This Is Robotics: Radio News Tom Green

Has Code Writing Capitulated To GenAI?
What exactly just took place, and why?
Suddenly this March, we all woke up one morning to find code fighting for its life. Why so fast? Why so suddenly? Why so completely? Unexpectedly and quietly code is disappearing. Why is that? Is AI’s argument that convincing? Sure seems that way. It was a little like the Berlin Wall: imposingly there for a few decades, then suddenly gone and forgotten.

We’ll take a look at what happened to code, and what’s next for robotics. Don’t despair. The remedy is good!

In early 2023, U.S. tech industries cut more than 190,000 employees from the workforce. Tens of thousands were coders. Tens of thousands of individuals who spent billions of dollars to learn how to code, so that they could get a “good” job.

"The new philosophy calls all into doubt," wrote the poet John Donne over 400 years ago. Indeed, GenAI's prompt engineering has done just that.

Prompt engineering in AI is the process of designing and refining prompts—questions or instructions—which are at the heart of some of the most advanced AI applications…and growing.

Join us as experts Andrew Ng, Stephen Wolfram, and Michael Welsh walk us through the new world of GenAI and the unparalleled opportunities that await for those who don’t wait.
See also:
Did AI Just Free Humanity from Code?
What About You? A Primer to Combat GenAI Anxiety
Experts on AI & Robot Convergence for 2040 

Hi folks, welcome to This Is Robotics for February 2024, Episode #28. I’m Tom Green, your host and companion as we travel together through the big, wide world of modern robotics…and now, robotics is getting even better as it converges with artificial intelligence.
Ah, the age of smart robots is upon us.


Thanks again for making This Is Robotics the #1 robotics news podcast worldwide…for two years running. 


We did some investigative journalism this month to find out why…and we were surprised at what we found. You will be as well. An article series on the topic we published in Asian Robotics Review titled Why So Little Robot Automation in America? got over 10,000 hits. Our email response from our readership attested to the fact that we were not the only ones surprised by our findings. It’s accompanied by a news report from CBS which also covered the strange state of robotics in the U.S.


Then we’ll dip off into What’s New in Robotics? What’s New in Robotics? is the blog we write in partnership with Robotiq. 


From the blog, we present here at This Is Robotics three FIRST-EVERS in robotics. We love what people have been doing with robots and cobots lately.  Simply amazing!


Two of them hail from Korea: Hyundai’s micro-factory in Singapore; and a huge breakthrough by Koreans in teaching robots to respond to the human voice. Then we nip over to Argonne Laboratories to see cobots in a first-ever making medical radioisotopes. 


We close out the podcast with what is the biggest story in robotics for the foreseeable future: Can Robots Save East Asia?


China, Korea, & Japan are suffering from a new pandemic: Too Few Workers, Too Many Elderly, and Too Little Automation.


China, Korea, and Japan are plagued with the very same “too few, too many, and too little” affliction simultaneously.


The clock is ticking on China, Korea, and Japan. The five years 2025 to 2030 will be critical. Each country has a plan. What is each doing…and can each plan work?


We have been following this mega-story since 2023. Along with an in-depth article series on the subject in Asian Robotics Review, we brought the story into this month’s podcast as well. We’ll show you what we know. 


As always, look in the show notes for all the links to the online articles. 


Thanks for coming. We appreciate your attention and loyalty.

Hi folks, welcome to This Is Robotics, and our last episode for 2023. Next up a wild and woolly 2024. We are already planning our January show. It’s forecast to be a fabulous for robotics, logistics and automation in general. 
Plus, it’s also the Year of the Dragon (2024)


The dragon, one of the luckiest and most powerful symbols offering prosperity, and good fortune throughout 2024. It is the perfect time for rejuvenated beginnings and setting the foundation for long-term success.


THE STATS ARE IN FOR 2023! 


Our podcast host just gave us the best-ever Christmas present from our listeners:

Once again, we are #1 worldwide for a robotics news podcast.
Across 12 time zones and 63 countries, This Is Robotics podcast was downloaded by over 3,000 fans per week!
Yearly, over 150,000 touchpoints with our listeners.


Every hour of every day 18 pairs of ears somewhere in the world seek us out for the very best news in robotics. Thank you so very much!


This closing episode for 2022, we highlight robots converging with artificial intelligence…in laboratories. Already making good headway, we look closely at what’s going on.


