
'Gods' Make Comeback at Toyota as Humans Steal Jobs From Robots - sologoub
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-06/humans-replacing-robots-herald-toyota-s-vision-of-future.html
======
femto
Toyota has recognised that if you only have robots then innovation stops,
because you forget the skills that the robots are replacing.

Experience in manipulating materials, and doing it manually, is a valuable
thing. Toyota isn't going to start replacing robots with humans, but the
humans need an in depth understanding of what the robots are doing, so they
can then improve what the robots are doing. The best way to learn what the
robots are doing is to do it: get in there and watch how the metal flows, how
it reacts to heat and so on.

This has the potential to be an engineer's utopia. Presumably the valuable
thing isn't what the "gods" make (the robots make the stuff that sells for
money), but what they learn during the making process. Thus the "gods" are
free to work on things that won't immediately sell. Imagine a job where the
brief was "make whatever you like, just be sure to learn a lot while you do
it". It sounds like Toyota is rediscovering the golden era of the Industrial
Lab (Bell, IBM, ... ).

~~~
hkmurakami
Also, it works well in Japan and for Toyota in particular because of the lack
of labor mobility there. And I don't just mean Japan's general lack thereof;
rather, I'm pointing to the fact that (1) in Aichi prefecture, the only major
Auto maker is Toyota (whereas Hamamatsu and Tokyo regions have several), (2)
selling a house in the countryside (which the surrounding regions of Toyota
city is) is always a money losing proposition in Japan, making a long distance
move very difficult, and (3) once you are an employee at one of the Toyota
Group companies, you cannot change jobs to another Toyota Group company.

The "Gods" that you nurture will stay with you for perpetuity (or retirement)
under these conditions.

 _disclosure: I was a researcher at one of the Group companies._

~~~
w1ntermute
Wages are shockingly low in Japan. A junior developer in Tokyo would be lucky
to make $45k (at a domestic firm).

------
rdc12
Reminds me of this Plato quote about written record.

" If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will
cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling
things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of
external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for
reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its
semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will
make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as
men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a
burden to their fellows."

~~~
gshubert17
Thanks for this reference (dialog Phaedrus, 274e-275b). This quotes Socrates
telling a story about an Egyptian king telling the inventor of writing that
he's not the best judge of its ultimate usefulness. Ironically, Plato was a
writer and disseminated his thoughts by writing, which is how we have them.

~~~
delluminatus
Interestingly, Plato had significant reservations toward writing, and writing
philosophy in particular. He believed (as common among the ancient Greeks)
that philosophical truths emerged and were understood only through a spoken
dialectic. This probably accounts for his books' unusual format.

I have seen one particularly amusing quote where Plato basically says that he
would never write down philosophy. But I forget the exact wording and I can't
find the quote now.

------
dang
The original url was blogspam [1]. I changed it to point to the original
source. When you submit an article, please make sure it isn't lifting from
some other source; if it is, please follow the HN guidelines and submit the
original instead.

[1] [http://www.leftlanenews.com/toyota-assembly-line-robots-
repl...](http://www.leftlanenews.com/toyota-assembly-line-robots-replaced-by-
humans.html)

~~~
sologoub
Sorry, I've read leftlanenews.com for a few years now and never thought of it
as blogspam. Not affiliated with them in any way shape or form...

If you could share guidelines of how you determine blogspam would be helpful,
as I regarded these guys as a credible car-related news source.

Edit: To clarify, I view this site as a minor competitor to something like
Edmunds or KBB (for their new car stuff, not the used pricing book).

~~~
dang
By "blogspam" I didn't mean that the entire site was junk, or that you were
spamming HN. I'm using that word in a much narrower sense, for an article that
is merely a summary of some other original source. In such cases the HN
guidelines call for submitting the original source instead.

Many tech sites consist of nothing but such short summary articles lifted from
elsewhere. When a lot of those get submitted to HN, we ban the site. But I
didn't ban leftlanenews.com—just changed the url of this one story. If other
articles on that site are original, substantive content, you're still welcome
to post them here.

~~~
GFischer
Thanks for sharing your thought process and guidelines, we appreciate the
transparency.

------
ignostic
I understand why some (especially here) might think manual labor is useless,
but those more hardware-oriented people might understand the value. Even if
you've worked on a lawn mower or jimmy rigged a gadget you might understand
the potential gains.

When you tinker with something you see why it works, how it might work better,
etc. Sometimes a software architect needs to dig into the code. Sometimes a
mechanical engineer just needs to work with the parts. This has the added
benefit of putting the mind in a relaxed state where creativity tends to
occur. I know there are studies along these lines, too, but I'm not great at
tracking down or validating nuero/psych studies.

I have no idea if the benefits I mentioned the intended result, but I think
it's interesting. It may or may not be more beneficial to have people repair
broken things, solve mechanical problems, or create non-standard parts from
scratch to see what happens.

