The role
of technology

The recent world crisis has highlighted a fundamental aspect: the weakness of the human being in relation to the growing demand for goods. If we wanted to look at the problem from a purely instrumental point of view, we could explain it with the fact that too many companies and supply chains still use human workers to make production possible. Provocations aside, however, it is clear that, regardless of the sector, in many cases the physical presence of workers is crucial to lead the creation of consumer goods in port.

The post Covid 19 world will want to find a solution to this, let’s call it “productive dysfunction”. And it will do so by creating a system capable of resisting events of this kind without having to experience a new industrial lockdown.

The scope of the so-called industrial robotization process will therefore be enlarged.

Therefore, starting from the simple assumption that machines do not get sick, as they do not ask for breaks or holidays, it will soon be concluded that a radical rethinking of the industries of the production system is needed.

An extensive robotization of the functions, together with a global reorganization of the “factory” macro-organism (a concept that many are already applying to build the production units of the future) will be the likely solution adopted. The machines can be designed to replace most of the manual intervention and thus significantly reduce the necessary workforce, limiting it to strategic interventions for the installation, maintenance and management of the machines themselves.

The future that awaits us will therefore see a significant development of robotic technologies and a proportional reduction in the presence of human workers. The economic impact of the pandemic has heightened this sentiment and has clearly shown which strategies will need to be adopted.

The “distance factor”, in this case, will be used inclemently by companies to justify progressive dismantling of the workforce. An exponential investment in the so-called artificial intelligence and machine learning will allow to create integrated structures that will need fewer and fewer human beings to evaluate the production choices on the merits.

A growing number of cases, monitored over time and subjected to stochastic evaluation algorithms, will make it possible to foresee convenient choices on prospective models so as to make not only the production but also the life of the (few) workers employed more and more secure and – at least as it will come told from the propaganda point of view – desirable.

We will therefore experience a progressive loss of the centrality of industrial uses until we reach a definitive disintegration of the worker as a social and political figure, therefore capable of organized programmatic action. This will be followed by a consequent marginality of the role of the Unions and an atomization of the social consciousness of the worker himself.

Robotic integration

Following this systemic ideal, all production chains will have to be redesigned in order to make them perfectly integrated.

Advanced industrial robotization will in fact be a sine qua non condition for access to large supplies.

Except for some production categories, in which craftsmanship could still have an added value, the process of updating the factories will soon tend towards this epochal transition.

In fact, in the recent world crisis, the permeability of the production chain was experienced. It has been found that even if only one link in the chain of goods creation is blocked, the whole process ends up being arrested. As happened recently, and still happens, many companies have been forced to stop not only for the protection of workers but also and above all for the lack of supplies of semi-finished products.

This change of perspective will make two evidences clear. First, we will see an investment process never seen before towards the study and development of increasingly sophisticated robotic machinery. Secondly, a large part of the specialized workforce will try to move towards sectors with a predominance of craftsmanship, the only ones capable of guaranteeing continuity of use and investments in quality.