We’ll look at one fascinating woman’s brilliant insight on how best to discover a cure for our most intractable diseases, especially those without cures in neuroscience like ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. 


How research is broken and how she’ll fix it. Hmmm, interesting. Her name, Alice Zhang, founder and CEO of Verge Genomics, and she just got $134 million to realize her brilliant insight.


We catch up with her at a lecture at Stanford where she explains it all.


Then we take a stab at answering a question we get all the time from our listening audience: How exactly do robots and AI work together in a laboratory to come up with miraculous discoveries as of late? 


We go to a lab in Liverpool UK where Andy Cooper explains it all.


Then, how are all these elements taking over the industry? And giving it a name like Pharma 4.0? We present a concise, little episode excerpt that explains it all.


Wow, that’s a lot of “explaining it all” but it’s all cool stuff.


We close out our show with one of our most favorite and memorable episode excerpts, one that we get a large call to repeat throughout the year. 


But, it just so happens to be a perfect Christmas story, so we retell it every December: It’s a story about China’s supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, without whom China would have no middle class or be the giant in robotics it is today. 


We call it China’s Christmas Miracle. A more heartwarming tale you can’t find anywhere.
SHOW NOTES ADDENDUM
Please see the show notes for more on the incurable disease that is ALS, including one very sad diary from a 31-year-old woman just diagnosed with ALS.


ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.


Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), formerly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a neurological disorder that affects motor neurons, the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement and breathing.

 As motor neurons degenerate and die, they stop sending messages to the muscles, which causes the muscles to weaken, start to twitch (fasciculations), and waste away (atrophy). 

ALS is progressive. Eventually, in people with ALS, the brain loses its ability to initiate and control voluntary movements such as walking, talking, chewing and other functions, as well as breathing. 

Welcome everyone to This Is Robotics, episode #26 for November, 2023.
Oh, and BTW: Thanks for making us the #1 Global Robotics News Podcast for TWO YEARS IN A ROW. I’m Tom Green, your guide and companion into the wide, wonderful world of robotics. Welcome.
It’s that time of year when we take a look at Time Magazine’s picks for its Global Top Inventions for the year. This year, 2023, there are 200 selections in 21 different categories. 
Robotics, as usual, has its very own category, category #18, but my oh my, robotics, now with its new partnership in convergence with AI, has it ever seeped its way into nearly every other category. 
We’ll take a look at Time’s picks, plus we’ll pull one out and showcase it. It’s an amazing 5-year-old developer called Shift Robotics, from Pittsburgh. Shift has taken robotics, AI, and automation and brought them into the shoe business. Footwear!
What caught my eye was its founder, Xunjie Zhang, and his 3-minute description of the company’s design process, the "ask it, research it, plan it, create it, test it, and improve it" of finding a problem and coming up with a solution. Beautifully clear thinking and execution. Then we’ll see what Wired’s Brent Rose thinks about the company during his visit.
Following that is our annual Homage to Pittsburgh. A segment that we run every Thanksgiving. The heartwarming story of Pittsburgh’s fall and rise on the wings of robotics, after 29 steel companies filed for bankruptcy and left the city in tatters. 
I usually do a preamble to our Homage to Pittsburgh segment, but this year we have a contributor providing us with one. Florian Pestoni, well-known in the robotics biz as co-founder and CEO of InOrbit, a cloud robotics platform, who is also a pizza fanatic and a great admirer of Pittsburgh. He just made a trip to Pittsburgh and jotted down his thoughts. We’ll share them with you.
Then we’ll take a look at our newest website: Robo AI News where we aggregate and curate the best in the convergence of robotics with AI; and we’ll look to you guys to Get On Our Wall at Robo AI News. We’ll show you how. It’s simple but powerful. Robo AI News is dedicated to the most interesting man in the world: Garry Mathiason: The Man Who Knew Way Before! More on Garry a bit later in the show.
Okay, let’s get on with the news.

