Abstract
Etymological warnings
Robota, a Czech word meaning serf labour or, more generally, drudgery, gave birth to the English term ‘robot’ with the publication of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. In today’s context, the etymology is not reassuring, with its echoes of slavery and hard labour. Slavery is a word we are forced to talk about again since, with the advancement of work carried out by robots, people run the risk of being forced or self-induced to comply with what is required by devices controlled by artificial intelligence. We are getting used to living so intimately with technologies that we do not bother to examine them in-depth.
Creating harmony between automation and human workers
Human Manufacturing (HUMAN) is the name of a research and innovation project of the European Commission’s Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS). It involves 12 partners from six European countries and is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme. 1 The aim is to create ‘…workplaces where automation and human workers operate in harmony to improve the productivity, quality, performance of the factory as well as worker satisfaction and safety’. 2 According to CORDIS, HUMAN will develop solutions that will remove the barriers to: the ‘adaptability and flexibility of humans’ in a constantly changing workplace; the ‘alignment of new and complex tasks with human cognitive and physical skills’; and the ‘synchronization of enterprise goals with human expectations’. These solutions, it suggests, will then have ‘significant impacts on higher customization capability, productivity, quality, worker satisfaction’ and will ‘empower [the] competitive position of the EU manufacturers’. 3
Work is changing: the hand and the head are intimately connected. From the perspective of Human Manufacturing, work is a word that encompasses a multiplicity of attributes. If the modus operandi in society is to maximize allocative efficiency, then, among those attributes, toil (tension of the body and fatigue of the mind) and performance (carrying out what has been ordered by others) will stand out. If, on the other hand, it is the transition from a low to a high level of education that prevails, climbing the steps of learning, we shall find at the top of the list of attributes preparing (putting oneself in a position to deal with a situation) and undertaking (undertaking an enterprise).
The past industrial revolutions have put efficiency on the throne, but learning will take its place as the vicissitudes of automation, artificial intelligence and robotics unfold. The age of mechanization produced a bottleneck between doing and thinking. The current revolution enhances the position of those technological craftspeople whose working hands and thinking heads are intimately linked. Their work relies on the interaction between hands and mind, combining technological education with the liberal arts. As is often repeated, if not always with conviction, it was Steve Jobs who, introducing the iPad 2, said, ‘It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough – it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing’.
The value of interdisciplinary thought
Against this backdrop, take the case of Comau, the Italian industrial automation and robotics company, a subsidiary of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. At Comau, engineers make robots dance, showing us the embrace of science and engineering with design and the arts. Comau’s Factory 4.0 is like an orchestra, with engineers making robots’ movements function in accord with human behaviour. Committed to orchestrating change, companies like Comau are stepping into the current phase of our history, which requires an ‘entirely new cultural perspective’ and an ability to think on a ‘species level’ (Ord, 2020).
For some time now, precisely for this purpose choreographers in California have been participating in Stanford University’s mechanical engineering doctorate. Digitization is uniting science and engineering with design and the arts in a golden embrace. When barriers break down, creativity becomes a key player on the stage of human-centred engineering and uses of technology. The arts act as a catalyst in converting scientific and technological knowledge into new processes, products and services. Maintaining a high propensity for techno-humanist entrepreneurship means encouraging the ideas that can nurture start-ups which engender new values: this requires continuous learning and willingness combined with an ability to advance into the unknown.
As the race towards robotization continues, it is important to become accustomed to the notion that a genuinely flourishing intellect is a well-rounded mind whose possessor has knowledge of, say, engineering, poetry, mathematics and music – and this knowledge then informs action. If the jobs that are not easily replicated by machines are those that are connected to essential human qualities, impulses and activities – such as purpose, initiative, empathy, negotiation, teamwork and leadership – we need a varied and powerful workforce of people educated in the arts and humanities as much as in the sciences.
