D

The word "robot" was coined in 1920 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek meaning fully functional servants. For most of their history, robots have been inelegant mechanical devices sitting out of sight in factories. Things are starting to change, however. Robots are leaving carefully managed industrial settings for everyday life and, in the coming years, will increasingly work in supermarkets, clinics, social care and much more.

They could not be coming at a better time. Many industries are facing a shortage of labor-the demand for workers has recovered much faster than expected and some people have left the workforce, particularly in America. Warehousing(仓库)has grown rapidly thanks to the e-commerce boom. Robots are picking items off shelves and helping people pack a rising numbers of boxes. They are even beginning to move slowly along some pavements, delivering goods or food right to people's doors. Nowadays, short of workers but with lots of elderly folk to look after, having more robots to boost productivity would be a good thing.

And yet many people fear that robots will destroy jobs. A paper in 2013 by economists at Oxford University was widely misinterpreted as meaning that 47% of American jobs were at risk of being automated.

In fact, concerns about mass unemployment are overblown. The evidence suggests robots will be ultimately beneficial for labor markets. Japan and South Korea have the highest robot usage rate but very strong workforces. A Yale University study that looked at Japanese manufacturing between 1978 and 2017 found that an increase of one robot unit per 1,000 workers boosted a company's employment by 2.2%. Research from the Bank of Korea found that robotization moved jobs away from manufacturing into other sectors, but that there was no decrease in overall vacancies.

For all that, the march of the robots will bring big changes to workplaces, too. One supposed example of "bad automation" is self-service checkouts in supermarkets, because they displace human workers. But robots could perform unpleasant work. Checkout staff who retrain to help customers pick items from aisles(传送带)may find that dealing with people in need is more rewarding than spending all day swiping barcodes in front of lasers. In addition, as jobs change, workers should be helped to acquire new skills, including how to work with and manage the robots that will increasingly be their colleagues.

The potential gains from the robot revolution are huge. In Capek's play, the robots revolt(反抗)against their human masters and cause mass unemployment and worse. However, the beginnings of the world's real robots have not matched Capek's assumption. So there is no need to concern about their future.