The Japanese company Hitachi wants to continuously optimize work processes with a system that permanently monitors them
In Japan, robots are treasured. Their development has also been called for in the rapidly aging country to keep immigration to a minimum. In Japan, only about 2 percent of the population are foreigners, no more than 50.000 immigrants admitted. In 2013, the government decided to invest $20 million a year in the development of robots to cater for the growing proportion of the aging population, including toilet robots, robots to help people move around or locate dementia patients. According to a survey, elderly Japanese were more likely to be cared for by robots than by an expatriate caregiver.
But it may be one thing to have robot dogs, to have robots bury guests or communicate with them, to be cared for by robots or to work alongside them, as long as the master-servant relationship is – or at least appears to be – in favor of humans. But this could also change soon.
Hitachi says it has begun developing an AI system that assigns work tasks to human employees, making them bosses. The reason, of course, is to optimize operations and improve productivity. For many years, Hitachi has been using the so-called Kaizen method to introduce changes through permanent observation and precise analysis in order to perfect and accelerate work processes, i.e. to continuously optimize the Taylorization of work.
The AI systems, which are designed to understand changes in demand, track processes on the ground in a kaizen sense. Thus, the work processes of the employees are permanently observed in detail and compared with new approaches to determine how a work process can be made more efficient. By analyzing the rough volumes of data that are generated on a daily basis and verifying them in logistical tasks, i.e. by iing commands, the company says it will increase productivity by 8 percent.
Human-in-the-loop takes on new meaning
It is hoped that with this "Cooperation" between humans and AI to improve operations in many areas. Until now, business systems had operated on the basis of pre-programmed instructions. For each change, the system had to update and rewrite programs, so it was not possible to react quickly to changes. With the integration of adaptive AI into business systems, as Hitachi has done, employees’ ideas for work improvement can be implemented in immediate response to changing work conditions or fluctuations in demand, in addition to kaizen monitoring and optimization of work processes.
Even if the AI systems give instructions to the employees via Big Data analysis, they could also introduce new approaches, of course, only if this optimizes the processes. The AI analyzes the consequences of new approaches, selects which work better based on known data about workflows, work volume and weather conditions, and ies new instructions based on that data. This can still talk about human-in-the-loop, but ultimately the AI decides how to work. Already Hitachi is saying that this makes it possible to, "Create an environment where people and artificial intelligence cooperate to continuously improve efficiency.
In a test with a management system upgraded with the AI program, the collection of goods in a distribution center was measured. Compared to the performance without AI, the processes controlled by AI reduced the necessary working time by 8 percent. Hitachi is now looking to apply AI not only to logistics, but also to finance, transportation, manufacturing, health care, government, everywhere. The goal is to contribute to the ability of processes to react flexibly and efficiently to changes in society. There is no mention of people and their needs in this obsession with optimization in order to reduce labor costs. In the end, not only will people become command receivers of a machine, whereas before they received their orders from a superior who also monitored their work productivity, but as soon as robots are able to perform the work with a certain flexibility and adaptability, they will disappear from the world of work altogether.