WSJ on 100 years of ‘robot’: “In 2019, 373,000 industrial robots were sold and put into use, according to the International Federation of Robotics, a not-for-profit industry organization that conducts an annual, global robot census based on vendor data. That number has grown about 11% a year since 2014, to a total of 2.7 million industrial robots in use world-wide. Industrial robots—descendants of the Unimate robot arm first installed at a General Motors factory in 1961—are the kind common in manufacturing, performing tasks like welding, painting and assembly. They work hard, but they’re not very smart.”
Santosh Desai on mornings and how they have changed: “It is possible that it is not the mornings that have changed; it is we who have become a new version of our old selves. When we insist that everything in our life must deliver value and must have a reason for existence, we make all parts of our life instrumental, part of some grand, if not entirely well defined plan.”
James Buchanan: “If you are going to spend for one group, you have to spend the same for every group, just like if you tax one group you have to tax everybody. You have to go back to having more general laws, more general taxes and more general spending programs.”
