Hacker News Reader

Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I also read about how American car factories used super sophisticated and expensive computer system back in the 80-90s only to realize that the Japanese accomplished the same with just people and some cleverly placed sticker symbols.

I think underlying a lot of this is a disdain in America for blue collar workers. People at the top thing of them as dumb monkeys and that there is nothing to what they do. Hence the falsely assume a computer or robot can do the job just as well.

The Japanese showed that by utilizing what humans are actually got at you get better productivity. Using humans the same way as robots is a very bad way of utilizing the flexibility inherent in a human.

View on HN

> I think underlying a lot of this is a disdain in America for blue collar workers.

It could simply be that everybody knows that blue collar job are eventually going to disappear. You don't want to build your latest factory using technology that will make you obsolete in a few years.

Obviously we were not quite there yet in the 80's/90's. Otherwise you would be reading the opposite story on how Japanese Car Factories failed because they used human instead of machine like in the US. Actually you can replace "Japanese Car Factories" in the previous sentence with a lot of thing that are actually true today.

Now, about Tesla, there is some relevance. They are still building car that are very much like regular cars and other manufacturer are building their own factories regularly for new platform/model, not held back by legacy issues. So it does indeed seem that Tesla is at an experience disadvantage.

I guess what happens is that this is Tesla trying to leverage a manufacturing bet on top of its successful "electric car" bet. You can see that on how harshly they lashed at journalists talking about their manufacturing safety, and draw some parallel with the initial review of the model s ( compared to today where you can make a 100 million view video bad mouthing about their car and Musk would probably not even be notified )

Tesla real goal is to find a manufacturing process that can get them producing car 1 order or 2 order of magnitude faster than the competition (and you know such a process cannot include human). They want to be the market leader by volume on every single class of electric vehicle in 10 years.

> everybody knows that blue collar job are eventually going to disappear

Everybody does not know that. Indeed, a lot of people know the opposite. Including Toyota, who went from a small-time player in post-war Japan to the world's largest car company based on the belief those jobs weren't going anywhere.

How is just assuming that without evidence not disdain for blue collar workers?

> Tesla real goal is to find a manufacturing process that can get them producing car 1 order or 2 order of magnitude faster than the competition (and you know such a process cannot include human).

I'm not sure this is true, and if it is, I don't think it's a particularly smart goal. Toyota spends ~30 worker-hours on building a car. Getting that down to 3 doesn't do much to reduce costs, and getting them down to 0.3 does way less.

To make that happen, Tesla will have to invest a lot of money in less flexible, less repurposable hardware and software. This a) doesn't save money in the short term, b) can introduce significant lags (because they're spending time up front to save time later, and also because they've increased delay risk), and c) may lock them in to suboptimal techniques in conditions where human workers could keep improving.

> How is just assuming that without evidence not disdain for blue collar workers?

In order for that to be disdain, you need to associate people identity with their job.

I'm not a millennial, but I'm still young enough that the concept of job as identity does not fit the social reality of the people I know. They have moved between position enough that they cannot just be summarised by their present occupations.

So this is not disdain for the people, but for the jobs. And not only those jobs, but all the jobs, including mine. I want Star Trek for my great-great-grand-children, not grinding at work till they drop.

> I'm not sure this is true, and if it is, I don't think it's a particularly smart goal. Toyota spends ~30 worker-hours on building a car. Getting that down to 3 doesn't do much to reduce costs, and getting them down to 0.3 does way less.

I don't know what Tesla is doing, but what you say is correct, there is no gain to make by replacing a human by a robot if the robot is not providing massive economies somewhere. I personally don't think that hate of blue collar worker is really that valuable to Tesla, so I'm thinking more of massive throughput increase. Since it appears that Tesla want to spread in every market segment, being able to build a "10x" production line would allow them to do it at a fraction of the time of their competitor.

Note that I'm not suggesting that Tesla is going to make it, or that the technology is ready. Musk and Tesla investors do.

Another point which one always has to keep in mind with Musk. Maybe that's also related to SpaceX. If humanity has a future in space, it needs to be able to build stuff with as little human as possible.

edit: I just noticed that I missed the proof. Like the majority of the people on HN, I'm in the business of automating other people job away. I have friends working in the engineering field and I have yet to hear a story about some new tech requiring more human being than before. It is the same as white collar work: next release will require less people or less qualified people.

I was enlightened by the link above to NUMMI. Here is a transcript of that video: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/transcript You have seen the same advice from Paul Graham: "Do things that don't scale", http://paulgraham.com/ds.html. In the case of NUMMI, the emphasis was changed from quantity to quality. It didn't mean automation, it meant listening to suggestions from the workers. The worker adopted the change because it meant a change from industrial mayhem to a fulfilling work experience. The changes at that plant have (too) slowly trickled through the US car industry, as the managers involved moved around the GM organisation, finally giving the US car industry the high quality we see today. Tesla is similarly learning that, rather than automation being the magic answer, it's the one-off things that humans can do by coordinating that will bring costs down and quality and production up.

The next release usually requires fewer but higher skilled people. This has been happening for the last 10,000 years.

> It could simply be that everybody knows that blue collar job are eventually going to disappear. You don't want to build your latest factory using technology that will make you obsolete in a few years.

Plumbers are not going to disappear. There is heaps of repair work that won't disappear.

But beyond repair, look at construction. There are all sorts of claims about how 3D printing and full automation of house construction is coming, but go and look at almost any construction site you see.

(edit: Innovation is hard with construction in part because people want things that will definitely last 50 years. Fail fast is great on a web app, but what about failure in 10 years because 3D printed concrete doesn't work correctly in your location? How about brick laying robots cement failing in 15 years when the company is insolvent? Are you up for the risk? )

Power tools introduced in the 1950s or earlier have made a huge difference, but these jobs do not appear to be disappearing.

In Australia I've heard of teachers and people who can write mean python code quitting to become builders.

People with power tools are productive and very flexible. We're a long way off from a machine that can attach a deck to a house and make a hole in a wall for a window.

This is circular reasoning. Blue collar jobs will only disappear if no-one builds factories using them, because everyone knows these jobs will disappear.

> you know such a process cannot include human

Sounds like you're just assuming this is true, because "more tech is always better/faster/etc". I'm not so sure this is correct.

Knowing what will happen eventually isn't always as useful as most people think, even if that belief turns out to be true. The transition can take decades or centuries. And in the long term, as Keynes used to say, we're all dead anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com