‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#81

Post by Negitivefrags » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 1:30 AM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #67

What I don't understand is why the "Gods" don't say "No we won't train robots to do our jobs." One of the biggest hurdles to automation in general - especially where replacing skilled workers is concerned - is in teaching (algorithmically or otherwise) the machine to replicate what the skilled worker is doing. If there really is the existential crisis of "machines taking our jobs" then why are the robot trainers not…

Programmers don't seem to have a problem automating aspects of their own jobs. Efficiency for it's own sake is a motivation.

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#82

Post by npunt » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 1:39 AM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #71

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are two kinds of jobs that robots will have a hard time replacing: 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.

Hairdressing may be resilient for some people, but my eyes were opened in Singapore when I went to "K-Cuts" - which is as close to an automated hair-cut as you can get. Full haircut, in 10 minutes for S$10. Nobody speaks english, so talking isn't an option. They use vacuums to collect your hair. I hold up three fingers, point to the top of my head, two fingers, point to the side. That's the sum total of guidance. And…

Your anecdote is good to keep in mind, I learned something. While I don't think the US has any auto-cut places (oh the liability!), we certainly have had infomercials selling vacuum haircutting machines for a while[0]. I'm not sure they've made a huge dent in the beauty industry to date.

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/

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#83

Post by johnong » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 1:39 AM UTC

Back in the early 90s, I was working in a Sony plant in Singapore that produces CRTs. It's a fully automated plant and my section are in charge of making the famous Trinitron apperture gril. Anyway, I still remembered there was once a group of Japanese craftsman came to visit our plant. And some some of my colleagues were assigned to attach with them and learn. These craftsman turn out to be ladies (wow!) and they showed us how to do some of the work manually (WTF!) and the skills they have really put to shame the local guys, we stand and watch and totally stunned. The crafmanship and professionalism in their skill is truely awesome.

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#84

Post by ghshephard » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 1:56 AM UTC

npunt wrote: post #82

ghshephard wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hairdressing may be resilient for some people, but my eyes were opened in Singapore when I went to "K-Cuts" - which is as close to an automated hair-cut as you can get. Full haircut, in 10 minutes for S$10. Nobody speaks english, so talking isn't an option. They use vacuums to collect your hair. I hold up three fingers, point to the top of my head, two fingers, point to the side. That's the sum total of guidance. And…

Your anecdote is good to keep in mind, I learned something. While I don't think the US has any auto-cut places (oh the liability!), we certainly have had infomercials selling vacuum haircutting machines for a while[0]. I'm not sure they've made a huge dent in the beauty industry to date. Beauty is not an industry that a bit of tech pixie dust will magically transform. Haircuts aren't just a utility, they're a persona…

I'm really interested in finding out - at $10/haircut/10 minutes - It's the sort of thing you can do casually every couple weeks without even thinking about it.

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.

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#85

Post by emmanueloga_ » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 2:01 AM UTC

Sometimes I do find programmers that do not know how to, say, install a linux distro, or at a lower level, don't understand what a data bus is, or how one bit of information is actually stored in a computer.

> Learning how to make car parts from scratch gives younger workers insights they otherwise wouldn’t get from picking parts from bins and conveyor belts, or pressing buttons on machines.

This is also the spirit of the nand2tetris [1] course, currently running on coursera [2]. The book is a really entertaining read too. Depending on how familiar you are with electronics you may be able to outpace the video course quite a bit.

Also,

> “Fully automated machines don’t evolve on their own,”

not yet... :p

1: http://www.nand2tetris.org/

2: https://www.coursera.org/course/nand2tetris1

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#86

Post by mst » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 2:39 AM UTC

Artistry121 wrote: post #68

hkmurakami wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two distinct groups involved here. 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 positio…

This is a great perspective. 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?

I would suspect that the engineers theorise what can be done and produce a small scale demonstration and then the craftsmen take the concept and refine it into something that's reproducible at scale too.

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#87

Post by NamTaf » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:26 AM UTC

ffk wrote: post #65

hkmurakami wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two distinct groups involved here. 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 positio…

That's a good point. 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. :)

The appropriate analogy for silicon valley would be if your programming rockstars were not the same people as your architectural rockstars and neither had more than the most basic experience in the other area. Imagine if you had a bunch of people who could theorycraft a great system really well but didn't understand much past hello world, and you had some really amazing programmers who could code just about anything efficiently but didn't understand system architecture.

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.

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#88

Post by NamTaf » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:32 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #44

ffk wrote: post #6

This is a fundamental shift from how many other factories work. 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 cap…

Hmm, 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 worker…

Some tradestaff do progress in to 'engineering' roles and in many professional engineering organisations there's provision for recognising this. They tend to be given a title like 'technical officer' and their role is to do the engineering with a bit less maths and a bit more hands-on experience.

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.

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#89

Post by mbell » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 3:47 AM UTC

tehchromic wrote: post #12

I think this is a real indicator and validation of what the next economy will look like: humans at the apex of the arts, where imagination and craft will be highly valued in the everyday folk worker, and mundane or trivial tasks will be assigned to automatons. We will choose our own employment adventure.

I agree it's what the 'next economy' will look like, but it's also what the 'last economy' looked like. Prior to the entire tech movement was agriculture, resource harvesting and material manufacturing.

Previously farming was done by hand, now a single machine replaces a hundred workers.

Previously coal was mined by hand, now a single machine replaces thousands of workers.

Previously trees were axed by hand and sluiced by river, now you can clear a forest with a couple machines and a couple skilled operators.

Previously producing cloth required massive numbers of skilled workers, then the loom was invented.

I often see this argument that we're in some unprecedented state of replacing labor with automation. I don't see any proof of that. I think we replaced labor with automation at a much faster pace during the industrial revolution and made it out just fine.

I'd love to see some stats on the differences if anyone has them.

Re: ‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

#90

Post by gregpilling » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 4:25 AM UTC

mbell wrote: post #89

tehchromic wrote: post #12

I think this is a real indicator and validation of what the next economy will look like: humans at the apex of the arts, where imagination and craft will be highly valued in the everyday folk worker, and mundane or trivial tasks will be assigned to automatons. We will choose our own employment adventure.

I agree it's what the 'next economy' will look like, but it's also what the 'last economy' looked like. Prior to the entire tech movement was agriculture, resource harvesting and material manufacturing. Previously farming was done by hand, now a single machine replaces a hundred workers. Previously coal was mined by hand, now a single machine replaces thousands of workers. Previously trees were axed by hand and sluic…

or... previously everybody had to produce the food they ate, now only 1% does. previously many people had to dig out coal, now a machine has relieved thousands of a shitty job......