Nonsense At Work

Expect robots if profit is your purpose:

With every job loss, business fails to do its civic duty.  After all, the real business of business is to keep people busy and off the streets.

For centuries, businesses have been quite good at making money to pay for new jobs to keep more adults busy.  But somewhere along the way business leaders began to believe that their purpose was to create profits, not busy-ness.

The road to profit is not the road to full employment which is why technology is so rapidly doing away with the need for workers.

Here is my favorite example of this trend, first celebrated in a business magazine in 2003.  Somewhere in Japan is an automated factory which operates 24-hours a day, unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time.  Humans intervene only when there is no more space to store what has been manufactured.

And what has been manufactured?  Other automation robots!

I’m James McIntosh at nonsenseatwork.com

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© 2010 James Henry McIntosh - nonsenseatwork.com