The world should welcome the rise of the robots

THE WORD “robot” was coined in 1920 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek. In “R.U.R.” (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”) Capek imagined artificial, fully functional servants. For most of their history, however, robots have been dumb, inelegant mechanical devices sitting out of sight in factories.

Things are starting to change, however. Robots have benefited from rapid innovations in smartphones, which brought cheap cameras and sensors, fast wireless communications and powerful, smaller computer chips. More recent advances in machine learning have added software to make robots better informed about their surroundings and equipped them to make wiser decisions. Robots are leaving carefully managed industrial settings for everyday life and, in the coming years, will increasingly work in supermarkets, clinics, social care and much more.

They could not be coming at a better time. Many industries are facing a shortage of labour—the demand for workers has recovered much faster than expected from the pandemic and some people have left the workforce, particularly in America. Warehousing has grown rapidly thanks to the e-commerce boom. Robots are now indispensable, picking items off shelves and...