In freestyle chess and in factories alike, carbon and silicon make for a great combination–it’s win-win. But in the long run (and perhaps not even too long from now), if humans or robots are going to be ejected from the workforce, which is more likely to go? From Matt McFarland at the Washington Post, a report about YuMi, your new coworker:

YuMi was designed to require about the same amount of space as a human worker, so it can easily slide into roles alongside humans in factories. YuMi is safe enough that ABB chief executive Ulrich Spiesshofer encouraged German chancellor Angela Merkel to put her finger in YuMi’s grip at an event Monday.

These companies see a huge opportunity in manufacturing to grow their businesses. A Boston Consulting Group report from earlier this year found that only 10 percent of manufacturing tasks are automated.

They say they have strong interest from China’s massive manufacturing sector. One of Rethink Robotics’ clients in China loses 25 percent of its workforce a month. That churn rate requires it to constantly retain workers, which hampers its efficiency.

“We will get to a point in time, whether it’s five years from now or 10 year from now, where you will not be a successful manufacturer if you do not have collaborative robots in your environment,” said Jim Lawton, chief product and marketing officer at Rethink Robotics. “They allow you to do things in fundamentally different and better ways.” …

The robotic elephant in the room is this: What happens to employment? Won’t jobs be swept away by the tide of automation?

“If you look at the countries with the highest level of robotization and automation, these are the countries with the lowest unemployment rates in the world,” Spiesshofer said. “Germany, Japan and South Korea have the highest robotization and the lowest unemployment rates. So for me, a smart application of a robot is a job security measure, it’s a job creation machine, if you do it right. The combination between human beings and robots to add additional jobs rather than destroy them.”•