First, there is a specific role in Toyota group companies with the title "Production Engineering", which is tasked with creating/improving/redesigning/etc. the production process of particular products, new and old. They are the most important category of engineers hired as undergrad and masters engineering graduates, and everyone knows that they are the group best positioned for career advancement through the engineering side of the company. The exact title is "Seisan Gijyutsu 生産技術". If you see a Toyota group company CEO with an engineering background, chances are he came up through this division.
Second are the "craftsmen" who are typically HS grads from the Aichi area, sometimes from Toyota branded schools. They are the ones with the deft touch and individual skill that are often lauded in these western oriented articles.
It's only when you have both sides working together that you will have scalable, transferrable progress.
disclosure: I worked at a Toyota group company as a new grad in Aichi and spent 3 months in the factory as part of my training.
Here in silicon valley, the best performing companies are rarely the ones who have only engineering talent. A good engineer often lacks domain experience in the space they are trying to innovate in. It is important to find and work with those who have domain experience in order to progress quickly.
Thanks for pointing this out. :)
Without those two areas working together and understanding each other, you end up with a broken system. This is precisely the sitaution that you face in mechanical design + mechanical manufacture.
I am a mech engineer by profession and it's critical for me to engage early and often with the tradestaff who manufacture my items, so that they can guide me. I'll understand the design fundamentals far better than they will, but equally they'll understand the tooling and production processes that it's necessary to respect.
I can propose a design that will work, but they're the ones hwo can make it result in half the material wasteage with a few tweaks. If I can ensure that such aspects are successfully incorporated into the design then the part is better than either of us could achieve individually.
In reality, the programming/IT side of things tends to blur and you tend to have quite significant experience in both areas, so the problem is less pronounced. It's far more distinct in the mechanical world.
You've done a pretty detailed analysis of the company process.
So is the Production Engineer "Seisan Gijyutsu" focused on finding improvements for the Craftsmen to develop or does the Production Engineer "Seisan Gijyutsu" develop the improvements and teach them to the craftsmen?
eg if i replace this machine tool with x% scrap/rework rate with a new one that has y% and the new machine costs Z$ million - how long does it take to payback.
There are two kinds of jobs that robots will have a hard time replacing: these sorts of high-skill, creative, intution-and-experience heavy tasks; and low-skill but mechancially awkward tasks.
In both cases, the key to job survival will be that it's something of a niche. Anything remotely generic will be taken over by machines. So for example we'll still see certain kinds of literature generated by humans, but 100% of financial reporting, political reporting and sports reporting will be automated. More sophisticated commentary of the kind that Nate Silver does might last, but the Paul Krugmans and David Brooks of the world will be engineered out in the next decade or so by bots that troll the web for stories and generate canned ideologically-loaded commentary based on a smattering of data sources.
At the other end, jobs like fruit picking will be completely automated because it's a common task that can be implemented with a relatively generic machine, but cleaning houses will remain the domain of humans because houses are such awkward, complex spaces. Once we have a humanoid robot with very good AI that'll change, but I'm a little doubtful about seeing that in the next few decades.
Three - add anything which is primarily social.
I think hairdressing will be one of the most resilient jobs. Not only is there a huge market for it, but it requires a certain basic level of dexterity, and it's primarily social. The talking is at least as important as the hair cutting, and it's going to be a while before robots can replace it.
And these places are busy - my guess is there will be an automated haircut place in <10 years, and they will pick up 90% of the business within 5 years.
People will always go to custom hair cut places, but I bet there are a lot of people who will be keen to pay a small amount of money to get a reasonable hair cut.
Beauty is not an industry that a bit of tech pixie dust will magically transform. Haircuts aren't just a utility, they're a personal statement and a piece of one's identity. And as a previous poster indicated, it's also social and cultural. Plus the variety of people's hair and variety of desired cuts make it an incredibly complex and fine motor skill, one that robots will suck at for a very long time. And people rarely know exactly what they want when they go into a hair salon, so there's a service component there too. Beauty just isn't ripe for disruption because people and culture are so involved.
I think this is similar to the soylent discussions. Food-as-utility people think its great, but food has cultural value far beyond calorie intake. So its found its niche among products that already existed (sans tech pixie dust) - the nutritional shake market.
90% is an order of magnitude off in my opinion. But I agree that a place that offers reasonable hair cut for cheap is what many people would want, so I do look forward to your future where that is offered!
