As I predicted in my post of 8/17/2012 , Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s book How Much is Enough would annoy some people . As an example of such annoyance, here is a negative review from the August 19, 2012 Sunday New York Times by Richard Posner, a conservative judge who teaches at the University of Chicago . But in the same issue of the Times, is an article expounding the improvement in productivity and quality of work from a four day week and increased variation in work. It is here. You will like it. Hopefully Mr. Posner has read it. In addition, there is a front page article on the use of industrial robots in this issue focusing on the improved capability and decreased cost of modern robots and the resulting effects on employment. I also include it here.
I am not trying the include the entire New York Times in my post, but the three articles represent our quandary about work. There is no question that mechanization eliminates jobs. It has happened in agriculture, it is happening in industry, and it will happen increasingly in those functions we call service. And I don’t think that sound bites by politicians will remove the resulting problems. I would bet on a continued increase of mechanization in industry. And I definitely would not bet against a shortening of the work week.
I am happy to say that I am not responsible for solving this problem. But I am interested in what the continued mechanization of manufacturing and assembly and use of computers in design might do to the quality of products. In 1908 there were 253 automobile manufacturers in the U.S. Now there are few. Since that time, the automobile has become standardized to what we see on the road today. Certainly a higher quality product from the standpoint of cost, comfort, reliability, and performance. Yet perhaps we have lost a bit in product diversity, serviceability, and aesthetic/emotional appeal. It is classic car week in Monterrey, California, and anyone attending this or similar events can get an indication of this.
When I joined the Stanford faculty in the 1960’s, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was experimenting with a purchased manipulator and a couple that a graduate student from mechanical engineering named Vic Scheinman (later to start a manipulator company) had built. These were primitive devices compared to those now available, but people were definitely thinking about industrial use of such things. One topic under discussion what whether six degrees of freedom (what we have in the arm and hand) was necessary, or whether fewer would suffice if products were designed to take this into account.
Present day industrial robots can do what we can do when it comes to manufacturing and assembling products. But will product design change to ease the task of the robots? Will lower cost more specialized robots result in products that they can assemble more easily, but which will be more difficult for us to service? Will computers take a greater role in design? I can see the possibility of further standardization and concern with efficiency of production with concurrent loss of emotional appeal of products. It would be too bad if increasing use of computers in design and robots in production resulted in products defined more by catering to the abilities of these devices than for our use and pleasure. Material for a science fiction book?
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