On June 15, 2012, Robotics Business Review reports that Grishin Robotics, a global investment firm based in New York City, will focus on companies that bring robotics to consumer markets.
The robotics industry now is where the personal computing industry was in the 1980s: ripe for mainstream adoption and poised for massive growth, Grishin says. Technology has advanced to make production of robotics much cheaper now.
The robotics industry has been around for 40 years, said Mr. Grishin, but recently a number of technological innovations have significantly reduced the cost of production. It used to cost anywhere from hundreds of thousands to a $1 million to manufacture your average robot, he said. But progress in smartphones and even electric cars has driven down the price of wireless technology, cameras, processors, memory, and batteries. “Do you know Microsoft Kinect device?” asked Mr. Grishin. “It’s a very cheap scanner and this is very useful in robotics and now it costs only $150.”
Mr. Grishin said he launched Grishin Robotics in New York City because of its proximity to robotics hubs in Boston (MIT) and Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon) as well as its connections to capital markets. “There is no clear leader in robotics right now,” he said, pointing to innovation hubs in Europe as well as South Korea, where corporations like Samsung and government funding in robotics could give it an early edge.
This is one of those relatively obscure stories that provide a look into the future. We are not prepared for this in terms of the structure of our economy. Robotics’ role is to do ever more of the work, which, in the case of a productive capital asset, produces income.
Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
Robotics and other advanced forms of machinery is the reality the Third Industrial Revolution, which is now exponentially developing. Who will and should own this non-human means of production of the products and services that comprise our society? This question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership in a world of machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”