The Impact of Automation

Harley Shaiken

Keynote Speech to the 1985 Conference on Decision and Control, 1985

Summary

                  The speech hold by Harley Shaiken at the Keynote Speech to the 1985 Conference on Decision and Control in 1985 appears to be an interesting lecture about the importance of automation with a point of view different from the traditional thoughts related to hard automation, but instead more cooperation-oriented.

The speaker underlines the fact that the introduction of automation in a company and in society in general implies positive and negative aspects.

The first concern to be addressed is related to engineers and it’s about the impact on the workplace, automation in fact appears to improve the workspace through computer technology, it allows improving skills creativity and makes a more autonomous working environment.

The second aspect on which Harly Shaiken is concerned is the fact that today companies facing automation are faced between the decision of autonomy against authority and reality brings generally an increase of authority, a direction which frequently degrades the final quality of the work.

Behind automation there is also a social paradox facing directly researchers, in fact it appears clear that academic researches are often far from the manufacturing shopfloor and don’t really realize how to make automation really effective.

There is also a lack of feedback, values of a certain design are seldom made explicit.

In the production area the use of technology of the key solution for all problems may result in an increase of complexity from which is would be difficult, is not impossible to bring out something really effective, therefore automation should be thought as a tool cooperating with humans creativity, knowledge and special skills.

The speaker makes and example of a meeting he had during the 1984 International Machine Tool Show in Chicago, he had the chance to talk with the vice-president of a leading Japanese company in tool changer, presenting at the fair a tool changer capable of changing 700 tools, when questioned whether they used it also for their internal production, the answered was that they only sell it for the United States, since they were able to actually reduce the tools they need from 600 to only 70. This example, as another one of high technology in inventory management, where actually a zero-inventory policy is more suitable, done by an American Company in the food sector, is explaining how actually technology is not always necessarily the solution to problems.

Automation is also viewed sometimes as a tool for reducing human input under the assumption that human input increases variability in the production and therefore lower overall performances.

The reality is that factories face a huge amount of variable and actually humans are capable in some cases of even reducing the overall variability in such an environment.

Going back to the choice between authority and autonomy, machines are often programmed by external programmers rather than the machinist working on the shopfloor, there is not actual study demonstrating that this is the wrong approach, but there are cases of machinists lamenting that machines are not really performing effectively in this way. In the American Machinist magazine in 1983 a medium-size machine shop in Ohio performed a study on its performances after machinists lamenting the low efficiency of machines due to external programming, the result proved that for complex machines (mainly with 4 or 5 degrees of freedom) the system has actually on 26 programs error-free. Companies also often lament the hidden costs of automation, which are again due to excess technology investment and authoritarian approach. The speaker make the example of Ford, which between 1974 and 1980 performed studies on its line downtimes (between 40% and 60%), behind there was the issue of relations between the workers and automation, in fact automation should be guarantee job enrichment to avoid boredom of workers and unemployment and part-time employment in general.

Key Concepts

The impact of automation on humans