Heading into the 20th century, America was a predominantly rural country. Roughly 40% of the nation’s labor force toiled on farms alongside 22 million work animals. One hundred years later, fewer than 2% of U.S. workers are employed on farms, and those beasts of burden have been replaced by 5 million gas-powered tractors. Of course, the cause of this transformation was a technological revolution that lured workers from farms to more lucrative employment in urban areas. Simultaneously, farming became more efficient and needed less labor to produce the same amount of food. The U.S. manufacturing sector has been going through a similar transformation over the past 70 years. Manufacturing employment peaked at nearly 40% of the non-farm workforce during World War II and has since fallen to roughly 9% of the working population, according to data from the Labor Department. The total number of manufacturing jobs has been more or less steadily decreasing since the late 1970s. (MORE: Double Robotics Lets You Turn Your iPad into a Telepresence Robot) But recently, something strange has been happening. In the past two years, manufacturing employment has actually increased by roughly half a million. The media has dubbed this new trend “reshoring,” whereby rising wages in the developing world, combined with escalating energy costs has made it more efficient in many cases for companies to make products in the U.S. that will ultimately be sold here. Meanwhile there are others who think that robotics can help America make a more permanent play for manufacturing jobs. This may be a bit counterintuitive. After all, as robotics becomes more cost-effective, won’t machines do more of the work that humans are currently doing and therefore take those jobs? Not necessarily, according to Rodney Brooks, co-founder of Rethink Robots, a Boston-based robot manufacture. Rethink is releasing a new manufacturing robot called “Baxter,” which is equipped with sophisticated software that can help the machine actually learn tasks, recognize different objects and react intelligently to force. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rjPFqkFyrOY] Baxter is designed to help manufacturers automate tasks inside their factories so that human workers are free … Continue reading Can Robots Bring Manufacturing Jobs Back to the U.S.?