robotic arm.
ALSO: Taiwanese manufacturing giant FOXCONN just ordered 1 million new industrial robots, which will nearly double the world's indusrial robot population.
On The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1966, Joe Engleberger, Devol's business partner, introduces the Unimate.
An Alexander McQueen Couture show from 1999 featured automated arms: (Start in at 0:40 seconds)
"The one thing robots can't make: other robots." Thank God. Amazing footage of BMW's auto plant in Munich.
Sarah Conner's mission is to kill. Nip the whole idea of sentient automatons in the bud by offing the inventor. They end up enlisting Dyson in their explosion-laden attempts to change the future. After Dyson realizes the consequences of his invention, he's on board to stop it.The movie casts the inventor as the origin, the locus vivendi, of mankind's fall. Would those who loathe the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. come to the same conclusion about George Devol, the inventor of the first programmable robotic arm? Devol died Thursday at 99.
Devol's robot arm, which he marketed as the Unimate, changed modern industrial production forever. After 1961, when G.M. introduced the first Unimate on an assembly line in a company plant in Trenton, New Jersey, ("Trenton Makes the World Takes"), Detroit's other two giants and factories around the world would integrate the technology into their methods too. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame the arm represented "the foundation of the modern robotics industry."
Even by 1961, when certain types of automation had already trimmed payrolls, hands were wringing about the effect of automatization on American jobs. In a 1961 a Time magazine story quoted Congressman Elmer J. Holland, a Democrat from steel country Pennsylvania, who headed up a subcommittee exploring automation and the workforce:
"One of the greatest problems with automation is not the worker who is fired, but the worker who is not hired."
The American industrial workforce has shrunk from its peak in 1979 at 19.5 million. Last year the number of manufacturing workers was around 12 million. Automation, as much of a bogeyman as it seemed, proved to be a lesser worry than low-wage foreign workers.
So we'll spare George Devol the label of job killer and toast his irrepressible piece of human ingenuity and evolution, the robotic arm.
ALSO: Taiwanese manufacturing giant FOXCONN just ordered 1 million new industrial robots, which will nearly double the world's indusrial robot population.
On The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1966, Joe Engleberger, Devol's business partner, introduces the Unimate.
An Alexander McQueen Couture show from 1999 featured automated arms: (Start in at 0:40 seconds)
"The one thing robots can't make: other robots." Thank God. Amazing footage of BMW's auto plant in Munich.
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