February was a big month for robots. They humbled us in a quiz game, became self-aware, and thumbed a ride to the Space Station.
Lately, I’ve been stuck in a thought loop that sounds like this: The pursuit of operational excellence, and lean manufacturing in particular, will drive humans toward obsolescence in the manufacturing world. Robots will hip-check us out of the equation.
The logic is fairly simple. Operational excellence and lean manufacturing call for the elimination of waste. Waste takes many forms, including excess material or needless processes. Waste can also be a machinist who sneezes when she’s supposed to be guiding a rivet into place. Or a line worker who misses a shift because his daughter has a cold. Or a paint room worker who files for worker’s comp because he inhaled toxic fumes.
Robots don’t sneeze, don’t have kids who get sick, and, like Bill Clinton, they don’t inhale.
If operational excellence truly means eliminating waste, when do we humans fall into the category of waste? You may think this isn’t a question our generation needs to answer, but let me remind you that the future moves slowly only until it’s staring you in the face.
Two weeks ago Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the most advanced trivia buffs the world has put on television, got smoked by a specially programmed IBM computer on Jeopardy!, a game Ken and Brad dominate when pitted against human peers.
After the show, the ever-affable Jennings wrote in a Slate essay, “Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines. ‘Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.”
He may have buzzed in late, but I think Ken’s right on this one.
You may dismiss the Jeopardy!-playing computer as a glorified search engine, able to associate words by brute force but not much more. Well, there’s much more to Watson than that, and many more implications for we humans than just losing a few quiz show slots.
A little farther upstate from IBM’s New York think tanks, scientists at Cornell’s Computational Synthesis Laboratory have created a robot that they say is self-aware. The robot, which resembles a four-legged spider, uses basic information about its component parts to learn about its capabilities as an integrated machine, and then employs trial and error to learn how to move.
According to Hod Lipson, a Cornell roboticist quoted by Scientific American, “The key is for robots to create a model of themselves to figure out what is working and not working in order to adapt.”
Adaptability used to be our thing. We humans could find lots of different ways to perform tasks. That’s what allowed us to conceptualize operational excellence and lean manufacturing in the first place. We could work through all types of obstacles—physical, mental, and procedural. Robots simply did what they were programmed to do. Now suddenly they’re adaptable, too?
While you ponder that, look up in the sky. When the Space Shuttle blasted toward the International Space Station last week on what was slated to be its final mission, it carried a robot called the Robonaut 2, or R2. NASA says R2 will be the Space Station’s first permanent resident. Ron Diftler, Robonaut project manager at the Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, summed it up nicely in a recent Christian Science Monitor article:
“Our goal with Robonaut is to build a robot that approaches the dexterity of a space-suited astronaut. Once we do that, that robot has multiple roles.”
Did you hear that? That’s the sound of the Tang budget shrinking. And it’s also the sound of operational excellence in space.
NASA created the R2 in conjunction with General Motors, which will use the technology here on Earth in its manufacturing facilities. Check out the short video:
It all makes me wonder: Does the ultimate iteration of operational excellence mean a manufacturing world in which humans aren’t obligated to participate? And will that be good or bad for us?
“Robotic technologies like those found in R2 play a key role in GM’s future,” the automaker says in the video. The next slide asks, “What does this mean for you?”
GM meant that to be directed at its customers. But whether GM likes it or not, it’s also an open question to all who work in manufacturing.
What does this mean for you?
4 Comments
(Editor’s note: I’ve moved this comment here from another article on ManagingAutomation.com because it fits this discussion well. -Chris)
Adv213 (unregistered) wrote:
At first seeing robots in movies, we were almost always given the idea that something will go wrong with them. As this idea becomes more and more a possibility we have to base our decision on the positive externalities this decision may have.
A robot wouldn’t have as many flaws as humans might. It’s true they may need fixing once in a while but that’s like our “sick days”. Never will they ask for vacation days or a raise and they all will work in a rhythm producing more than a human manufacturing line may.
The setback though would be loss of jobs, the expense for making them and getting them fixed whenever needed. Along with this, programming a robot to deal with any sort of problem and making them become adaptable may take a very long time and there’s also a chance it may never happen.
It is true robots would help the industry but they would also hurt it. It is hard to see their exact impact but I believe that we should use them in situations in jobs where human lives may be at risk. This would keep the unemployment rate steady and we would be saving potential lost lives.
Have you guys even read “The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era” by Jeremy Rifkin ?
We don’t know when it will happen, but we know that little by little robots and computers will take over many of the tasks we currently perform.
Society will have to find new ways to distribute wealth in a world where our value as a person does not depend solely on what we can “produce”, but on the well being we bring to other individuals and to our community.
Currently and for the next 10-20 years or so there are still too many obstacles to overcome in order for robots to completely replace humans in manufacturing and even with todays advances it could take much longer then that. Complex tasks that require manual dexterity, vision and cognitive reasoning require a human. The advances being made in the lab in terms of power sources “batteries”, touch sensing technology, artificial intelligence and machine vision are truly remarkable, however humans are still the most diverse in terms of capabilities. Once we get to the point where machines have the capability to become self aware, see, touch, and problem solve the big question is do we want to empower the machines to that point? I know the industrial robots I work with everyday are much stronger and faster then any human, having one with a bad attitude could be a real problem!! I hope much thought is given to just how much self awareness we allow especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Nano Robotics, we need to consider the potential for the good we can receive from these developments, but also to what extent could things go wrong if this technology fell into the wrong hands or decided to start making decisions for its own purposes and not that of humans.
Once again, the real world begins to catch up with the science fiction from 50 years ago that I misspent my youth reading
“The Midas Plague” (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the “poor” are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots’ extravagant production, so that the “rich” can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage. Morey eventually hits on the idea of having the robots help him to consume his quotas. At first he fears punishment when he is discovered, but instead the Ration Board quickly implements his idea across the world.
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