Lights Out

Okay…it’s hard to get anything done with all of what’s going on in the news. Last Sunday I believe we got the bombshell that a second Kavanaugh accuser had come forward and Michael Avanetti had given a heads up that in the coming days he would come forth with allegation from a third accuser. Then sure enough, he came forward with an affidavit with an extremely serious allegations of gang rape on Wednesday. Also on that same day, rumors of two more allegations came out but the accusers were anonymous so at the time they were deemed not serious. One of them later turned out to be false. Then Thursday was the appearance of Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to provide riveting testimony. Then the news media followed up with news analysis of the testimonies to see whose testimony was more credible. Finally Friday brought the drama of whether the Senate Judiciary Committee would vote in spite of there being no FBI investigation but then, Senator Jeff Flake said he would not vote “yes” in the final floor vote if there were no FBI investigation.

So next week, we will have an FBI investigation as we should have had all along.

And I have done nothing but follow along with the drama, trying to determine the facts.

So today’s post will be short as I have nothing to say. I wanted to give a heads up about a manufacturing concept called lights out manufacturing. Lights out manufacturing is a concept where the plant is fully run by machines and thus won’t need the lights to be on as robots do not need lights to see. The plant can be a 24 hour operation with no down time. McKinsey has an article that clearly spells out how far along the automation of manufacturing has come. And then there is the 44 year old Chinese CEO who is gunning for 100% automation at the factory.

According to the Chinese CEO in the Forbes article, his company really won’t be a company of one because there will be other jobs, probably just not in the plant. Supposedly, those jobs will be more interesting and safer. My thinking is that in this brave new world your skills will have to include creativity to think of new designs/ideas for products or turning out products and you will have to have programming or technical skills to implement those designs. So creativity, design thinking and programming will be the bywords in the future.