Tech Life Chapter 1339-1340

 Chapter 1339

"Then in the production process, which used to rely on the experience of the teacher to control the production process and standards, now that computer-controlled automated production lines have sprung up, the vast amount of programming precisely controlled parameters are concentrated in sensors, embedded operating systems and so on."


        "And this range of production tools and equipment is controlled through industrial software, then the kind of knowledge and experience that the teacher used to have of the factory, of industry, of manufacturing, is replaced by industrial software."


        "Instead of a teacher, the factory owner would have to buy computers and hire programmers."


        "Another example is traditional marketing and sales, which used to rely on human relationships to approve goods, where I informed my customer to come and pick up the goods, to purchase."


        "And now, it's been replaced by e-commerce, where transactions can be done in the internet c2c model and all the consumer information is all captured, so big data rises up!"


        "Obviously then it's countless times more powerful and cheaper than if you were to do it yourself by hand, and most importantly you therefore have the information big data, which is probably the most valuable asset of all."


        "More valuable than even the product of the transaction itself, and indeed that's exactly what it is, otherwise why are they all playing around with building data centres now?"


        "So in traditional industry and manufacturing, a lot of this knowledge is actually being replaced by this knowledge in emerging industries, but the total amount of knowledge is exponentially exploding, so our society is constantly progressing and technology is constantly evolving."


        "This leads to the basic rule that the amount of knowledge in manufacturing is constantly flowing, if we believe some of the more extreme examples in science fiction movies."


        "Fully automated, unmanned factories with not a single person in them, factories where everything is produced entirely by automation, relying on sensors, computers and industrial robots to do all the production activities."


        "In this case, the knowledge of traditional industrial manufacturing, that is all drained away and all transferred to other industries."


        "So my personal bold prediction is that the further back manufacturing goes in the future, the more developed and powerful it will become, and the more and more ancillary industries it will need."


        "Or most of the middle will belong to the tertiary sector, it will get bigger and bigger, and more and more people will be employed by the tertiary sector, while the manufacturing sector itself will keep declining and will be shifted."


        "In fact this pattern has now emerged in whichever country it is, and it is a very clear trend. That is, the share of manufacturing in the middle of the whole economy, it's always constantly declining, it's a big trend and a big trend."


        "So when everyone is talking about the US asking for manufacturing to return, what is the main purpose and motivation for that return? We all know that it's to create new jobs in the US."


        "So I just think that when the old US goes this way to position itself, it goes off course, and it goes off rather badly, and that kind of traditional job is bound to be lost because it's not competitive in the future, so you can't stop this big trend, not in the US, not in anybody."


        The words were loud, powerful and well-reasoned.


        The live camera was given to a number of US tech moguls, many of whom nodded silently, and to several US dignitaries in attendance, all of whom had expressionless faces.


        Li Linfei said that going off course is actually a euphemism, to put it bluntly, old America you are taking a path of no return that is doomed to fail ah.


        On stage, he paused for a moment, looking around the room while licking his lips to moisten them, and then said, "So, I think this is also an inspiration to people in our country and even in all walks of life in society, that is, what kind of employment position in the future is a promising and competitive job position?"


        "It must not be to protect those production line jobs in the middle of the traditional industrial manufacturing of the past, but to create new jobs, the main purpose of such jobs is to continuously empty the knowledge of the traditional manufacturing industry, this kind of is the most promising job in the future."


        "Such an emerging job, in the process you will find that its general trend is to make manufacturing foolish, of course I know that everyone is mentioning smart manufacturing, manufacturing is getting smarter and smarter, but you are saying that it is getting more and more foolish, or at such a conference, you are not coming to tear down the stage ......"


        Li Linfei smiling self-flagellation, the scene is also ushered in a cacophony of laughter, the original are listening carefully to the scene also became a lot more relaxed, the atmosphere is a lot more active.


        After the small episode, Li Linfei continued, "This I think we have to look at it from different angles, intelligent manufacturing is standing inside, is standing inside the industrial system to see industrial manufacturing, it will be found how intelligent it is and become so complex."


        "But I think it's more important to look at it from the user's point of view, from standing outside the industrial system, and under this new perspective it becomes clear that manufacturing has been just getting sillier and sillier and simpler."


        "Let's take the example of the dumb camera more than 20 years ago, we all feel that the dumb camera is a very silly camera, in fact it's not a camera that is silly, it's a camera that even a dumb person can use, before you want to take a picture, you have to be able to take a picture with the right aperture, consider the weather, know how to adjust the shutter, and then you can take a picture."


        "It would have required a lot of expertise from the user, it would have demanded a lot from the user, you couldn't take a picture if you didn't have that expertise."


        "But with the advent of the dumb camera, it took that amount of knowledge out and transferred it to it, it automatically gives you adjustments to the aperture, shutter and so on, and the user just has to press it and a beautiful picture comes out."


        "So to say silly is relative to the user is to be convenient, the more convenient something is to the user the more convenient it is."


        "And again our future technology phc 2.0, also has a similarity, going from within the industrial system, the semiconductor industry it's very complex, the software industry is also very quite complex."


        "But outside of that system, from the user's point of view, phc is more silly than pc, the user just needs to get her hands dirty and play around, if she doesn't understand it, then just get an AI assistant to tell her what you want to do."


        "Well, isn't that what manufacturing is all about?"


        "So the way manufacturing is going, I personally think the accurate term is not smart manufacturing but dumb manufacturing."


