The factory of the future

What-a-load-of-tosh Department

Image by Nicole Dralle from Pixabay

“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment” – Warren G. Bennis.

When I first came across that quote, some years ago now, I thought "What a load of nonsense". It sounds clever for a second or two, until you think about it. It's completely self-referential for one thing: I mean, why do you need someone at all if they're not allowed to do anything? If you don't have the man, you don't need the dog.

But what if you do need someone, say to switch the machine off if it's about to blow up, the dog would bite their arm off.

I have recently had a glimpse of this techno-utopia, when I cancelled an order I'd been mis-sold by the phone company I use. The 'system' thought I'd cancelled everything. Bang went the landline. Next we were told the broadband is going. (Not yet, thank goodness.) I was told I would need to send all the broadband hardware back, and then put together a new set of identical hardware myself in order to get broadband back.

Cue email after email, text message after text message, as the machine rolled inexorably on. Nobody could stop it, because it is automatic, we were told.

Not completely automatic mind you: the first automated email informed me that we were also going to lose the unlimited minutes on our mobile phones, and be put onto so-called Standard Minutes. On looking these up I discovered that the cost of that is high enough to warrant taking out a bank loan. 

It turns out that that information is out of date: apparently there is no longer any such thing as Standard Minutes.

Now that is something that annoys me. Twenty years ago I was teaching my students how to link different files (and types of file) in such a way that when the information is updated in one place it is automatically updated everywhere else. You can do it quite straightforwardly, for example, in a relational database such as Access. [A relational database is one in which tables of information are linked, in such a way that when you update the data in one table every other table it links to gets updated automatically.] If my students knew how to do it, why can't the engineers at a major telecommunications company do it?

After hours and hours and hours on the phone over three weeks, we finally managed to speak to someone who has assured us that all (or at least most: we may not get our old landline number back) will be put back to what it was before this debacle, and to ignore the avalanche of messages being sent.

Thank goodness the designers of their system didn't listen to Warren Bennis and install a dog.

The saga continues...