Robots take on skilled labour

IN THE Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialised tools to assemble electric shavers.

At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work.

One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent human supervisors being injured.

The Dutch factory has several dozen workers per shift, about one-10th as many as the Chinese plant in Zhuhai.

A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by car makers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in manufacturing and distribution.

''With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,'' said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer in the Dutch town of Drachten.

Even as Foxconn, Apple's iPhone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than 1 million robots within a few years to supplement its workforce in China.

Foxconn's chairman, Terry Gou, has endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than 1 million employees worldwide, he said in January: ''As human beings are also animals, to manage 1 million animals gives me a headache.''

But Bran Ferren, a veteran roboticist at Applied Minds in Glendale, California, argues that there are still steep obstacles. ''I had an early naivety about universal robots that could just do anything,'' he said. ''You have to have people around anyway. And people are pretty good at figuring out, 'how do I wiggle the radiator in or slip the hose on?' And these things are still hard for robots to do.''

Beyond the technical challenges lies resistance from communities worried about jobs.

Take the cavernous solar-panel factory run by Flextronics in Milpitas, south of San Francisco. A large banner proudly proclaims ''Bringing Jobs and Manufacturing Back to California!'' Yet in the state-of-the-art plant, where the assembly line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are robots everywhere and few human workers.

Such advances in manufacturing are also beginning to transform other sectors. One is distribution, where robots that zoom at the speed of the world's fastest sprinters can store, retrieve and pack goods for shipment far more efficiently than people.

Robotics executives say even though blue-collar jobs will be lost, more efficient manufacturing will create skilled jobs in designing, operating and servicing assembly lines.

A report commissioned by the International Federation of Robotics last year found that 150,000 people are already employed by robotics manufacturers worldwide in engineering and assembly jobs.

But US and European dominance in the next generation of manufacturing is uncertain.

''What I see is that the Chinese are going to apply robots, too,'' said Frans van Houten, Philips' chief executive. ''The window of opportunity to bring manufacturing back is before that happens.''

NEW YORK TIMES