For the last six years I've been working an assembley line that has 16 million dollars worth of robots and seven people. Two years ago they told us they would replace two of us with another robot. It had become excess on another line and was laying around so they wanted to put it to work.

We told them the job was rife with false positives in the testing and the computer controls of the robot wouldn't be able to cope. Two years of seven day weeks later, four more robots, and three more people on the line, and it's finally beginging to run smoothly.

I've forgotten half the songs I knew and haven't had a life. It's been eat sleep and work. The key thought here, is that a robot is never smarter than the human who programmed it in the first place.

GIGO

Garbage in, garbage out. The whole idea of using robots depends on the planning of the people who buy them. Really smart people run a good factory whether it has people or robots.

Having just retired from a factory run by idiots, I thought you might like to hear my rant.

Jeff Smith