'Gods' Make Comeback at Toyota as Humans Steal Jobs From Robots
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Experience in manipulating materials, and doing it manually, is a valuable thing. Toyota isn't going to start replacing robots with humans, but the humans need an in depth understanding of what the robots are doing, so they can then improve what the robots are doing. The best way to learn what the robots are doing is to do it: get in there and watch how the metal flows, how it reacts to heat and so on.
This has the potential to be an engineer's utopia. Presumably the valuable thing isn't what the "gods" make (the robots make the stuff that sells for money), but what they learn during the making process. Thus the "gods" are free to work on things that won't immediately sell. Imagine a job where the brief was "make whatever you like, just be sure to learn a lot while you do it". It sounds like Toyota is rediscovering the golden era of the Industrial Lab (Bell, IBM, ... ).
The "Gods" that you nurture will stay with you for perpetuity (or retirement) under these conditions.
disclosure: I was a researcher at one of the Group companies.
" If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows."
I have seen one particularly amusing quote where Plato basically says that he would never write down philosophy. But I forget the exact wording and I can't find the quote now.
[1] http://www.leftlanenews.com/toyota-assembly-line-robots-repl...
If you could share guidelines of how you determine blogspam would be helpful, as I regarded these guys as a credible car-related news source.
Edit: To clarify, I view this site as a minor competitor to something like Edmunds or KBB (for their new car stuff, not the used pricing book).
Many tech sites consist of nothing but such short summary articles lifted from elsewhere. When a lot of those get submitted to HN, we ban the site. But I didn't ban leftlanenews.com—just changed the url of this one story. If other articles on that site are original, substantive content, you're still welcome to post them here.
As for leftlanenews.com, their original content is so heavily focused on car news that I doubt much of it will be good HN content.
When you tinker with something you see why it works, how it might work better, etc. Sometimes a software architect needs to dig into the code. Sometimes a mechanical engineer just needs to work with the parts. This has the added benefit of putting the mind in a relaxed state where creativity tends to occur. I know there are studies along these lines, too, but I'm not great at tracking down or validating nuero/psych studies.
I have no idea if the benefits I mentioned the intended result, but I think it's interesting. It may or may not be more beneficial to have people repair broken things, solve mechanical problems, or create non-standard parts from scratch to see what happens.
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It relates tangentially to my struggles with Ubuntu and modern automated configuration tools .. that is, one gets the general feeling that a whole lot of it is designed and implemented by folks who didn't ever really master doing it by hand making the increasing layers of abstraction more and more shaky.
...or maybe I'm just old and grumpy.
[0] http://www.themathlab.com/writings/short%20stories/feeling.h...
I really don't like how it portrays humanity as a race where only a tiny percentage have the ability to innovate. All humans have this ability! Not all may use it, but we all have it.
Yes.. I know I'm pointing out factual inaccuracies from a science fiction story written 55 years ago, but because he used the term "human" explicitly I feel the need to do so.
It's impossible for us to KNOW whether a given person has the ability to innovate, or the potential to be brilliant. That's absolutely true. However, we have no concrete evidence to support the idea that any given individual CAN innovate, or has the potential for brilliance.
Quite the opposite: We already know of many heritable traits that impair an individual's ability to compete in the workplace, or perform effectively in difficult fields. Most of these are classified as diseases or mental disorders, but regardless...
Acknowledging that not every person is necessarily born with identical talents and capabilities is important if we want to empower these people to do good things and achieve what the rest of us can achieve. Claiming that everyone has equal potential implies that those who don't overachieve are simply not trying hard enough.
(I say this as a person who, due to environment or biology, ended up with an unpleasant assortment of conditions that impair my ability to compete in the workplace.)
If people can't compete in the workplace, maybe we need a better workplace.
Anyway, to name a few that afflict people I know (or me, for that matter) and all have devastating impact on productivity (often in different ways)
Chronic fatigue, ADHD/ADD (yes, it exists in adults; sometimes it's adult-onset), clinical depression, bipolar disorder, dyslexia, dyscalculia, etc.
