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Logistics Automation and Us

Kevin Gue

Several years ago I began telling my children that I thought the greatest challenge for their generation was sensibly integrating technology into everyday life. It seemed at the time (and I continue to believe) that the blind adoption of rapidly advancing technology would have unknown and possibly deleterious effects on the human condition. Sounds like the subject for a nice book, eh? Alas, Nicholas Carr has beaten me to it with The Glass Cage: Automation and Us.

While recognizing the industrial and social benefits of automation, Carr points out that our inventions no longer help us accomplish work, but rather do the work for us. If the work is mindless or backbreaking, so much the better, but technology now threatens to rob us of many of the experiences that make us human. As I have written elsewhere, this point really resonates with me. I am reminded of a rhetorical question posed by a friend several years ago: "Why do I have to remember anything, when I can just look it up?" That is a serious question. The answer, of course, is that remembering—knowing—is a critical part of what makes us human. Machines look things up; humans know.

The challenge is to build technology that relieves man of the burden of work without robbing him of the satisfaction of work. Here Carr gives a huge shout out to the human factors research community, which knows a great deal about the interaction of humans and their machines, but which Silicon Valley has little interest in accommodating if that means limiting what can be done (and how much money can be made). Utopia, we are told, is life without work, instructing BeerBot to fetch us a cold one while we lie on the couch watching Netflix. Come to think of it, why can't BeerBot just anticipate that I need a cold one!

Back in the industrial world, automation has changed laborers and craftsmen into button pushers and caretakers, making sure nothing goes wrong. But as Carr points out, automation is not just a threat to the blue collar workforce. White collar jobs that involve design, analysis and decision making are very much in the cross hairs. If corporations are willing to replace workers with robots, why would they hesitate to replace a multitude of managers with Mr. Algorithm? They won't.

 

The effect of technology on employment is neither the point of Carr's book nor the point of this post. I am more interested in the effect of logistics technology on us. Is our industry developing machines and devices that improve the human condition, or are we developing machines and devices that solely improve ROI? Are these objectives mutually exclusive? Must they be?

 

What is really interesting to me is the prospect that, in an environment of scarce labor resources, companies that develop and implement human-centric work environments with "human optimized automation"—perhaps at a higher cost—might have the last laugh. What exactly "human optimized automation" looks like is still an open question, but I am sure it doesn't look like a row of buttons and toggle switches. Here's hoping that Carr's book gets a wide reading in our industry, and that suppliers and end-users alike find a way to develop automation that serves rather than dehumanizes us.

 


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