~~~
colechristensen
There are jobs suited to humans and jobs suited to machines. Most things which
are automated by machines ought to be done by humans some of the time for the
exact reasons you specify: people will be more clever than machines in some
ways for a very long time.

\---

It relates tangentially to my struggles with Ubuntu and modern automated
configuration tools .. that is, one gets the general feeling that a whole lot
of it is designed and implemented by folks who didn't ever really master doing
it by hand making the increasing layers of abstraction more and more shaky.

...or maybe I'm just old and grumpy.

------
knome
Reminds me of Asimov's short story "Profession".

[http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html](http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html)

~~~
_Adam
Great story, but there's one part of it that bothers me.

I really don't like how it portrays humanity as a race where only a tiny
percentage have the ability to innovate. All humans have this ability! Not all
may use it, but we all have it.

Yes.. I know I'm pointing out factual inaccuracies from a science fiction
story written 55 years ago, but because he used the term "human" explicitly I
feel the need to do so.

~~~
kevingadd
I'd love to agree with your idealism but I think it's a bit irrational.

It's impossible for us to KNOW whether a given person has the ability to
innovate, or the potential to be brilliant. That's absolutely true. However,
we have no concrete evidence to support the idea that any given individual CAN
innovate, or has the potential for brilliance.

Quite the opposite: We already know of many heritable traits that impair an
individual's ability to compete in the workplace, or perform effectively in
difficult fields. Most of these are classified as diseases or mental
disorders, but regardless...

Acknowledging that not every person is necessarily born with identical talents
and capabilities is important if we want to empower these people to do good
things and achieve what the rest of us can achieve. Claiming that everyone has
equal potential implies that those who _don 't_ overachieve are simply not
trying hard enough.

(I say this as a person who, due to environment or biology, ended up with an
unpleasant assortment of conditions that impair my ability to compete in the
workplace.)

~~~
Ygg2
I don't think it's irrational. Schools don't nurture creativity. They destroy
it. Rather effectively. However I might be wrong, can you name the traits
impair the general populace?

If people can't compete in the workplace, maybe we need a better workplace.

~~~
kevingadd
Who said anything about schools?

Anyway, to name a few that afflict people I know (or me, for that matter) and
all have devastating impact on productivity (often in different ways)

Chronic fatigue, ADHD/ADD (yes, it exists in adults; sometimes it's adult-
onset), clinical depression, bipolar disorder, dyslexia, dyscalculia, etc.

It's true that workplace improvements can help people with disadvantages be
able to participate and achieve good things, but this is exactly what I mean
when I say that people do not have equal potential and capability. To assume
otherwise, or blame these disadvantages solely on schooling or some other
controllable factor is hopelessly naive. We have to accept that we can't apply
our own experiences universally to everyone, and that we have to understand
them and recognize their challenges so we can help overcome them.

~~~
Ygg2
> It's impossible for us to KNOW whether a given person has the ability to
> innovate, or the potential to be brilliant

Sure it's possible to guess, people will innovate depending on their
creativity coefficient. That coefficient goes down drastically once kids
finish education. If you want more creativity, then you need to address that
major hurdle first.

I think a large number of those listed aren't real illnesses (dyslexia,
dyscalculia) or are often misdiagnosed (ADHD/ADD). I think there might be a
way to actually get those people using some means to be useful to society at
large.

------
alrs
The future of software is the aggregate of teenagers the world over messing
around with Linux, Arduino, etc.

Without entry-level jobs they're just going to be distro-hoppers who never get
a foot in to industry.

~~~
sanderjd
This is a tantalizing comment, but I'm having trouble seeing how it's relevant
to the OP. Care to elaborate?

~~~
alrs
Manual work is being brought back so as to help develop experts.

------
sbierwagen
Naked, obvious PR plant.

~~~
wwweston
It may be PR, but if so, it's the best kind -- there's a lesson to reflect on
here.

There are limits to automation (and, more generally, any reduction of
knowledge/craft to process). As you depend more on robots (literal or
figurative) to execute process, over time you're likely losing a body of
knowledgable/craft-capable practitioners. You can automate worker _function_ ,
but until we have AI, not their perspective and the potential expertise that
comes with engaging with a task over time. And you concentrate the
responsibility for improvement in a smaller number of hands.