It's true that workplace improvements can help people with disadvantages be able to participate and achieve good things, but this is exactly what I mean when I say that people do not have equal potential and capability. To assume otherwise, or blame these disadvantages solely on schooling or some other controllable factor is hopelessly naive. We have to accept that we can't apply our own experiences universally to everyone, and that we have to understand them and recognize their challenges so we can help overcome them.
Sure it's possible to guess, people will innovate depending on their creativity coefficient. That coefficient goes down drastically once kids finish education. If you want more creativity, then you need to address that major hurdle first.
I think a large number of those listed aren't real illnesses (dyslexia, dyscalculia) or are often misdiagnosed (ADHD/ADD). I think there might be a way to actually get those people using some means to be useful to society at large.
And I think it's pretty clear that saying all humans have this ability is wrong.
Firstly, there are numerous edge cases, e.g. people who are mentally handicapped in ways that preclude this.
Secondly, there is a broad range of intelligence levels in humans. Clearly, the innovation capabilities of people at the low end of the intelligence scale is either absent, or very very limited. Not to mention that, just as clearly, most of us aren't Einstein and aren't going around making giant contributions to science.
Ignoring the fact that there are inherent differences between humans, some of them large and unfortunate, is just a way of closing our eyes and burying our heads in the sand to how the world actually works.
Innovation is not the important part it's recognizing improvements and utilizing them.
Without entry-level jobs they're just going to be distro-hoppers who never get a foot in to industry.
There are limits to automation (and, more generally, any reduction of knowledge/craft to process). As you depend more on robots (literal or figurative) to execute process, over time you're likely losing a body of knowledgable/craft-capable practitioners. You can automate worker function, but until we have AI, not their perspective and the potential expertise that comes with engaging with a task over time. And you concentrate the responsibility for improvement in a smaller number of hands.
That doesn't mean there aren't also yields to automation -- sometimes big ones. Just means there are limits too.
By way of comparison... it's great that many software developers are much more productive in Ruby or Python or whatever than they would be in C or assembly. But when the time comes where you have to make a key optimization, if you don't have a "god" around who can be productive at a lower level, you may be bound to a sub-optimal approach (you might not even know about the potential optimizations).
We should understand this well from software. There's plenty of airline and financial software people don't want to meddle with too much because the people who remember the business rules behind it are retired or dead.
If FLA and such, then this isn't all that novel. Even relatively modestly priced S2000 had a lot of manual labor in the assembly process. (Don't think it had a hand-built crank, but for a 30k that's a bit lavish...)
Immersion in the details of a craft is what advances the craft. If I'm going to automate something, the first thing I do is to try it manually, because that's how I know the right way to automate it. But once I bake that knowledge into inaccessible software, I have basically stopped progress.
The number of people who can advance basic physics is relatively small, and when they're doing it, they still need food to eat and cars to drive. The way to maximize the number of people doing physics is to make every other craft as productive as possible. Robots will have a place to play in that, but not in a naive "replace all persons with robots" way.
Maybe writing something like an HTTP server in assembly, or something? I remember this (https://github.com/nemasu/asmttpd) popping up on HN some time ago. Writing your own kernel, or compiler? Building your own 8-bit microcomputer, and then running something on it? (A project like that was part of a course I took at college, and it did a decent job at demystifying many common concepts about computing).
The story is either a weird marketing ploy, or it's misreporting, or it's downright stupid. You do not need to replace robots with humans to improve manufacturing processes.
Perhaps the reality is that they're simply hiring more manufacturing and operations experts to oversee continuous process improvements and this hiring is being misinterpreted?
Toyota's history is one of treating their workers as valuable participants who use their brains at least as much as their hands. They eschew all sorts of fancy technology, not just robots, because technology is relatively inflexible. This approach allowed them to kick the asses of the US car manufacturers in the post-WWII period, continuing to increase productivity per worker long after US manufacturers leveled out.
Their approach isn't to hire experts. It's to turn their workers into experts on their work, and on improving that work. This has been literally incomprehensible [1] to US car companies because it's of the dominant US paradigm, managerialism [2].
See, e.g., Toyota Kata for more on how Toyota approaches this.
[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Eco...