Posted: May 26, 2019 12:58 pm
tuco wrote:If you were moving boxes from one place to another your whole life, found it a great job, then called my "Automation frees people for menial and mundane tasks, literally." bullshit, because it would not free you from anything as you love moving boxes from one place to another, then I would have to reconsider. But that is not so and both of you freed yourself from doing such stuff not only because it was a shit job but also because it was shit pay.
Ford's delivery robot and associated driverless vehicle is not a menial and mundane task, nor is it necessarily a shit job for shit pay. I have done this for most of my working life. The job involves rather more than picking up a carton, taking it elsewhere, and putting it down. Basically, a production unit is given an area to service and a volume of goods to distribute (and collect later in the day), which varies from day to day. You need to organise this to make it manageable. Granted, in my case the freight could be a pallet (or 14), a crate, a jiffy bag, or whatever, delivered to a residential property, a clothing shop in a mall, the receiving dock of a factory, a mine site, a particular person in an office on the 27th floor, but the underlying principle is the same. I was given the task of organising how to do the day's work any way as I saw fit. There were easy days, and there were - shall we say - challenging ones. The only requirement was that the transport company's customer service department did not get flooded with complaints from people in the area I serviced. I was paid well enough to buy a little terrace house and pay the mortgage off in under ten years. And yes, I enjoyed doing this kind of work. The combination of having to physically exert myself, laying out a plan to handle the workload and changing it on the fly when things do not pan out as expected, suited me.
The Ford clip illustrates automation of my job in its embryonic stage. One day robots will become good enough to do my job as well as I have managed. Not long after that, it will do it better and more cheaply than that.