Technology: The ultimate moving target

Everyone from engineers to sociologists tries to gauge the impact of technology. The results of their efforts are mixed at best because technological advances can influence fields that were never considered when the technology was developed. Fifty years ago, few if any would have predicted that ever-increasing densities of semiconductor devices on slabs of silicon would result in the ubiquity of mobile devices—or even personal computers, for that matter.

We still have little understanding of what this tech revolution really means from an economic, social, or political standpoint. We just know that it’s really profound, do our best to work with it, and try to gainfully exploit it.

Where Is Technology Headed?

Tech companies obviously are used to dealing with serious, even earth-shaking technological change. They’re generally in the business of creating it. But even they have difficulty gauging the magnitude and timing of its impact.

Xerox, a tech giant in the 1960s, could have owned the personal computer space, both hardware and software, through its intellectual property developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Silicon Valley. The company didn’t see the PC revolution coming. It got stuffed. Likewise, Kodak, a tech mammoth of the early to later part of the 20th century, could have owned the consumer digital imaging market. The people at Kodak knew the technology and even developed a lot of it. But hubris and lack of imagination basically crushed them.

Figuring out where technology really leads is extremely difficult, maybe even impossible. But we know this: Technology changes things. And it doesn’t take a major breakthrough to do so. A lot of incremental improvements of known physics, math, and chemistry, combined with ever-improving software capabilities, will do the trick.

Technology is already affecting older industries, including metal fabrication. We see it now in machines that are increasingly more precise and faster. We see it in support activities, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that are at last beginning to look like they were designed to be helpful and friendly to humans. We see it in the ability to significantly increase the productivity of sales and customer-service people. We feel it in places where we can’t even see it.

Educating for an Unknown Future

Right now I have the disturbing sense that, when it comes to people, we as an industry are mobilizing to win the last war. We know there is a lack of workers to properly staff the available jobs in manufacturing. There just doesn’t seem to be enough people with the right skills, and the deficit appears to be growing. Whether it is or not, the volume of outcries about the deficit surely is.

There are many reasons for this deficit. In response, we now have an ad-hoc national mobilization in the education community. We also have company involvement and support for increasing the availability of certain skills training. Good stuff, one would think, despite the fact that we have no idea of how many people will actually take advantage of this training or how many are needed.

I sense that if these are successful and loads of people do show up for the programs, these people may be getting training for jobs that may last for 10 years or even less. Or they may be getting that training for a life-long career. I sense that we simply don’t know. If it’s the former, we will have just committed another perceived hoax on a population that remembers the hoax of the stable, middle-class manufacturing job—the one that came to a sad end in the 1980s and 1990s. That hoax is at least one of the root causes of the labor shortage we experience today. We have to do better than that.

One of the worst jobs today is that of president of a community or vocational college. In the tech-related fields, including manufacturing, exactly what programs and content should that person staff for, how much should he invest, and how does he make sure graduates are not going to be unnecessary in a few years? These are tough, possibly career-ending decisions, because the overhead required for a manufacturing or fabrication program is much more than one in, say, paralegal studies. That educator has to somehow hit a fast-moving target determined by the speed and direction of technology deployment. His only resource to solve this is us—the people now working in manufacturing.

Growth in technical jobs will be offset by technological replacement. During the coming decades, the growth rate for jobs requiring technical skill actually may head into negative territory. Because machines allow one technically skilled person to be incredibly productive, we simply might not need as many technically savvy people to support economic growth. One can make a strong case for that outcome. Smart community college presidents know that too.

How Many?

Just what skills will we need in five or 10 years, and how many skilled people will we need? The answers to these questions are of incredible importance to metalworking and manufacturing in general. We cannot even begin to come up with a realistic answer until we understand where relevant technologies are headed and when they will become economical to use.

What follows are some technology areas that will likely reduce the need for skilled people in the future to achieve the same level of output that we produce today. This includes hands-on skill as well as mental skill—the ability to understand, manage, and communicate about that technology.

1. Robots are still in their infancy. Their utility has grown rapidly while their costs continue to drop. These include not just stationary machines, but mobile ones such as for conveyance and storage.
2. Artificial intelligence (AI), a very active and broad field, offers the prospect of mechanizing many routine decision-making and other skills, such as machine programming, scheduling, and the like. This intelligence does not have to be humanlike in power or cognition. It doesn’t need to be R2-D2. It just needs to work in specific applications.
3. With the Internet of Things, machines interconnect not just on a local network but also on the Internet where, for example, repair and performance diagnostics can be done remotely on a mobile device. This will tie into robotics and AI.
4. Sensors have become smaller, cheaper, and more accurate. Along with intelligent software, sensors are the keys to today’s automatic machine technologies. Advancements include distributed versus local (discrete) sensors. Improvements are coming from all fronts, including military, aerospace, and biomedicine, and will be useful in many applications.
5. Materials science is pushing everything toward lighter, stronger, and cheaper. Current research and development eventually may lead to new materials that will have a similar impact as plastics did 60 years ago. This will affect how we make things in a dramatic way.

None of this is just in the realm of university research. It is upon us, and it has a huge impact on what we need going into the future. It is not going to take 50 years for it to have remarkable effects on metalworking in general. (Note that I didn’t mention 3-D printing. This technology is profound for 3-D device manufacturing. I believe that it will be much less profound for sheet metal fabrication, which is topologically 2-D.)

So what skills are we going to need given the technological wave that is just starting to hit us? Will we really need laser technicians or operators who actually understand the machine? Will we need skilled machinists if all they do is monitor? Will we need G-code programmers if the programming can be done automatically? Will we need estimators and costing engineers if sensors and software can decipher even the most complex drawing and basic AI can generate routings, costs, and programs? Will we need maintenance people to diagnose machine failures if the Internet of Things and sensors can do it frequently and more accurately before the catastrophic failure actually happens?

Yes, we will probably need them. But probably not nearly as many, relative to the total output of industry. But what skills will we need in this radically different environment, which may be only a half generation away? I think that the skills we will need are going to be far different from what we are demanding today. We need to think and get this right. We need to educate the educators.