[0] http://www.flowbee.com/ http://www.haircut.com/ http://www.aircut.com/
Definitely agree that there will be some people who absolutely will want to go to a hair salon - and, honestly, my 90% was just a thumb-in-the-wind estimate. You're probably right that it's high, but, never underestimate the desire for people to get a good deal.
I think your Soylent comparison is excellent - and is exactly the one I would make. People who see food in a utilitarian perspective see the value offered from soylent. Likewise, people who consider haircuts as the process required to rid themselves of the excess hair, will get a lot of value out of an automated hair cut establishment.
Characterising a Nobel-winning economist as a content troll says more about you than him.
I wouldn't call him a troll. I would call him a shill. And no, that's not not saying more about me. It really is about him.
Yeah, that post seems kind of bizarre to me. Is Krugman partisan? Absolutely, and he admits it. Can he be - compared to most of the professional commentariat - abrasive and rude? Yes, and he admits it. [1] At the same time he is a cheerleader for Nate Silver and data-driven analysis. This is definitely reflected in his blog posts though somewhat less so in his columns (which do tend to be fluffier for a popular audience.) Half of his writing since the beginning of the recession has been deriding narrative-based analysis and demonstrating that the data contradicts it.
He does of course sometimes write about subjects outside his expertise - he wrote a lot about the Iraq War, for example - and he sometimes shades his economics with political analysis, but I wouldn't go so far as calling him a shill. Krugman is obviously derisive of most Republicans, but he has been decidedly unhappy about most post-2008 Democratic policies.
Krugman is basically the only mainstream political pundit I read at all, because you can actually learn a lot from what he writes.
I can see machines replacing David Brooks, but it will be a tragic day when we lose such a fitting (though well-intentioned) subject for mockery.
[1] He gives his reasons here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/wild-words-brain...
It may take some time, but many of these 'awkward' jobs too will disappear. Once the house is the machine, the problem of maintaining it becomes a lot simpler. In fact, these environments may look nothing like a house (I would expect the first iteration to focus on low-cost functionality over form). Such machines could eliminate the need for independent robots or human labour.
...why?
The explanation that I get from article for the shift to training more metal workers is that a highly skilled metal worker winds-up being more akin to an engineer - that aspects of metal work are too complex to be understood by just theoretical knowledge of the engineers. Thus the robots in the factories duplicate the processes which both metal workers and engineers create. But if you get rid of the metal workers, you are left not able to change your processes or create new, effective processes.
Recognising and upskilling the best tradestaff into these roles is one of the most important aspects of a successful mechanical design organisation, as far as I'm concerned. They deliver a critical insight that your degree-educated, never-worked-away-from-a-desk engineers simply lack, because those engineers haven't spent years bending and cutting steel to understand exactly how far you can push the processes.
Example: I've just finished redesigning a proposed lifting device where some idiot engineer had specified steel bent in a radius of half its thickness. Any manufacturing tradestaff will tell you this is complete insanity as the rule of thumb is ~1.5-2* thickness as a minimum radius - any tighter and you rapidly start tearing the material apart along its grains. It's just not done. Yet there's clearly an engineer out there who didn't even consider it and sure enough, as soon as we crack tested the bent area, about 1/3 of the items had cracks.
This is the critical stress area of a proposed lifting device so that's basically a cardinal rule broken, because the manufacturing defect (the tear in the metal) will propagate into a crack over successive lifting cycles until the whole thing breaks in half and the several tonnes of load it's supporting falls back down. Had the engineer talked to literally any tradesperson they would've known to avoid this, yet here we are.
Trade Apprentice -> Technician (associate professional) -> Engineer -> Ceng (PE)
Some Cultures make it harder to actually progress all the way Germany used to be realy bad.
In general, the workers are not given enough information to replicate the product. They are shown how to attach a specific sprocket to a widget. The tasks are kept so simple (nothing to do with pleasantness) that no one can learn how the whole device is created or suggest improvements. This model lends to people being replaced by robots because human capital is one of the most expensive parts of running a factory.
In the case of Toyota, it sounds like these are high skilled engineers who are watching, understanding and making improvements to how the robots behave.
While the article itself is good, the title feels like link bait to me because the engineer's job is not to replace the robot but to enhance the robot. The dynamic isn't human vs robot as in the first scenario, instead it is human & robot cooperating.
With these types of factories, I think we'll likely see a resurgence of factories in rich countries as the most expensive component of the factory shifts from human capital to transportation of completed goods.
[edited for grammer, sic]