That doesn't mean there aren't also yields to automation -- sometimes big
ones. Just means there are limits too.

By way of comparison... it's great that many software developers are much more
productive in Ruby or Python or whatever than they would be in C or assembly.
But when the time comes where you have to make a key optimization, if you
don't have a "god" around who can be productive at a lower level, you may be
bound to a sub-optimal approach (you might not even _know_ about the potential
optimizations).

~~~
rodgerd
> As you depend more on robots (literal or figurative) to execute process,
> over time you're likely losing a body of knowledgable/craft-capable
> practitioners.

We should understand this well from software. There's plenty of airline and
financial software people don't want to meddle with too much because the
people who remember the business rules behind it are retired or dead.

~~~
kalleboo
My father is actually in the process of this right now. He was one of the few
people in his company who worked on the rules coded into the current software
written in the 70's-80's. He's the only one who can tell the programmers why
certain things were done (if they were significant, or just optimizations to
make the batches run in time on the VAX hardware of the time). He's heading up
the project to port the whole thing to a more modern system, but he's planning
to retire soon...

------
jpwright
I can't wait to pick up a hand-crafted artisanal Camry from local Kami-sama.

------
sologoub
The one thing that's not very clear, is whether they are focusing on specific
high-end cars for this hand-crafter stuff or not.

If FLA and such, then this isn't all that novel. Even relatively modestly
priced S2000 had a lot of manual labor in the assembly process. (Don't think
it had a hand-built crank, but for a 30k that's a bit lavish...)

~~~
itazula
The main point isn't to build hand-crafted cars. The main point is to
understand the process and materials.

------
ginko
FWIW, Volkswagen does something similar for their Phaetons in Dresden:

[http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/en/](http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/en/)

------
jmt7les
But if we let the robots handle all the manual labor, and had everyone working
in advancing physics and such we could make so much more useful progress.
Robots are inevitable.

~~~
wpietri
That's a bold but unsupported assertion.

Immersion in the details of a craft is what advances the craft. If I'm going
to automate something, the first thing I do is to try it manually, because
that's how I know the right way to automate it. But once I bake that knowledge
into inaccessible software, I have basically stopped progress.

The number of people who can advance basic physics is relatively small, and
when they're doing it, they still need food to eat and cars to drive. The way
to maximize the number of people doing physics is to make every other craft as
productive as possible. Robots will have a place to play in that, but not in a
naive "replace all persons with robots" way.

------
parennoob
Perhaps I am searching too closely for parallels here, but what would be the
analogue of this from a software engineering perspective?

Maybe writing something like an HTTP server in assembly, or something? I
remember this
([https://github.com/nemasu/asmttpd](https://github.com/nemasu/asmttpd))
popping up on HN some time ago. Writing your own kernel, or compiler? Building
your own 8-bit microcomputer, and then running something on it? (A project
like that was part of a course I took at college, and it did a decent job at
demystifying many common concepts about computing).

~~~
ojii
those examples all sound like very good parallels. you're building something
"by hand" to learn how they work/are constructed. the software you ship you
will still build using "robots" (eg linux, nginx, your framework of choice)
but do so remembering the lessons you learned.

------
gilgoomesh
This is being presented as a good thing? I'm sorry, I take no pride in having
humans replace robots for repetitive manual labor.

The story is either a weird marketing ploy, or it's misreporting, or it's
downright stupid. You do not need to replace robots with humans to improve
manufacturing processes.

Perhaps the reality is that they're simply hiring more manufacturing and
operations experts to oversee continuous process improvements and this hiring
is being misinterpreted?

~~~
wpietri
No, this article is very much in line with Toyota's roots.

Toyota's history is one of treating their workers as valuable participants who
use their brains at least as much as their hands. They eschew all sorts of
fancy technology, not just robots, because technology is relatively
inflexible. This approach allowed them to kick the asses of the US car
manufacturers in the post-WWII period, continuing to increase productivity per
worker long after US manufacturers leveled out.

Their approach isn't to hire experts. It's to turn their workers into experts
on their work, and on improving that work. This has been literally
incomprehensible [1] to US car companies because it's of the dominant US
paradigm, managerialism [2].

See, e.g., _Toyota Kata_ for more on how Toyota approaches this.

[1] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/403/n...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/403/nummi)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-
Eco...](http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Economic-
Controversies/dp/178032071X)

