>> +----------------------------------------------------------------+
>> A robot can build a car. But a robot cannot buy a car... The
>> explosion in the development of computer- and robotic-based
>> manufacturing is seeing the rapid expansion of laborless
>> production systems.
>
>Robots can NOT (presently) build cars. While it is true that many
>operations in an auto assembly plant can and have been robotized
>(especially within the paint and body shop departments), an auto assembly
>plant still requires significant amounts of human laborers. "Laborless
>production systems" (e.g. flexible manufacturing systems) are mostly used
>in small batch manufacturing plants rather than assembly plants.
>
>Jerry
>
Correct about the auto assembly line. But the idea of the FMS is NOT
"laborless production system" in today's business-school textbook. Instead,
it is even more "labor intensive," in terms of the importance of human
intervention in the production process, than the comic-book version of
Fordist assembly line. Small batch manufacturing is the key. Exactly because
model change and task adjustments are constant affairs, direct workers'
intelligent initiatives are crucial for those kinds of production. That's
one reason why "human relations" talks are in fashion in today's business
schools.
Robots cannot presently build cars, and I don't think it can build cars in
the forseeable future either. Maybe I am myopic, which is physically true
anyway, but if we look closely, any material production involves a degree of
uncertainty which cannot be exhausted by previous rational designs. Thus
dead labor (machine) can never replace live labor of thinking human beings.
Just try to design a robot to pick up trash on the floor and feel the pain,
then you know you'd better have some human being do it. I did not learn this
from Marx, but from classmates in my master study who work as engineers and
managers in the Ford plants in the Detroit area.
When I took my quality-assurance and lean-production classes in business
school a few years back in the US, I am always amazed at the degree of
agreement of my straight-arrow meat-and-potato professors's ideas and my
supposedly Marxist ones, such as the irruducible centrality of human labor
to any kind of production. It seems that only a weird segment of the
academics (and Sci Fi authors) hold that machine CAN replace human beings.
The robots-gonna-do-it-all theories always sound like fetishism to me, but
also always taken as a matter of fact by Daniel Bell & co., and even some
progressives.
Hsin-Hsing "Dikoh" Chen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ph. D. Candidate
Dept. of Science and Technology Studies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
USA
Lecturer,
Dept. of Sociology
Tung-Hai University
Taichung 407
Taiwan
