Up to 20 million manufacturing jobs could be lost to robots by 2030, according to a new report by Oxford Economics. The study found that robots will lead to twice as many manufacturing job losses in low-skill areas, thereby aggravating income inequality. The report, "How Robots Change the World", estimates that each new industrial robot eliminates 1.6 manufacturing jobs on average, and calls on governments to prepare with policies including better training and welfare programs, and a universal basic income. It suggests that in Australia, South Australia is most vulnerable to the future robot rollout. The state is Australia's most manufacturing intensive but has the slowest-growing economy and low levels of manufacturing productivity, the report argued.

Engineers at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre's Factory 2050 in Sheffield, UK are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to learn what machine utilization looks like on the workshop floor. The aim is to create a demonstrator to show just how accessible Industry 4.0 technologies are, and how they can potentially revolutionize shop-floor productivity. The demonstrator will be the first created under an emerging AI strategy being produced at Factory 2050, which seeks to harness the innovative work being done with AI and machine learning techniques across the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and provide real use-cases for these techniques in industrial environments. "Using edge computing devices retrofitted to CNC machines, we have collected power consumption data during the production of automotive suspension components," said Rikki Coles, AI Project Engineer for the AMRC's Integrated Manufacturing Group at Factory 2050. "It isn't a complicated parameter to measure on a CNC machine, but using AI and machine learning, we can actually do a lot with such simple data."