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Factory-In-a-Day Project Aims To Deploy Work-Ready Robots Within 24 Hours
Zothecula writes "Industrial robots have proven useful in reducing production costs in large factories, with major enterprises enlisting their services to execute repetitive tasks. The Factory-in-a-Day project, which kicked off in October, aims to also make robotic technology beneficial to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), by developing adaptable robots that can be integrated with workplace systems within 24 hours."
How hard can it be to teach a robot to whip humans into performing menial tasks?
Jobs are drying up so fast yet the population just keeps growing.
It is interesting to watch the "how it's made" videos. However, some items are hand-processed, but the work could easily be handled by a robot, especially menial tasks like slicing chickens coming down an assembly line in the exact places or sewing a shoe together.
People will complain that it takes jobs... but a job of cutting chicken butts all day should be left up to a machine, not a person that will get RSI from doing the same task over and over.
Don't worry! All of those losing their unskilled jobs to robots will find new skilled jobs servicing robots or in some new industry which will magically spring up from nothing. Really!
They want these right away to replace all their workers who want $15 an hour.
In the situations I've encountered turnaround time hasn't been the bottleneck keeping smaller businesses from automating things with robots. Maybe there are some cases where you really need custom stuff on the spot, but more often you can wait a week. The problem is that at small scale stuff is expensive and high-overhead. If you want one industrial robot, you are going to pay a lot for it, and you are going to incur a lot of labor costs just getting the thing to work.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Automation like this only benefits two groups, factory owners and the consumers of the product. Owners want more profit and consumers want cheaper goods. The big loser is the worker who is left without a job. Most workers are also consumers, so more automation is required to keep prices at their level given that they are shifted into lower paying "service" jobs. It's a vicious cycle that's been going on for a century and we now have unheard of disparity between rich and poor. I love the idea of robots doing our bidding and appreciate this tech, but the reality of it sucks.
I am not a Luddite, but we need to think about how tech affect society. I think most engineers would agree that there are certain technologies that are unethical to work in. To me, this is one of them.
http://www.pbfcomics.com/197/
No reason to worry, with our exciting advances in military robot technology, we can have robots solve the unemployment problems that other robots create!
"Automation like this only benefits two groups, factory owners and the consumers of the product."
Make that three groups, as those deploying, servicing and repairing the robots will remain in demand for many years. Industrial equipment gets used hard and doesn't fix itself yet.
The skills needed for that are a combination not natural or intuitive to many people. The world has plenty of computer geeks, plenty of mechanics, and plenty of electricians. It has fewer who are all of those.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
...I can imagine the sales speach: "Yes Sir, no problem sir. You can have your robot on the first day after we programm our assemly robots, so that's in two weeks. If no unforseen problems occur..." :)
Don't be silly. Obviously all those unemployed and displaced workers will get jobs building and servicing the robots. You know, buggy wheels and industrial whip-cream and all that...
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
"Industrial robots have proven useful in reducing EMPLOYEES in large factories, with major enterprises enlisting their services to LAYOFF EMPLOYEES. The Factory-in-a-Day project, which kicked off in October, aims to also make robotic technology beneficial to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), by LAYING OFF EMPLOYEES within 24 hours."
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
Hopefully this would help for natural disasters to recover as quickly as possible.
> It's a vicious cycle that's been going on for a century and we now have unheard of disparity between rich and poor.
Where do people get this stuff? Have you never cracked a history book? There has been a far greater disparity between rich and poor for basically all of history before the most recent 100 years.
This should be very effective if it works. Which it should. Automated manufacturing usually takes a lot of startup time. Production lines have to be designed, fabricated, and carefully installed with everything aligned properly.
There's already a big success in this area - Kiva Systems. They make those little mobile robots used for order processing. Kiva already is handling about 20% of online orders, and Amazon bought the company recently. Setting up a warehouse for Kiva is simple - all you really need is a big flat floor. You put down markers for robot guidance, bring in the shelving units, the charging stations, and the human order-picking stations, which are all standard components, hook everything up to the servers, and go. No need to fabricate and install complex conveyor systems. No need for on-site robot repair techs - all the Kiva robots are interchangeable, so you have spares, and you can just send them back to Kiva HQ (which is small) for repairs.
