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Deco Lighting, a leading green lighting technology manufacturer, is planning to deploy Rethink Robotics’ high-performance Sawyer robots to reduce production time with precision sub-assembly on each line. By introducing Sawyer into this process, Deco Lighting hopes to reduce assembly time on its products from about an hour per unit to less than five minutes.

Deco Lighting marks a paradigm shift in the LED lighting industry through optimization in design and manufacturing. With the deployment of Sawyer robots at the start of the assembly line, Deco plans to significantly cut down assembly time in the factory, drastically reduce the risk of human injury and shorten the lead time for customers.

Here's a paradox you don't hear much about: despite a century of creating machines to do our work for us, the proportion of adults in the US with a job has consistently gone up for the past 125 years. Why hasn't human labor become redundant and our skills obsolete? In this talk about the future of work, economist David Autor addresses the question of why there are still so many jobs and comes up with a surprising, hopeful answer.

McKinsey analyzed 2,000 work activities across 800 occupations and found that just 5% of occupations are likely to be become fully automated based on currently demonstrated technologies. However, individual activities in almost every job can be partially automated. Adapting current technologies could allow half of all activities that people are paid for to be automated, equal to almost $16 trillion in wages.

The activities that are most easily automated are physical ones that are predictable and take place in very structured environments, such as manufacturing, as well as data collection and processing. In the U.S. these currently represent 51% of activities in the economy, and account for almost $2.7 trillion wages.