Hi folks. And welcome.
Question: Is it okay with everyone if we talk about 2024? 
I know it’s still October of 2023, but so much is at the ready for 2024 now that it seems a shame not to give the upcoming new year some mega attention.
Okay, deal. Let’s do it.
Welcome again to This Is Robotics, episode #25, October of 2023. I’m Tom Green, your host and companion as we take a robotics look forward at the upcoming New Year of 2024.
The word in the air and on the streets for 2024 is LOGISTICS. Yes, warehouses large and small, especially the small ones, DCs, and last-mile micro-warehouses have been in the news lately. 
And if you go back a few months, all the way to Walmart’s big meeting, big things have been brewing for a while.
So, without more ado, Happy New Year 2024.
From the Walmart shareholders meeting back in May, it was announced that Walmart was going all-in for robots and automation for 42 distribution centers in the U.S. and Canada. 
The lucky vendor is Symbotic, who Walmart has been working with for 4 years.
That news got the juices flowing because a few months later SoftBank and the aforementioned Symbotic agreed to partner for a new offering called GreenBox to sell WaaS…Warehouse as a Service.
That was followed by SoftBank and its secretive Project R squirreling around for even more of this purported new $500 billion market.
Which was followed by old friend Amazon, rolling out its new automation giant, Sequoia.
Then, halfway around the world, India for 2024 will use logistics during the build-out of Grade A warehouses, as well as to use logistics for nation-building for the country as a whole. 
In fact, the Asian Century that was last seen in China, is on the move away from East Asia and about to take up residence in India. As the late Swedish scientist and demographer Hans Rosling said: “In the past, economic growth was driving demographics, and now it's the other way around.” Demographics is driving economic growth. And nowhere is that more in evidence than in India. India, with over 36,000 warehouses, is going to have a very interesting 2024.
Then we have an announcement to make. This Is Robotics and its parent company Asian Robotics Review, have a new birth announcement to make. Our family this month is growing bigger. We are launching our newest website Robo AI News.com (roboainews.com), which will specialize in rounding up, sorting through, and artfully displaying the best news on robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). 
News that specifically heralds the convergence of robotics and AI…and our call to action for everyone in robotics with the ability to contribute to Get On Our Wall. Send us your best in the ongoing robotics/AI convergence and we’ll publish it…and promote it and you throughout our family of online publications. Here again is the link. Take a peek: Robo AI News.

The Asian Century: Emphasis, India

Hi everyone and welcome to This Is Robotics, Episode 24. Thanks for joining us. I’m Tom Green your guide and companion for today’s journey into our global robotics news podcast.
Our first story explores the reasons for Why Is There So Little Automation in America?
As sci-fi writer William Gibson once remarked:  “The future is already here but it’s not evenly distributed.” Well, much the same can be said for automation in America. 
Why is it that only 5 out of 50 U.S. states get 77% of all industrial robots? Those states are Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Kansas. While the remaining 45 states average 175 industrial robots apiece. 
 Those are definitely places that are "underautomated". Three recent reports explain why, and the whys are not good for America.
The reports also answer the question: Do robots take jobs? Yes, they do! For every one robot deployed in this 5-state region, 3.3 jobs are lost. The reports also tell us what happens to the health of those individuals who lose their jobs to an industrial robot. It can be unsurprisingly grim.

Death by Robots!
Facts: Yes, Robots Take Jobs and Lower Wages
This five-state region could well become a test zone—a laboratory, if you will—for America’s future in dealing with people, robots, artificial intelligence, job loss, retraining and reskilling. Perfect things in these 5 Robo Hubs, and then spread them out to the rest of the country.
We’ve been covering Korea’s robot $177 billion-dollar breakout all this year. See the links for Korea’s Major Growth Spurt in 2023 in our show notes. 
 Everything “robot” in Korea is getting max attention these days from the government, industry, and academia. Doosan is no exception. It’s going public and its cobots have an excellent shot at pushing themselves into being #1 worldwide. We take a look at Doosan and its upcoming IPO. 
And while we’re on the subject of cobots, what’s STILL up with them and their weaker-than-tepid sales? Arguably the most important technical advance in robotics in the last 50 years has got a problem: SALES! And it’s been a problem for a decade. We’ve got an answer or two as to why. Join us and see if you agree. 
As an added bonus, we are reprising in this podcast our episode clip and PDF download titled: The Problem with Cobots. It offers a nice perspective on cobots going forward and how Doosan could take the lead.
With Doosan’s new cobot venture, we may finally see cobot sales finally hit the mega-numbers that forecasters have been predicting for cobots for years.
 And finally, Agility Robotics is feeling very fertile these days and its new humanoid Digit is about to multiply. Join us for Agility’s shot at assembly-line humanoids. Maybe as many as 10,000 someday soon striding out soon out of the world’s first humanoid robot factory. A 70,000-square-foot-factory that Agility calls its RoboFab.

REPRISE: The Problem with Cobots