“Never send a human to do a machine’s job.”
– Agent Smith, The Matrix
Au contraire, Agent Smith. Humans have been doing jobs machines can accomplish from time immemorial. As time marches forward, however, machines have evolved; gone are the simple pulleys and levers, replaced by the children of fire and steel. The progression of machines over the course of human history has been nothing short of exponential, their presence becoming ubiquitous from the household to the workplace and everywhere in between.
The proliferation of robotic machines within the construction industry is highlighted in “Construction Business Owner: Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto” by Mark Michaels. Michaels discusses the ways machines are changing the construction workforce; the tasks once done with human labor now accomplished by remote-controlled robots. The addition of robot workers lends any team myriad benefits, but can they harm a workforce more than they help?
While the addition of robots is often coupled with the fear that they will replace the human worker completely, the more accurate assumption is that it will yield greater results with the aid of the human worker. The marriage of the human and robotic components does not decrease the scope of the workforce, so much as it changes its composition. While, in the face of one machine doing the job of three men, there may be less human employees and, therefore, less need for timekeeping, there will be an increased need to monitor these robotic assets.
- Geofences established to surround specific worksites to report if and when remote-controlled robots arrive and depart the premises.
- Intelligent tracking would enable the monitoring of robot workers in near real-time.
- Monitoring the integrity of the machines by setting maintenance alerts after a specified amount of hours of use.
- The machine’s integrity can also be monitored via temperature; a range is set and should the machine’s temperature exceed that range, the managers are alerted.
As technology progresses the union of man and machine grows increasingly more intimate. With the inevitable shift in the makeup of the workforce, Actsoft’s Comet Legacy provides the avenue to maintain and strengthen the efficiency of your workforce. As time marches forward, it’s necessary to ensure that your workforce is prepared for the inevitable rise of the machines.
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