There’s a fascinating article at GE Report on how present technology consumer-style augmented reality is being used on the factory floor to assist workers in being more productive:
The system currently at the Waukesha lab came from Light Guide System, a Detroit-area maker of augmented reality tools for industry. The first applications are focusing on guiding workers through “the critical steps where we can’t afford to make a mistake,†Beacham says. But his team has already started expanding its scope and connecting it to face recognition technology, collaborative robots, or cobots, and Predix, GE’s software platform for the Industrial Internet.
Beacham says that facial recognition will enable plant managers to ensure that workers at specific workstations have the required training. It also will automatically sign the employee into GE’s IT systems and allow him or her to start or resume the job after a break. “We’re spending almost 100,000 hours a year on logging into our IT systems at GE Healthcare alone,†Beacham says. “This saves time and money.â€
Extending the AR system to cobots like Baxter or Sawyer from Rethink Robotics will allow the team in Waukesha expand the palette of tasks it covers to the “4Ds — dirty, dangerous, difficult and dull jobs,†Beacham says. “Let’s say the operator is doing assembly work. The cobot may take over and apply adhesive in a complicated pattern. When that’s done, the human jumps back in and does the next step.â€
Read the whole thing. No one seems to have lost his or her job in this process but it is ensuring that workers are safer and more productive.
I believe this is just the beginning of this and, as was the case with the personal computer in the 1980s, much of the impetus to use AR will be very small scale and come from the factory floor. That’s how improvements are made in a modern production environment, one guided by Deming’s principles.
Augmented reality (AR) should have been integrated into the manufacturing process during the first decade of the 21st century. It is not new. In the article, the Boeing reference should include a timestamp. Here is an article about it from 1997:
Virtual Assembly
There was also the ability to manufacture custom sized garments in the apparel industry. According to their commercials, one company is using it to manufacture men’s shirts. There is a gold mine waiting for anybody who does this with women’s clothes.
All these technology improvements do not raise the minimum requirements for workers. Instead, it places a ceiling on the maximum requirements a manufacturer must pay their workers. Technology allows the “lower IQ” workers to do the same job as the more skilled.
Because there are more less-skilled workers than more-skilled workers, the free-market should cause wages to be lowered, but it should raise the income of the lower end of the labor pool.
This has not occurred, but according to the classical economists, it should have. Adam Smith did not write about more advanced labor saving techniques being thrown out and a return to using more labor intensive, but cheaper, workers. For some reason, technology’s march forward was reversed. If somebody can explain this, I would appreciate it.
As these technological advances become more commonplace, new products can be developed, and some of the former factory floor workers can move into new positions that have been opened up because the technological advances make those jobs available to the once highly-skilled workers. Everybody benefits.
I suspect and hope that, rather than renderig workers redundant, we’ll find technology and worker together are more productive and creative than either alone.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work, Ben, and the way it’s always worked in the past. I believe that one of our most pressing challenges is to determine if we’ve put barriers to that as I believe we have. Example of barrier: the adversarial relationship between labor and management enshrined in law in Taft-Hartley. Neither Germany nor Japan have comparable barriers and I believe it’s paying off for them.