The February 23 issue of the NY Times Magazine was devoted to the future of work, and in particular, to what it called the new working class. The Oxford Dictionary defines working class as “The social group consisting of people who are employed for wages, especially in manual or industrial work.” The working class includes many traditional blue-collar occupations, - factory workers, truck drivers, electricians, plumbers, - but it also now includes an increasing number of white-collar and service jobs.
While the new working class comprises a variety of jobs, most discussions on the topic are generally centered on the deindustrialization of America over the past few decades, as well as on the ensuing decline in both the number and the wages of manufacturing jobs. “Now when politicians invoke the working class, they are likely to gesture, anachronistically, to an abandoned factory,” notes the issue’s introductory article.
The ongoing transformation of manufacturing jobs was the subject of Learning to Love Our Robot Co-Workers by Kim Tingley. Her article nicely explained the major changes taking place in US manufacturing, especially the appearance of a new generation of flexible, programmable, moderately priced robots that are designed to safely collaborate with humans, - each doing what they do best.
Robotics is an exciting, fast moving discipline, which is playing an increasingly important role in the future of manufacturing. All computers are defined by what their brains, - that is, their hardware and software, - are capable of computing and controlling. Robots are computers that have both a brain and a body. A robot’s capabilities are defined by what its brains and body can jointly do.
“Robotics has benefited enormously from progress in many areas: computation, data storage, the scale and performance of the Internet, wireless communication, electronics, and design and manufacturing tools,” wrote MIT professor Daniela Rus, in a recent Foreign Affairs article, - The Robots Are Coming. “The costs of hardware have dropped even as the electromechanical components used in robotic devices have become more reliable and the knowledge base available to intelligent machines has grown thanks to the Internet… Today’s robots can perform basic locomotion on the ground, in the air, and in the water. They can recognize objects, map new environments, perform pick-and-place operations on an assembly line, imitate simple human motions, acquire simple skills, and even act in coordination with other robots and human partners…”
“Customized robots working alongside people will create new jobs, improve the quality of existing jobs, and give people more time to focus on what they find interesting, important, and exciting… Yet the objective of robotics is not to replace humans by mechanizing and automating tasks; it is to find ways for machines to assist and collaborate with humans more effectively. Robots are better than humans at crunching numbers, lifting heavy objects, and, in certain contexts, moving with precision. Humans are better than robots at abstraction, generalization, and creative thinking, thanks to their ability to reason, draw from prior experience, and imagine. By working together, robots and humans can augment and complement each other’s skills.”
In her NYT article, Tingle noted that “American manufacturers are producing more products now than they were before the [2008 financial] crash, with fewer workers, which suggests that those missing jobs have been automated. And while collaborative robots are showing up on factory floors first - where automation has always debuted, taking on repetitive, heavy and hazardous work - they are likely to find their way into other workplaces soon… Already, surgical robots make it possible via remote control to perform low-risk operations in outpatient settings; robot home-health aids may soon help people with limited mobility get out of bed, cook meals and perform other routine tasks…”
As part of her research for the article, Tingley visited a small tool and die business in Ramsey, - a manufacturing town near Minneapolis, - whose owner had recently brought in a few robots to help him compete with the lower costs of overseas companies. She was shown an injection press that was being used to make molds for intricate medical products. A young man was sitting at a table facing the press with the recently acquired robot beside him.
Before the robot arrived, four people worked the press. “The robot’s price tag was $35,000, and within two months, it paid for itself by quadrupling the efficiency of the press and eliminating scrap.” The increased productivity is helping the small business compete for additional work. “No one was laid off, and the company’s finances are sounder than they have been in nearly 20 years.”
The most important innovation wasn’t the robot’s speed but its ability to work alongside humans without fear of hurting them. If the robot bumps into something, it immediately stops. That means that you don’t need an expensive safety cage around the robot, which makes it easier to move and reprogram the robot to whatever unique processes are required to fill new orders.
Tingley also visited a GM automotive plant outside Detroit. The plant has long used non-collaborative robots behind cages, and it recently started testing how to best deploy the new generation of collaborative, flexible industrial robots. She found the robot next to a conveyor belt lifting 35-pound tires and stacking them on a cart, - a task that the employees who once performed it gladly relinquished as twisting to move the tires was an ergonomic nightmare.
Tingly asked the area supervisor, - “a petite woman in a ponytail, who looked most out of place amid stacks of tires that were almost as tall as she was,” - what it was like working with the new robot. In reply, “she gestured to an earlier section of the conveyor, where behind a fence, a hydraulic press was picking up wheels and slamming them into tires with a hiss. ‘That one I’m scared to death of; it could crush me,’ she said. ‘This one is completely safe. It’s kind of like a pet dog. I forget it’s there.’”
This new generation of collaborative robots are having a democratizing effect on manufacturing, “giving people of various ages, sexes, dexterities and sizes an equal shot at excelling at all sorts of physically demanding careers.” In addition, the biggest difference between this coming wave of flexible, moderately priced robots and past industrial automation is that both small businesses like the one outside Minneapolis, and big plants like GM’s outside Detroit can afford to participate.
“And to the extent that collaborative robots are blank slates - multifunctional and reprogrammable as opposed to major investments whose functions are determined at purchase - they offer employees an opportunity to experiment. Far more than past automations did, they give their operators, as much as their owners, the power to influence how they will be used to maximize the time the operators spend on the facets of their jobs that they find most fulfilling.”
It’s most definitely “not your grandfather’s manufacturing.”
Nice work
Posted by: Hawi Moore | May 11, 2017 at 08:29 AM