'Machine substitution' may bring about a technical unemployment crisis

In recent years, China's manufacturing industry is setting off a“machine substitution”A wave of automation upgrades as the main starting point. Undoubtedly, with“machine substitution”The upgrading and transformation of“Difficulty recruiting”“expensive labor”The human resources dilemma has also helped many companies to continue to improve their market competitiveness, continue to climb up the global value chain, and become a company with both quality and price advantages.“made in China”Benchmark.“machine substitution”The substitution effect on the labor force and the resulting potential unemployment risk, the changes in the content and methods of laborers' work under technological changes, etc. The development stage of the robot ①The first generation robot: teaching and reproduction type robot. In 1947, in order to carry and handle nuclear fuel, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States developed the world's first remote-controlled robot. In 1962, the United States successfully developed the PUMA universal teaching and reproducing robot. This robot controls a multi-degree-of-freedom machine through a computer, stores programs and information through teaching, reads the information during work, and then issues instructions. In this way, the robot can reproduce this action repeatedly based on the results taught by the human at the time. For example, the spot welding robot of the car, as long as it has taught the process of spot welding, it always repeats this kind of work. ②The second generation of robots: sensory robots. The teaching and reproducing robot has no perception of the external environment, the size of the operating force, the existence of the workpiece, the quality of welding, and whether it is good or bad. Therefore, in the late 1970s, people began to study the second generation. Robots are called sensory robots. This kind of robot has human-like senses in certain functions, such as force sense, touch sense, sliding sense, vision, hearing, etc. It can sense and recognize the shape, size and color of the workpiece through senses. ③The third generation of robots: intelligent robots. Robots invented since the 1990s. This kind of robot has a variety of sensors, which can carry out complex logical reasoning, judgment and decision-making, and autonomously determine its own behavior in the changing internal state and external environment. Research by domestic scholars has found that the overall replacement rate of robots in the labor market is less than 1%. Data from the China Labor Statistics Yearbook shows that the employment population in my country's manufacturing industry has continued to decline since 2013, with a decrease of more than 10 million people in the past five years.“machine substitution”is also considered a major factor. How to avoid a possible technical unemployment crisis in the future? To answer this question, not just focus on“machine substitution”The number and replacement rate of the new technology should also rethink the relationship between people and technology.“machine substitution”The term implies that workers as a factor of production can be replaced by robots as a new factor of production, while“machine substitution”The decision of the enterprise is nothing more than made by the enterprise manager according to factors such as input and return, production efficiency, production quality and so on. So, can there be another relationship between man and machine? Can machines be an aid and supplement to workers in the production process, rather than replacing workers? Combined with the historical experience of industrial automation processes, this“Robots help people”The technological change path should be feasible and practical, but it must have at least the following three elements. The first is to form a social consensus. Emerging technologies such as robots and artificial intelligence have a profound impact on people's daily life and work. Therefore, the choice of the path of technological change should be widely discussed in the whole society, and finally a social consensus will be formed. However, in the past few years, the automation upgrade of enterprises has almost been a decision-making path led by the enterprise unilaterally, which inevitably leads to the implementation of labor reduction, cost saving, and production efficiency-oriented enterprises.“machine substitution”technological transformation. The second is respect for the value of human labor. At present, there is a general attitude in society to despise blue-collar labor, including students in vocational schools.“To learn technology is to not be a worker”idea.“machine substitution”It boils down to the denial of parts of human labor (such as repetitive manual labor), the belief that machines can replace workers, automate production processes, and even monitor and manage manual operations. If with“Robots help people”As the core concept of technological transformation, the production process should be human-centered, machines should be the assistants of workers, and production and management should be supplemented by worker group work, workshop worker programming, and worker participation in automation solutions. This undoubtedly puts forward higher standards for the skill requirements of laborers, so it is also necessary to continuously improve the skills training system for laborers.