UNEMPLOYMENT DOWN: Minorities and teenagers hardest hit.

UPDATE: Um, hardest hit by the fall in unemployment. Some people didn’t get it. But Bill Hobbs has some additional perspective.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, the email keeps coming. Unemployment is down most among them, which is good. Sorry I was being too cute, I guess.

On a related topic, a reader who’d rather I not use his name emails:

Just finished a month in Japan evaluating innovation and competiveness for my company.. Given your recent TCS column on robots, I thought you’d find it interesting how far the concept of “dark factories” has gone in Japan. One of the companies (highly profitable) I visited has a manufacturing plant that can run two months without stopping..no big deal, huh?

Well, the big deal is that this factory is solely robots manufacturing other robots, to the tune of about 50-60/day, big industrial robots too. There isn’t a human around for 70 straight days (hence the term “dark factory”..they don’t need light to operate). I’ve got 14 years in Supply Chain and Manufuacturing, but I wasn’t prepared for how far machine vision and “fuzzy logic” has already taken us. The robots did everything themselves..there was no artifical set-up of the components or stockroooms.

True, it is a bit of a showpiece, but even I got this eerie Terminator/Matrix feeling watching what I guess is essentially robot reproduction.

Interesting. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords, er, employees.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Augh! They’re everywhere!