engleski

Dialectics in Automatic Production

The present global, largely recognised as financial, crisis shows the interesting aspects which are related to fundamental relationship between control and executive functions of a system, despite of its kind: economic, social, biological, industrial or technical ; these functions often appear as a perpetuation with significant routine behaviour - ritual, or automatism, driven with limited scope of criteria, that can be measured in order to optimise efficiency. Even advanced technical possibilities often do not much contribute to quality - it is impressive discrepancy comparing vast technical possibilities and trivial outcomes. For more than last 25 years, proclaimed product diversification and customisation to meet customer needs (meaning decreased production volumes), very often has not been followed with appropriate automation achievements in production. Still, mass consumption allows hard or just slightly softened (flexible) automation that can deal with one product in large production volumes only. Moreover, automation nowadays desperately tries to deal with rapidly changing production environment, to be applicable to wider range of products, in smaller production volumes, giving appropriate satisfaction to automation labourers (equipment manufacturers and system integrators) and decent profit to stockholders. According to IFR, in 2009. the number of sold industrial robots worldwide slumped dramatically by about 50% compared to 2008., one of the most successful years. The globalised and unbalanced world market and corresponding phenomenon of outsourcing, driven with a corporate wish for short-time financial profits, lead to neglecting of real technical and technological issues. At the same time, inventions and technological progress allow technical systems to deal with more and more complex industrial tasks with increased autonomy that should not only enable survival of companies and liberate humans of tedious work, but open space for more human life-span creativity and satisfaction. It means also that the technical systems become more and more complicated, both on hardware and control levels, requiring enlarged planning effort from its creators. Each human task is creative, and implies transformation/materialisation of human- life powers to some artefact, or other kind of communication signal. Mechanisation and automation have moved boundaries of exploitation further and further. A task and related work division require harmonic establishment of executive (operative, outcome/artefact-carrying function) and control (process initialisation, corrective and adaptive function) parts of a system. The planning of technical systems includes several aspects, such as their design, integration into environment, process planning and programming. At the operational level, it is necessary to anticipate that future systems would be required to have much more autonomy in their acting. The autonomy, or large-scale automation, or automatic behaviour, implies comparable machine intelligence and increased requirements for symbolic reasoning. One may think about highly automated - intelligent - system as a single, isolated, almost self- sufficient system that possesses some self- management abilities in an unordered environment. However, the full potential of intelligence arises in integration of engineering activities and technical systems, including general principles and concurrent engineering approaches, and very important, in integration with other, non- engineering, domains, using even unconventional approaches. Industrial production, products and technical systems are materialisation of humanity. So it may be assumed further that structure and behaviour of technical systems may have features that are inherent to humans. If the majority of people behave as robots, then really it would not be hard to produce robots similar to humans (Fromm). Human survival, playful intellectuality, conscience of its own limitations, loneliness and imperfection have always been mirrored to creation of "deus ex machina". Vast mankind's knowledge base calls for synthesis and compiling. Each domain cannot be self-centric any more - diversified knowledge is necessary: various engineering knowledge and knowledge from outside the traditional engineering domain and practice. In that sense, it may be interesting to explore the possibilities of using psychological concept of transactional analysis for automaton design. Desirable and undesirable behaviour of the technical system depends on current situation which may be difficult to anticipate. Common technical criteria of effectiveness (productivity, costs, time etc.), should be rather considered as dialectical criteria of construction and deconstruction. The effort to develop such advanced systems cannot be anymore treated solely as a technical issue, or technical systems must be treated differently, since many risks and threats may arise by neglecting past experience and some today's obviously concerning trends. Although the engineering class has its own limitations to deal with the above content, engineering science and praxis should always be life- centric and responsible while design and use technology for public and individual purposes, avoiding indifference.

automation; dialectics; production; education; society; transactional analysis

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