Industrial robots are high-quality, productive workers; humans can’t match their output.  Because of these steel-collar workers and their peerless output—around the clock if necessary!—productivity gets a boast. Factory owners like the increase in productivity, low price and ROI of these workers, so they are buying ever more. Such mass productivity affects GDP. Georg Graetz of Uppsala University and Guy Michaels of the London School of Economics in their Robots at Work “found that, on average…the increasing use of industrial robots over the time period raised the annual growth of GDP by 0.37%. They compared this substantial growth to the boosts in productivity that occurred at the turn of the 20th century from steam technology.” The comparison was near identical.

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