It is, then, with creativity and independent thinking that we need to prepare for the incoming wave of the evolving robotic workforce. Automation, artificial intelligence and robotics are rapidly changing the industrial landscape, the people in it and the lives of all of us. The fact is that the human mind tends to treat an original idea in the same way the body treats a strange protein: it rejects it. This mistake is potentially catastrophic if, as highlighted by the philosopher Toby Ord (2020) and the economist Richard Baldwin (2019), ‘Globotics’, to use Baldwin’s term (signifying the combination of automation, artificial intelligence and robotics), is not aligned with human values and so overwhelms our ability to adapt. As Huw Price (2012), co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, argues: ‘It seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology’. With the development of artificial intelligence, suggests Price, humans could at some point be destroyed by ‘machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don’t include us’.
Humanity has reached the point at which culture is becoming the primary driver of an evolutionary surge, surpassing technological, environmental and physical constraints. The consequences of the working of technology must be faced: if we accept this as something we do not need to understand, we are lost.
Preventing the new industrial revolution from producing a mental block between doing and thinking is within reach of the human being not only as Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber but also, and to no small extent, as Homo Creativus. The enterprise must revolve around people rather than being structured around its products and services: with this approach, what emerges is an enterprise that promotes a style of working centred on human values and the critical spirit in the midst of an array of technologies that are replacing people in the performance of so many tasks. The human dimension of the enterprise is then reflected in the new perception of workers as co-creators and entrepreneurs, who can communicate with each other coherently and fluidly, facilitating mutual understanding.
Robots will not displace us if we take care to enrich our ability to speculate through the relentless learning of critical thinking. Learning in this context is an exercise that will enable us to adapt to the challenges of the future, an exercise that requires us to step into the path of change as it is being charted. Workers will learn to love robotics and artificial intelligence if they can embrace these innovations while staying in control of new technologies. Teaching people how to create and collaborate with intelligent machines should be accompanied by learning how to think in ways that are alien to machines.
The value of intellectual capital
In the 1990s, Skandia’s Leif Edvinsson, a Swedish organizational theorist, conceived of a report on intellectual capital to accompany the annual company report, on the grounds that this capital is at least as important as financial capital for the generation of genuinely sustainable corporate income (see Edvinsson and Malone, 1997). However, there are still only a few companies that measure their intellectual capital – which is made up of employees, the customer base, reputation, intellectual property, social relations and entrepreneurial culture. All these are ‘soft’ values, the roots of the corporate tree, with its hanging fruits of remuneration, profits, dividends and positive spillover to the economy. No longer should we need to say, as the behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner (1969) argued, ‘The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do’.
Will the jazz band be the orchestra of tomorrow’s factory?
To pursue the example we considered earlier, Comau presents itself as an empathetic company, capable of recognizing the humanity of the people who work for it, understanding their feelings and being receptive: ‘I notice you, I listen to you and I act with you’. The team has to be in tune when the work in the factory faces the transition from full subtraction (removing parts of material by turning and milling) to vacuum filling (additive manufacturing) which involves adding layer after layer of material to get the desired product. Work is no longer broken down into small tasks requiring increasing levels of control; rather many tasks are performed through horizontal processes that cut across different business functions and specialities. Success, therefore, is no longer dependent on the control of each individual worker, but on the ability to align all the actors involved, inside and outside the company.
In Post-Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker (1993), whose writings contributed to the foundations of the modern business corporation, writes: In the baseball-type team, players get their information from the situation. Each receives information appropriate to his or her task, and receives it independently of the information the teammates all receive. In the symphony orchestra or the soccer team, the information comes largely from conductor or coach. They control the “score.” In the doubles tennis team, the players get their information largely from each other. This explains why the change in information technology, and the move to what I have called the “information-based organization” has made necessary massive “re-engineering.” (Drucker, 1993: 88)
The transition from hardware to software is pushing organizations towards this evolution. Entrepreneurial skills come into the picture, and there is a need to train in the gymnasium of complex conversation governed by social norms that promote collaboration and rapid and promiscuous experimentation among individuals.