Automation like this only benefits two groups, factory owners and the consumers of the product.
What about the engineers who program the device? The tooling makers who build the automation and fixtures? The more skilled (higher paid) workers needed to operate the machines? The workers who remain employed because their company remains competitive? The maintenance workers who service the machine? The bank which finances the equipment purchase? The workers who get hired on the next project because the company is more competitive? All these groups and more benefit from automation. You have an overly simplistic, short sighted and incorrect view of this issue.
It's a vicious cycle that's been going on for a century and we now have unheard of disparity between rich and poor.
Demonstrably nonsense. Income inequality fell until around the 1970s-80s. The disparities we are seeing recently are a recent phenomena and are due to a complicated mixture of the falling power of unions, globalization, and financial manipulation.
The big loser is the worker who is left without a job.
Sigh... I run a small manufacturing company and I'm a certified accountant as well as an industrial engineer. Automation does not mean fewer jobs, it means different jobs and in the long run it means more jobs. Automation happens when a product needs to be produced in sufficient volume or with quality and/or safety requirements such that employing humans to do the job is not economical. The "lost" jobs you are bemoaning would never exist in the first place or if they did they would exist in the location with the lowest labor costs. My company purchased automation for lead making (we make wire harnesses) that allowed us to produce subassemblies faster. This allowed us to hire MORE people than we would have without the automation. In fact without the automation we would have been bankrupt. There is NO possible way for anyone to produce 500,000 wire leads with good quality by hand for a competitive price even with Chinese labor rates.
I'll give you another example. We use automation to process a six conductor cable for a jumper harness. We make about 1000 of these each day. While it is technically possible to automate this with some very expensive robotics and vision systems, the volume requirements would have to be ten times what we are producing to even consider doing that. The automation would cost well over US$2 million (yes I've looked). So we have unskilled workers who don't get paid much doing the work. Because of the cost of this automation (we can't afford it) we have to charge higher prices for our services which means we lose out on bids for work and cannot hire as many people. Lack of automation actually hinders our ability to hire more people because it limits our competitiveness.
I am not a Luddite, but we need to think about how tech affect society. I think most engineers would agree that there are certain technologies that are unethical to work in. To me, this is one of them.
Factory automation is not in any way unethical. People are the most flexible and useful asset companies have. Why would you limit your people to doing boring, repetitive tasks when they are capable of so much more? I'm guessing you have never worked an assembly line. It is mostly dull, soul crushing work that pays badly and grossly underutilizes what people can do. Come work on our assembly line for a few days and you'll be whistling a different tune. Factory automation lets us get more work and hire more people and the people we hire can be paid more and do more. It's a positive cycle.
Yes, yes. We all know that quote from The Simpsons that gets posted every time there's an article about robots replacing people in the workplace and factories.
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Automation like this only benefits two groups, factory owners and the consumers of the product. Owners want more profit and consumers want cheaper goods. The big loser is the worker who is left without a job.
Labor and capital can be visualized as occupying the two sides of a seesaw. As you increase the utilization of one, the other will become less utilized. With labor becoming increasingly expensive, business will naturally do its best to replace it with capital (i.e. equipment), because that's the most cost-effective route. The only way to stop that from happening is to somehow drop the cost of labor, and I don't see how that's possible in today's political climate other than to have government subsidize it. There'd be a lot of pushback against that from both sides of the political spectrum ("Don't subsidize evil corporations!", "Don't prop up crappy business plans!"), so I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future.l
Hurray, more time to play Final Fantasy XIV with my friends!
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What's your point? Ancient Egypt vs post-industrial USA is not an apples to apples comparison.
We went off the rails somewhere when people started amassing wealth for the sake of amassing wealth.
The game has been rigged.
