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Excerpt of an article by Megan Ray Nichols To read more, visit  Thomasnet "According to recent studies, approximately 2.6 million industrial robots will be active by 2019 — or one million more units than just a few short years ago. It's a record-setting pace that yields mixed reactions from the public. While some are skeptical of the role of robots in the future workplace, others are more than willing to embrace industrial robots and all the opportunities they provide in Industry 4.0. Big data is just as critical to Industry 4.0 as industrial robots. Many of these next-gen, AI-powered machines utilize advanced data sets to monitor day-to-day operations, provide recommendations, and even learn from their mistakes. Robots are especially popular in predictive maintenance. By monitoring the condition of production hardware and comparing it to recent trends, industry benchmarks, and manufacturers’ specifications, automated robots diagnose machines before they fail. This fun...

From eMarketer : Technology may be changing the customer experience, but many consumers still want a human interaction, even as tech continues to improve. That's what PwC found when it surveyed 4,000 US internet users ages 13 and older, as well as 11,000 internet users ages 18 and older in countries including Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico and the UK. More than eight in 10 US respondents said that even as technology improves, they will want to interact with a real person. And that sentiment was nearly the same across the other countries polled—although people in China, Brazil and Japan were less likely to agree.

From the New York Times : Salad bars are magnets for bacteria and viruses. Even if the sprouts and ranch dressing aren’t tainted, the serving utensils may be. The Silicon Valley start-up Chowbotics has devised what it says is a partial solution. Its device, which it calls Sally the Salad Robot, is aimed at reducing the risk of food-borne illness by assembling salads out of pre-cut vegetables stored in refrigerated canisters. Diners use a touch screen to place their orders, choosing from a menu of recipes or designing their own salads. The machine calculates the number of calories per salad and drops the veggies into a bowl in less than a minute. There is less human contact with the food. But as a growing number of food- and drink-slinging robots have begun interacting with diners in the San Francisco Bay Area, Deepak Sekar, the device’s inventor and the founder and chief executive of Chowbotics, has faced questions about whether his machine will put people out of work. He deni...

From LinkedIn : Robots are going to take our jobs, they say. I say, "Only if that's what we ask them to do!" Technology is the solution to human problems, and we won't run out of work till we run out of problems. Entrepreneurs need to set their sights on how we can use big data, sensors, and AI to create amazing human experiences and the economy of the future, making us all richer in the same way the tools of the first industrial revolution did. Yes, technology can eliminate labor and make things cheaper, but at its best, we use it to do things that were previously unimaginable! What is our poverty of imagination? What are the entrepreneurial leaps that will allow us to use the technology of today to build a better future, not just a more efficient one? Great entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are using technology to do more, not just to do the same thing more cheaply. That is the secret both to business success and to making the world more prosperous.