        "Because the word smart it is rather vague and ambiguous and easily misleading, what does it mean to be smart? What is the degree of intelligence? This thing is very difficult for you to say clearly, then it is easy to generate disagreement controversy."


Chapter 1340

"But the criterion of stupidity is not ambiguous for everyone, everyone understands that it is the ability to play with it easily without using any brains."


        "So the future development of the manufacturing industry, its general direction I think is by the rise of the tertiary industry in the auxiliary industry, which puts a lot of other emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, cloud services and so on."


        "Use these new technologies outside the industrial system to replace on a large scale the traditional technologies in the middle of the manufacturing industry that are backward in terms of capacity."


        "That is, it takes the traditional manufacturing technology and constantly empties it out and replaces it with these things, then makes the whole manufacturing industry easy for anyone to use industrial manufacturing after it becomes simple."


        "What does that mean? If you are an ordinary person and you want to build a machine, traditionally this would have to be too high, you would have to know how to turn and clamp and plan and grind, and you would have to be able to read diagrams and operate production lines, how can an ordinary person get involved in all this, of course not."


        "But in the future, as manufacturing itself becomes more and more foolish, after much of its internal knowledge has been replaced by other industries, making it highly intelligent and superficially silly."


        "Then in this case it lowers the bar for manufacturing and anyone with a little genius, a little idea can take their idea very simply through a model like Industry 4.0."


        "Meaning, I'll tell you the data, what kind of a part I need, and 4.0 the factory will automatically process and manufacture it for you based on your parameters and orders, you don't need to know anything else about machine tools or manufacturing processes at all."


        "When the time comes, you'll send it back to you when it's finished, a bit of a personal order, and that's the future of manufacturing."


        "And such a trend in manufacturing for dummies makes globalisation as we all know it approaching one of its major inflection points, where the globalisation trend, the undercurrent, is changing."


        "What we call globalisation in the traditional sense is basically driven by multinational companies with their core business as outsourcing, but why do you say that there is now the possibility of a reversal of this trend?"


        "That's where these multinationals it's going to re-evaluate the trade-offs, before, why was it outsourcing?"


        "It was because the cost of labour in its own country was too high and the cost of labour in foreign countries was very low, often a few tenths of what it was in developing countries, and traditional manufacturing requires a lot of workers, so the labour share is higher."


        "The manufacturing knowledge in the industrial process is stored in the heads of engineers and workers, it's marketing is done by human beings, call centres, customer service are done by human beings."


        "So reducing labour costs can greatly increase its profits and market competitiveness, and industrial manufacturing it has this strong urge and demand, and this demand drives it to move factories to other countries."


        "This process accelerated in the nineties, when the internet was just being born but there was no big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and so on, none of these concepts were there yet."


        "Then after that, the situation changed, with the birth of various emerging technologies, but it's extraordinarily important to note that almost all of these emerging technologies were born outside of the traditional manufacturing system, and it made a lot of knowledge replacements for traditional manufacturing."


        "And the knowledge in traditional industrial manufacturing continues to be lost as a result, and this is a time when manufacturing becomes more and more foolproof, and the cost focus of manufacturing is no longer on labour, so this leads multinationals to naturally reassess the risk allocation of global trade."


        Many people on the floor were still shocked to hear this, and as the conference opening speech continued, the content of Li Linfei's presentation became more and more pivotal in people's minds.


        Taking Future Technology as an example, it was tantamount to corresponding with the points he was elaborating with practical actions.


        Trillion scale annual revenue, in the Internet company known for high profits, the scale of its labor should be in 35,500 scale, and the future of technology is its 10, if replaced in the manufacturing sector will be more exaggerated, at least a hundred thousand or even hundreds of thousands of.


        "On the one hand the cost of labour in emerging market countries has been rising over these two decades, previously called labour arbitrage, this space is now becoming smaller or even almost gone."


        "The cost focus is no longer on workers, but it doesn't disappear out of thin air, it shifts, so where does it go?"


        "More and more, of course, on the investment in new technology research and development, on the cost of knowledge, so that the multinational company's books and its methods of accounting are bound to change.


        At the same time other risks are also rising, such as geopolitical risks, and now some countries oppose this globalisation brings policy risks, exchange rate risks and other kinds of risks are gathered together, to far exceed the risk of labour costs.


        When it comes to this, many people in the audience have a sarcasm in their hearts, the so-called certain countries, in fact, that means the old United States.


        That exploding head is now all kinds of things all over the world, withdrawing from the group, refusing to globalize, and single-mindedly playing their own game.


        The company's influence can be said to be radiating around the world, this kind of naming and shouting out, it seems to have no intelligence, we all understand that is, after all, will have to do business in North America, so so so named damage to others a little unethical ah.


        "Multinational companies are also concerned that he outsourced production around the world, to finally come back to the assembly of this process there may be problems? That possibility certainly exists."


        "And the Boeing 787 is an example, over 50 of all outsourced by the global supply package, specifically because of time constraints here, these can be found."


        "So, all of this points to an issue that is well worth going into."


        "And that is that there may have been a change in the thinking of multinational companies, especially multinational giants, which means that these are risks that you hadn't previously estimated, and you thought that going down this road of globalisation, going down the road of industrial subcontracting, going down the road of offshoring, could bring you huge profits."


        "But then you find that after these risks emerge, instead of costs coming down, they go up, and instead of making money, you lose money and damage the long-established brand reputation."