I am not a Luddite, but we need to think about how tech affect society
Youre not destroying looms, but youre voicing the same concern, and it simply hasnt panned out. Yes, those skilled textile workers lost their jobs, and the number of people needing jobs grew exponentially; yet we have lower unemployment, higher wages, and more wide-spread post secondary education since the luddite days, primarily BECAUSE of advances that reduced the need for manual labor.
Every time an advance comes along that promises to reduce menial work and improve life, people wonder whether it will mean the end of work for some, and the answer has always been "yes: but there will be new jobs and more opportunities". Consider the quality of life in the US, where automation has caught on heavily, and then consider the quality of life in any country where labor is outsourced because of its low cost; and then consider what objecting to technological progress is actually objecting to.
Find a job that supports the robots. It is going to be a very long time before the "automated stuff" loop is entirely closed. Humans are involved at some point, whether it be in design, support or repair. Complaining about automation isn't going to stop or slow the trend towards increasing the automation of precise, repetitive tasks, anymore than complaining about the combustion engine kept wagon-repair shops in business.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Yes so will we need PhDs and 20 years of schooling to have a job in the future? And what when we have capable AI that replaces just about every job? IQ of 145?
It's time we replace minimum wage with minimum income.
This is known as the 'broken window fallacy'. It says that if I go around breaking windows, jobs to fix windows will be created, and the economy will benefit. But really, what's happened is that we're living less efficiently. Houses with windows become more expensive, since the windows must be continually replaced. We waste effort fixing them that could have been spent on something with benefit.
The same is true when you make a factory less efficient. On the extreme side, we could require all workers to have one hand tied behind their backs, tripling the number of jobs created per factory. But the money those workers earned would be worth a lot less, since all goods would be much more expensive.
To put it as simply as I can, which society has more poverty: the one where they keep all of their harvests and GDP output, or the one where they incinerate two thirds of it? Because destroying two-thirds of it is equivalent to working at 1/3 efficiency.
I am not a Luddite, but we need to think about how tech affect society. I think most engineers would agree that there are certain technologies that are unethical to work in. To me, this is one of them.
It strikes me funny that people are considering the efficiency of automation as unethical. People keep saying we need a way to create jobs in this economy, but any system that must work inefficiently to keep working is inherently broken. Saying we should create a department of hole digging and filling are saying "this is how we should fix this wooden boat". Instead, we should create a metal ship, and the equivalent in this case would be a new experimental government.
People have a large set of opinions as to how we should implement a new government, but no one can argue that the problem is complicated. Perhaps some day, we can encounter a situation in which we can implement a set of experimental governments acting in harmony to both allow people to chose their laws in a simpler manner, and see which set of laws allows for the greatest success (whatever the metric might be). But seeing arguments like this makes me feel like everyone is ignoring the bigger problem.
-Cobra Commander
Well I laughed. I enjoy being reminded of the time The Simpsons was any good.
I'm glad you brought up textiles. North Americans own a lot of clothing. The average person would probably be just as happy in life if they owned half the amount of clothing and had paid twice as much. Why not pay people a little more to do the work with dignity? Sure, use machines where quality benefits, or where a task is impossible without, or where something is so menial that it lacks dignity. But, I don't see anything wrong with a little bit of social welfare from companies in the form of jobs for fair wages (there are companies that do this by the way). Yet most clothing companies compete to see who can pay the absolute least amount to people who are already dirt poor. Why? Because we need to be able to buy a shirt at Walmart for $5 and because some millionaire still doesn't have enough money. It's messed up.
While I fully agree with the workers affected and there needs to be something done for them, it is not immoral or unethical to work in the field.
Personally, the workers should be redeployed and workshare as needed.
Instead of hiring 1 person at 90k/year, hire 2 at 45k and have them work half time. More families are supported. More people have free time.
Yes, this might not be possible in certain fields, but it is possible in most fields.
Keep spreading the jobs and reducing the hours worked so all people contribute something and get paid.
As a tech person interested in efficiency and automation, but also having a soul, I wonder if there is some ethical way to go about this. For example, let the worker stay on to monitor and train the robot. Let workers compete to see who can best train their bot. Only use the bot after-hours to minimize over-working. etc. I may be totally naive, but "never automate anything more than what it is today and only ever require manual labor" isn't the future we want either. Seems like a balance could be struck, or a precedent set, to use this technology to move current factory workers upward.
