Robot Orders Jumped 40% in 2022's First Three Months

As labor shortages continue, "robot orders increased 40% in the first quarter of 2022," reports Business Insider (citing a report from the Wall Street Journal citing the Association for Advancing Automation)."People want to remove labor," Ametek Inc. CEO David A. Zapico told Bloomberg in November, noting that the automatic equipment company had been "firing on all cylinders" to meet demand. Robots are providing at least a temporary solution for businesses confronted by difficulty hiring in the tightest job market since World War II, marred by the pandemic, record-high quitting rates, and vast economic turmoil.... "The robots are becoming easier to use," Michael Cicco, chief executive officer of industrial robot provider Fanuc America, told the Wall Street Journal. "Companies used to think that automation was too hard or too expensive to implement." But as robot usage climbs, some have expressed concern about the machines displacing human workers as the labor crisis eventually eases. "Automation, if it goes very fast, can destroy a lot of jobs," Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Journal. "The labor shortage is not going to last. This is temporary."

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