TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Automation of more and more tasks is coming. Here’s one more example:

Baxter, the first product of Rethink Robotics, an ambitious start-up company in a revived manufacturing district here, is a significant bet that robots in the future will work directly with humans in the workplace.

That is a marked shift from today’s machines, which are kept safely isolated from humans, either inside glass cages or behind laser-controlled “light curtains,” because they move with Terminator-like speed and accuracy and could flatten any human they encountered.

Better to start thinking through how this new age’s economy is going to work now than later.