Robots vs Manual Labour: Cost & Efficiency Comparison

I'm confused, are we saying there's still major manufacturing around that doesn't use automated processes???? (Feel like I've dropped into a timewarp and gone back many years!)

Personally I find the more interesting question to be that now manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared due to automation, what are we going to do with all the people who used to work in manufacturing? Which is the huge political question world wide (for example, heavily relates to the rise of the far right in many countries)...but somewhat outside the IET's remit.

Antonio Leone said:

Considering that human have the brain, and they should use it, what do you think about the industrial automation investment?

So it's a related point, are jobs there for the benefit of the workers or for the business? In order to save a UK business form being relocated overseas, I spent several years working on a lean manufacturing turnaround project for small batch electronic products. One of our big areas was to improve production quality (partly through automation) and to both reduce test time and increase test coverage (entirely through automation). The problem was that this made the skilled test engineers roles redundant - previously they had fixed faulty units, now there were fewer faulty units to fix, and in any case the time they spent fixing faults cost more than the cost of they board the were fixing. The test engineers were furious that their brain power was no longer needed, but it had resulted in us producing better quality and cheaper products. (P.S. we did work to try to redeploy them in other technical roles as our whole aim was most definitely NOT to lose people from the business if we could avoid it.)

Having to make those decisions was a real eye-opener for me. I think it's worth remembering that manufacturing roles are artificial - they were created through advances in engineering, and so may be (and are being) removed through further advances in engineering. It's a massive societal problem in the UK, and has been for the last 50 years. But sadly for individual manufacturing engineers, trying to hold back from late 20th century (let alone 21st century) developments doesn't save jobs or use of the brains in the medium term...as the business is likely to fold anyway. As indeed happened to the company where I did my undergrad apprenticeship which folded in 1982! 

Andy Millar said:

Personally I find the more interesting question to be that now manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared due to automation, what are we going to do with all the people who used to work in manufacturing?

That question is arguably a few decades too late. 

My grandmother was of the generation where there was no widespread automation. But early in her career, the factory was automated and most people lost their jobs. My grandmother was one of the few kept on to help run the machines. This was sometime post war, probably 1950s.

So the question is, how did society change back then and does it have implications for any further changes. But I agree, most major manufacturing I expect to already be utilising robotic labour.

This post looks a little click-bait to me.

are we saying there's still major manufacturing around that doesn't use automated processes?

There are a couple of series on TV that go into various factories and I'm often surprised by what has and hasn't been automated - in some you see an almost totally automated production line that then feeds people who manually put the things into packaging or manually stack the boxes on a palette - which I would have thought would have been one of the simpler tasks to automate. Likewise output from one very clever machine is sometimes dumped into a bucket then pushed on a trolley by a human to  the hopper of the next very clever machine. In others you sill automated conveyor systems supplying workstations where people work with screwdrivers and hammers. In some cases the human input is a selling point (e.g. "quality hand finished") regardless of the economics of the actual process.

(Puts me in mind of the old Not the Nine o'Clock News sketch of a British Leyland assembly line .... "built by Roberts").

   - Andy.

Mark Tickner said:

So the question is, how did society change back then and does it have implications for any further changes. But I agree, most major manufacturing I expect to already be utilising robotic labour.

On Radio 4 this morning, in a very good programme about trade unions, the point was made that there's lots of fuss being made about AI making jobs redundant because now it's white collar jobs that are under threat...

Mark Tickner said:

That question is arguably a few decades too late. 

To get unusually serious for me, it certainly should have been asked a few decades ago, but we really need to hope it's not too late. Let's not get into specific politics, but the lack of employment opportunities is a perfectly understandable reason why there's been societal concerns across many or most Westernised counties, which of course have been played on.

It's a really tough question in a free market economy (which is why no-one's found a solution yet), it's not the responsibility of private or even public companies to provide employment. Private companies responsibility is to make a profit, public companies to provide a service. 

There is one area here which it feels to me should be solveable, and does come within the remit of this forum, why is it so difficult to get a job as an electrician while at the same time it is so difficult as a householder to locate a reliable electrician? (Ditto anyone else in the building trades.) My suspicion has long been that it's been the lack of companies able to provide apprenticeships because most are too small to be able to afford the time and cost, is that a reason and are there others?

There is a scale issue - in electronics, if you are 'going large' you invest a few million and get a custom chipset made, - the Apple/Intel sort of approach, or even Panasonic/ Toshiba, following in a path blazed in the 1970s by Mulllard/ Phillips. 

Modern chip making is both highly automated, when you want a thousand wafers of chips per year, and highly manual, if you scarcely need one wafer.

If you are not in the multi million financial depth of the custom chip, you can only stick parts made by others on a PCB. In an Research setting where you only want one or two, that may be a totally manual process, but even then, the pick and place machine will be used for small surface mount parts, and if you want more than ten of something it is automated.

What really cannot yet be automated is the final fix, especially for things that get installed in houses and gardens, which are also all different. 

for the same reason the bricks were laid by hand, the light switches have to fitted by hand, pipes for the loo fitted by hand etc but of course power tools and jigs make this as fast as possible, and generally the parts end up far cheaper than the labour for a lot of it.

In the end the jobs that remain are the ones where every case is different - and that means  hand on things like dentistry, nursing and perhaps hair dressing, and fitting things into odd locations, construction, plumbing and house wiring are good examples of that.

The step and  repeat jobs like putting lids on toothpaste have been automated all my life, and I am nearly retired, and there has been a gentle creep towards more complex things, and many processes now need cameras on computer to do final inspection or to line things up.

Its not a simple yes no question.

And the ideal of us all having more free time to pursue fine arts music and so on seems as far away as ever, we now just have far more stuff, and no time to play with it !

Mike.

There is a scale issue - in electronics, if you are 'going large' you invest a few million and get a custom chipset made, - the Apple/Intel sort of approach, or even Panasonic/ Toshiba, following in a path blazed in the 1970s by Mulllard/ Phillips. 

Modern chip making is both highly automated, when you want a thousand wafers of chips per year, and highly manual, if you scarcely need one wafer.

If you are not in the multi million financial depth of the custom chip, you can only stick parts made by others on a PCB. In an Research setting where you only want one or two, that may be a totally manual process, but even then, the pick and place machine will be used for small surface mount parts, and if you want more than ten of something it is automated.

What really cannot yet be automated is the final fix, especially for things that get installed in houses and gardens, which are also all different. 

for the same reason the bricks were laid by hand, the light switches have to fitted by hand, pipes for the loo fitted by hand etc but of course power tools and jigs make this as fast as possible, and generally the parts end up far cheaper than the labour for a lot of it.

In the end the jobs that remain are the ones where every case is different - and that means  hand on things like dentistry, nursing and perhaps hair dressing, and fitting things into odd locations, construction, plumbing and house wiring are good examples of that.

The step and  repeat jobs like putting lids on toothpaste have been automated all my life, and I am nearly retired, and there has been a gentle creep towards more complex things, and many processes now need cameras on computer to do final inspection or to line things up.

Its not a simple yes no question.

And the ideal of us all having more free time to pursue fine arts music and so on seems as far away as ever, we now just have far more stuff, and no time to play with it !

Mike.