HOW POSSIBLE AND DESIRABLE IS THE REPLACEMENT OF HUMANS BY MACHINES?
The elimination of physical effort as a source of energy in the production process has already been underway for several decades. Factories without workers on packaging and palletizing lines, driverless forklifts, is no longer a rare phenomenon but an irreversible trend.
Dictated by economic imperatives: increased productivity, reduced production costs, simplified work organization, refocusing on the company’s core businesses. This phenomenon will accelerate even further after the health crisis.
The sooner a company moves on to automating menial tasks, the more likely it is to maintain the same level of employment. Indeed, the replacement of men by machines for the performance of non-productive menial tasks is a growth acceleration factor that promotes the recruitment or transfer of staff to positions related to the core business of the company.
By reducing its production costs and concentrating the management of its workforce to carry out production tasks with high added value, substantial savings are made and allow production costs to be lowered, making the company more competitive. and therefore more attractive on the market.
However, in this new organization, it is no longer possible to leave even the smallest of tasks to chance, the robot and the tool being largely devoid of any concept of initiative.
Thus, the replenishment of a consumable store must be calculated and planned. The palletizing schemes designed and programmed, and finally incidents related, for example, to the possible fall of products that are poorly stabilized to the ground, can lead to total disorganization of the production line and production stoppage.