"any system that must work inefficiently to keep working is inherently broken"
It depends what you value. Many people pay a premium for handmade goods. Why pay $20 for a handmade clay pot when you can buy a mass produced one for $3? Perhaps you value the uniqueness of it? Perhaps you get warm and fuzzy feelings knowing that you're helping support someone who is doing what they enjoy, or at the very least, earning money without the need to own a million dollar factory?
Automation like this only benefits two groups, factory owners and the consumers of the product
That is, until the consumers lose their jobs due to automation.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I am not a Luddite
You might want to check again, because that's exactly the position you're advocating.
The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
You missed a bit here. The robots keep people working in the plant from being hurt. The robot installations I've seen have been in highly repetitive tasks to prevent repetitive stress injuries (RSI) to workers. The robots kept people from being hurt with the constant lift the box, stack the box, repeat kind of work. That kind of work is hard on the human body. The projects were justified based on safety, not just cost savings. I find it ethical to use technology to keep people from being hurt.
Automation engineer here.
I (obviously) don't think that automation is inherently unethical, but I very much agree that societies can use it in unethical ways, e.g. for concentrating the wealth of a country on only a small percentage of the population. I don't see the current skewed distribution of wealth as a problem of automation, but as a problem in the government. I miss a good debate about who should benefit from the increased productivity, how the wealth should be redistributed in a "fair" way, and what role the government should take in this endevour. I miss hearing views like Nick Hanauer's.
Grandparent's point is that we are doing far better now than we were in the not-so-distant past when slavery was legal, or during the "robber-baron" era, or (looking back just a bit more), when simple plunder by force was common.
Fine. I accept that label after reading about the Luddite Fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite_fallacy
In 1985 we built robots capable of amazing things. But the techs needed to service the robots, the computers that drove them, and the initial expenses were a huge barrier. Only very large companies could use these machines. Japan was kicking our fannies with stupid robots that ran off of camshafts and repeated one task only. But they were cheap, could be serviced by a mechanic, and did the job nicely. So what American small businesses need is a robot that is reliable and can be suddenly serviced. It is like the air conditioner in a restaurant. If it screws up you need service right now and must be back on line in an hour or so and repairs must be cheap as well. We are now at about that point. They can be affordable and a spare can be close at hand such that if a breakdown occurs the robot can be quickly replaced by another robot in a matter of moments. The station that the robot occupies simply needs to know what program the robot is to run and you are up and running. It could be quicker than removing a cook that just keeled over from a heart attack. Really we strive to eliminate human employment.
All of this and the comments above reminded me of this;
https://archive.org/details/AV_184-NEW_TECHNOLOGY-WHOSE_PROGRESS
For all his wealth, an Egyptian Pharaoh could not buy a television set or a cell phone. Yet such modern luxuries are ubiquitous among "rich" and "poor" alike in the developed world. Where did they get it from? Who had to lose so that they could benefit?
Wealth is not a zero-sum game.
and the answer has always been "yes: but there will be new jobs and more opportunities"
When resource production (primary) industrialized, there was manufacturing (secondary) to pick up the slack.
When manufacturing automated, there was services (tertiary) to pick up the slack.
When services automate, then what? There isn't another sector up and coming to pick up the slack like the last two times.
Which means we need to think about what we're going to do to deal with that.
As you say, trying to put the brakes on automation isn't a viable option, so what is? Spread the remaining jobs thinner by reducing each person's hours? Cast aside the idea of employment being necessary?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Yup, so then we end up paying for even more welfare, because low-wage, high-profit companies like McDonald's and Wal-Mart refuse to pay a decent wage.
