It's interesting that Europe, with its (in-)famously stricter labor laws, has a higher robot ratio than the US. I would have thought that companies in the US would be able to fire workers much more easily to replace them with robots, and yet this doesn't appear to be the case.

I find that very logical - in countries where employees are expensive to hire and to let go, buying robots is a easy strategy to cut costs. Given that you have to train a new employee with uncertain success, getting a robot with a limited but constant output will seem a safer bet.

I'm sure that's a part of it, but a bigger reason is probably just that the US has a very large number of manufacturers and most of them are too small to afford the robots this survey is discussing.

I've known many small job shops turning out thousands of parts a day with (automated, but not robotic) WW II surplus equipment; in some cases with the stenciled words "Property of War Department" still visible on the cabinet! Machine tools have lifetimes measured in human generations. There are also many small manufacturers that do everything by hand -- remember that most US small businesses are run part time -- a quick look at my bookmarks shows URLs of a few tiny businesses making just a few thousand units of their product a year.

Many of the manufacturing jobs in the US are unionized. The unions can make it more difficult to fire people.

Honest question: how do they count robots ? I mean, where does one end and the other one start... unless we are talking about humanoid robots of course.

Since they put the numbers in relation to manufacturing workers they surly only count robots used for manufacturing, not Roombas.

But then the problems start: Say you have two robot arms, one to hold a part up, the other to weld, are those two arms two robots or one? Is a CNC machine a robot? And so on.

Those differences don’t matter so much if they managed to get their definition of robot somewhat right (the amount of CNC machines is probably highly correlated with the number of [other?] robots, so it doesn’t really matter whether CNC machines are included or not) and if they counted consistently. You probably shouldn’t read too much into the worker:robot ratio. (Oh look, all Japan needs is a 35-fold increase in the number of robots, then they won’t need any workers anymore …)

This of course measures industrial robots per 10k workers, so it is woefully inadequate as it does not take into account robot dogs.

Random: Iceland is part of Europe, not the Americas.

So in a Terminator-like situation, the best bet would apparently be to head for Africa.

I can't wait for the Creepy Robot Armageddon. I'm tracking the situation at http://creepyrobots.tumblr.com/

Italy's surprisingly high on that list, if you think about the stereotype of the country. If you know the reality, that there are a lot of interesting things going on in industry here, the numbers make sense.

Italy's economy is roughly the same size as California's - hardly a third world country.

A lot of very desirable things are manufactured in Italy :-)

I wish they had China on here, even though it's probably like 0.5.

How is the world average higher than any continent except Europe?

Seems to be wrong. You get an average of about 26 (assuming 4.2 billion people in Asia, 1 in Africa, 0.9 in the Americas and 0.7 in Europe).

– edit: no, it could be right. It’s the number of robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, which is not the same as just population. If there are massive amounts of manufacturing workers in Europe and only a few in Africa the average could still be right.

Not quite that massive. With 3 degrees of freedom it's impossible to say for precise (see simpson's paradox), but according to the numbers,

  europe's industrial robots = americas's*0.09 + asia-pacific's*0.51 + africa's*41.66
  europe's manufacturing workers = americas's*0.06 + asia-pacific's*0.28 + africa's*1.67
  africa's manufacturing workers = europe's*0.60 - americas's*0.03 - asia-pacific's*0.17

why america sucks when it comes to robots?

Robots are expensive to acquire and to run. Unless you're in the kind of manufacturing where robots are useful (either very heavy industry or very large volume), there's probably no net benefit.

OTOH, used robots are cheap. e.g, http://bit.ly/b5Fsgu but if you don't have the required knowledge to repair, service and program them, then the upkeep will kill you.

Robots are only useful in certain industries, and these industries don't dominate US manufacturing the way they do in the robot-heavy countries.

For instance, cars are built largely by robots, but aeroplanes largely aren't. Japan builds a lot of cars and no(?) aeroplanes, while the US builds a lot of cars and a lot of aeroplanes.

Robots are used for manufacturing. The US hasn't been doing a whole lot of manufacturing recently, so it has less use for robots.

The US is probably doing more manufacturing now than at any time ever (don't have a cite, but it's easy to find figures online). It's just not visible because we don't manufacture much in the way of consumer products. But there are many, many companies building and selling stuff. I'd say that most of the businesses in the industrial park where I work are small and medium manufacturers. I happen to work for a very large manufacturer, but you'd never know it to look at our building: looks like any other office building except for the semis at the loading dock.

The US is still the world's largest manufacturer, by a hair:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_country_has_the_largest_manuf...

The graph is per-10k manufacturing workers.

I'd say it's due to strong unions in the US.