Dalia
Marin wrote an insightful article about the role that robots have been playing
in manufacturing, and what role they'll play after the COVID-19 crisis will be
over.
What
Marin did, however, was look at the subject from a narrow angle. It happened to
be the one that accentuated the differences between robots and human workers.
As a result, she concluded that the use of robots is more efficient than
humans, and will therefore replace them in manufacturing.
She
believes that the trend is already here, and will continue to progress in the
advanced economies where the cost of human labor is high. But she also believes
it will happen to the developing economies that had the advantage of cheap
labor up to now, but will lose to the robots eventually.
However,
the reality is that the differences between the human worker and the robot come
down to what you may characterize as skin-deep. In fact, both need nourishment
to operate. The human gets his in the form of food derived from a variety of
sources; the robot gets his in the form of electricity derived from a variety
of sources. Another similarity is that both get sick. The human gets a medical
doctor to heal him; the robot gets a technician to repair it. After a lifetime
of work, both die. The human is sent to the graveyard; the robot is sent to the
scrapyard.
It
takes about half a million dollars to raise a human child and prepare him or
her to be productive in the advanced economies. It takes about that much to
build a robot and program it to be productive. It takes much less than that to
raise a child in a developing country and prepare him or her to be productive.
But the developing countries do not yet have the knowledge to build robots. And
so, they offer cheap labor for the advanced economies to set up shop in their
jurisdictions, thus make products at a lower cost.
The
question is this: Will the advanced economies of today, and the developing
economies of tomorrow, do away completely with human labor and replace them
with robots? Before we answer this question, we need to understand what exactly
is referred to when we speak of robots because a persistent misconception needs
to be clarified before anything.
The
robot that's of interest to us, is not what is portrayed in science fiction as
a human-like specimen capable of all the things we do, except that it does them
better and faster. No. A robot is not that. It is an automation device whose
origin goes back at least two centuries. That would be decades before the
usefulness of electricity was established and made use of.
The
automation device was used to program the pattern of textile that was
manufactured by machines, themselves powered by the waterwheel. When
electricity was commercialized, it was used to upgrade the automation device
that was then called, servomechanism. With the invention of the transistor, and
later the microchip, it was possible to upgrade the servomechanism. When done,
it was given the new name of solid-state system of logic.
This
happened during the decade of the 1970s. A company called CBS Record, an
affiliate of the news and entertainment American giant, had a plant here in
Canada where I was hired at a crucial time. It is that the plant was equipped with
several machines producing vinyl records. Originally, the machines were
controlled by a system of logic using electro-mechanical relays. They were then
converted to run with solid-state microchips. As new systems, they needed to be
observed while operating and producing normally. If and when intermittent
problems revealed themselves, they were debugged, and the system modified to
eliminate the problem. I was part of the team that did this work.
During
that time a symposium was held by one of the technology giants, featuring displays
that foretold what kind of future the solid-state technology was promising to
shape. There was the electric typewriter with a memory. A suggestion that
anticipated the automatic teller machine. The Computer Aided Design (CAD), the
Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), and most important of all, a CAM machine
that was programmed, not by a keyboard, but by learning.
Visitors
could grab the arm of the machine and manipulate it. It was equipped with a
tool at its extremity. I moved the arm from place to place, and used the tool
to grab a screw from a tray and tighten a panel. I turned off the machine and
turned it back on. I pressed the “go” button, and the machine that learned the
moves I taught it without a keyboard, repeated them in the exact same manner.
This was the genesis of the robot revolution … except that they weren't called
robots at the time.
In
any event, it was clear then, as it should be now, that robots come in many
forms. They are used not only on the shop floor but also in the offices of
banks, insurance companies, and increasingly in hospitals.
Robots
are here today in many forms, doing all sorts of tasks. And yet, despite the
prediction that they will usher-in the leisure society, the contrary has
happened. The observed reality is that the more automation is used to power an
economy, the larger the workforce that's needed to fill the new jobs they
create.