Refuse? No. Cannot. They cannot raise wages that high even if they wanted to. While it is probably true that those companies could raise their workers wages some, they cannot raise them by more than a little bit unless everyone else is forced to do so as well. They are able to offer low prices in large part by keeping a lid on labor costs. Basically all their direct competitors do exactly the same thing. If they raise wages they have to raise prices and someone else gets the business. Go ahead and do the math. If those companies raise their minimum wages to $15 then ALL of their profits and then some will disappear faster than you can say "shareholder lawsuit".
Light duty industrial robot: $60,000.
So, 4000 hours of labor (can work continuously) = about 6 months of 8-hour-day $15/hour labor.
-Styopa
http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/products/baxter/
I've been tempted to get one as an investment ($22K) to learn to write apps for it, but I don't have the time right now doing other work. But stuff like Baxter is clearly the future...
And, while we "rethink robotics", we need to "rethink economics" (including a basic income, an expanded gift economy, improved local subsistence, and better democratic planning), like I talk about on my site.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Literally your exact concern (minus the word robotics) has been voiced so many times in the past, and turned out to be a complete non-issue, that the whole conversation is wearying.
It actually feels like its sapping my will to discuss the issue to hear techies wondering what will happen when menial / low-skilled jobs disappear. Where exactly do you think the tech sector came from? Where exactly do you think the industrial revolution came from? Why exactly did people form cities?
But what about the sheep-herding jobs!
Whats messed up is people demanding that we throw out all of the lessons from history and try to do things our own way. Progress doesnt kill opportunity, and "social welfare" is great until you try to base your society on it, and then everything fails.
Yeah, this is just all I need. My pointy-haired boss will think he can eliminate everyone underneath him, then wonder why his 'factory' isn't producing parts. He told it to, after all. Bad, insubordinate factory.
No would be a good time to sign the Citizens Initiative for a research into Basic Income.
http://sign.basicincome2013.eu/
Sorry, only for EU-pians.
A nice fantasy of someone who has never worked in or set-up or designed any factory before. There's a good reason why bringing up a factory is complicated (if economics matters) even when robots are involved.
Nobody buying at McDonald's is paying for quality.
Business must make some profit. If you own a business you want as much as possible. I was the production tech (started in 1996) in a facility that packed potatoes is small bags for grocery stores. We replaced our two hand operated spring scale baggers with four digital load cell automated baggers and doubled production (to 9000 5 lb bags per hour) without hiring any more workers. The digital scale machines (two-hundred fifty thousand dollars apiece) saved a $1000 per day each with more precise product weighing. The competing companies did the same thing so the owner had to lower his markup to remain competitive so actual profits didn't go up much. (I made $800 a week and a $6000 bonus most years so business was pretty good)
Most business do not automate or offshore to increase profits, they do it because their competitors did and they will be less profitable if they don't.
I pick this as the biggest shift we will see in the next mid-term, say 15 years. The availability of easily deployable, programmable robots that allow SME's to do what the big industrial companies have done. I can't see the ethics debate that's being had here is really relevant. This game is on, so get ready to throw your clogs, or work out how you can get involved.
Interesting thoughts, thanks. It's hard to know how it will all play out. I agree with you on looking at first principles like energy flows -- that is why so much of mainstream economics is bunk. I mention that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.
The above is somewhat inspired by "cybernetics". "
Elites can also come and go for various reasons. In the book of the oral history of some Native Americans, "The Walking People", the elite of that group 1000s of years ago lived by the beach while the rest lived up higher, but they got wiped out by a tidal wave, and the rest started walking...
Maybe a deeper issue is, as Charles Dickens worried about like in "A Tale of Two Cities", that society can so fast become an angry mob tearing everything apart... But the angry mob of the French Revolution mostly could lust use blades like the guillotine to vent their wrath. Individuals in today's angry mobs will have access to bioweapons including designer plagues, stolen nukes, chemical weapons, drones, cell-phone-based IEDs, computer viruses, airplanes to crash into things, and so on. That could all spiral into something very awful, especially when governments fight back and it all escalates... It's been suggested one answer to the Fermi Paradox is that all civilizations with advanced tech wipe themselves out.
I feel it is best to avoid the risk of ending up there, and things like a basic income, a gift economy, better democratic planning, and even improvised subsi
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.