‘Gods’ edging out robots at Toyota facility

“To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”

That is an awesome quote.

Thanks for posting the article it was an interesting read.

Several Toyota employees indicate the direction of the world?

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 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]

This is nice PR but to imply that this is anything more than that is silly. These humans are clearly just improving the robots.

Manual labor is the right direction? Wouldn't you rather have robots automating all the difficult/dangerous/demeaning work?