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Bloomberg reports that Toyota's vision for the future includes replacing (some of) its robots with humans.
While it may sound nonsensical, the image starts to make sense when considering some aphorisms on automation (for example, "Computers have enabled people to make more mistakes faster than almost any invention in history, with the possible exception of tequila and hand guns") and the recent recalls of millions of cars.
It's far from suggesting that robots were causing the faults or that, by replacing robots by humans, the company will diminish the rate of reproducing the faults with high efficiency. However Toyota has had a culture for quality for quite a long time and seems to have identified a cause for the lack of quality (which caused the recalls) in the distance the computers and automation place between the workers and the product they manufacture.
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. In an area [...] at the forging division of Toyota's Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap by 10% and shortening the production line 96% from its length three years ago. 760 workers take part in 96 percent of the production process at its Motomachi plant in Japan Toyota introduced multiple lines dedicated to manual labor in each of Toyota's factories in its home country
"We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again," Kawai said. "To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine." Kawai, 65, started with Toyota during the era of Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System envied by the auto industry for decades with its combination of efficiency and quality. That means Kawai has been living most of his life adhering to principles of kaizen, or continuous improvement, and monozukuri, which translates to the art of making things.
(Score: 1) by CoolHand on Tuesday April 15 2014, @02:23PM
No, it is way more than that, and very insightful, IMHO. It is actually saying that without good hands-on experience, enginners and QC people can not have full intimate knowledge of the materials in order to assure quality and have the understanding to make further process and material improvements. This is the sort of thing that can only truly be possible with robotics when AI becomes so advanced that is is truly artificial intelligence of at least a level with humans. Possibly not even then, unless a method can also be determined to impart a human's lifelong sensory perceptions into the AI/robot.
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(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 15 2014, @02:38PM
A strong AI won't emerge without a good amount of sensory perception. Even more, it may be that the AI senses will need to overlap quite a lot over human senses for a human/AI communication to make... well... sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15 2014, @04:44PM
And even if there were a strong AI, it would not be a given that it could completely replace humans in this area. After all, what does an AI know about how humans perceive a car? For an AI, human perception and human feelings would always be alien. It could reason about them the way we can reason about the bee's ability to see UV. But would you think you could design a flower that's attractive to bees, other than by trial and error?
Something that an AI might consider an irrelevant irregularity might be seen by a human as major flaw. On the other hand, and AI might spend considerable time solving a cosmetic "problem" in the production process that humans wouldn't even notice.
So, to exaggerate, you might get pre-bumped cars (because the AI considers the bumps caused in the production process irrelevant) with a colour uniformity at the limit of human perception (because the AI considers changes in the colour which we would hardly notice as serious).