Robots replace manual labor? After watching the lesson of Adidas' blood, speak again and tear down the smart factory

If artificial intelligence is the trend of the times, no one should object. In recent years, artificial intelligence has achieved remarkable achievements, and there will be many artificial intelligence in our daily lives, especially in electronic products. The increasingly frequent mention and use of artificial intelligence has made people more convinced that the future of artificial intelligence is bright. Of course, everything is a double-edged sword. Although artificial intelligence is so frequently used and appears in daily life, it not only brings convenience but also replaces a lot of manual labor, especially in some factories where the boring production on the assembly line becomes the work of machines, which to some extent deprives labor of job opportunities and reduces employment rates. So, can machines produce products that can definitely reduce costs and be fast and efficient? In April of this year, Adidas officially closed two intelligent factories, putting an end to its four-year "road to the future".

Originally, Adidas intended to reduce costs and improve efficiency by replacing manual production with machines, perhaps leading the world's factory trend. However, this time, it can be said that Adidas has lost both its wife and its soldiers. After four years of robot practice technology, it has been discovered that success may not be so simple. The reasons for their failure have also been summarized here, let's take a look at the reasons for these failures.

Firstly, although robots are intelligent, they can be said to be far different from humans. Each production line can only produce the same product. Adidas is a major sports brand, and their products are dazzling. During the production process, manual labor can flexibly change to produce different brands and styles, but for machines, they have stricter production processes and mechanical operations that cannot be flexibly changed. This may also lead to low efficiency for Adi, which needs to flexibly change its production mode.

The second reason is that the cost of building a factory is too high. Although it does improve production efficiency during the production process, the machine assembly line used to build this factory is not cheap. It can be said that it requires a huge investment to build a factory, and it is unknown how many years it will take to make up for the cost difference between labor and machine work. It is not possible to recover costs for ten years. Originally, these European and American brands arranged their production lines in Asian and African countries due to high labor costs, in order to reduce costs and build fully intelligent factories, it was better to hire manual production. Perhaps this money is not enough to hire a few machine experts.

Adidas was forced to close its smart factory, eliminating tedious and complex manual processes, effectively improving productivity, but pulling employment rates down the red line, and the high production line costs may eventually crush Adidas. Artificial intelligence is indeed the future trend, but now machines and artificial intelligence are still in the exploratory stage. If we blindly build high-tech and intelligent factories, it will not be worth the loss, just like Adidas closing factories with tears in their eyes. Artificial intelligence is not yet mature, and in another five years, there may be a qualitative change. What do you think?