Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: Keeping Up with the New World Order

During a normal commercial flight, a pilot only touches the controls of the plane for less than three minutes. The rest of the time, the computer called an autopilot is actually flying the plane—even landing the plane. Pilots have to undergo periodic training so they will not forget how to fly. How many phone numbers, including your own, do you know by heart? Or do you use smartphone settings to remember them for you?

The other day, my wife went to the post office with a package for our son. She had written the address in cursive (she has excellent handwriting, unlike yours truly). The young lady at the counter told her she could not read cursive, so my wife had to read the address to her to make sure the package would reach its destination.

There is an old joke about a reporter who toured a new, fully automated factory. Besides the person giving them the tour, all they saw was a man and dog. When the reporter asked the host what their purpose was, the host said that the man was there to feed the dog, and the dog's job was to make sure the man did not touch the equipment.

We are losing the ability to do things with our hands as more gadgets are invented to take care of our all of our needs. Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortona, and other AI will play our favorite music, order a pizza, and set the temperature in our house—or better yet, our second home that’s 3,000 miles away. There is nothing computers will not do for us.

I was in our public library the other day. I had just finished one committee meeting and was killing time until the next one started when it occurred to me that I had forgotten to bring my Kindle so I would have something to read!

We are actually forgetting how to do things, folks. We are losing our craftspeople. We are forgetting how a pencil works (think, Outlook), and we are losing our spelling and vocabulary to spellcheck. Fascinating!

Why am I bringing up all of this? It’s not because I think that the future is bad—no, not at all. I am not some Luddite trying to stop the flow of progress. None of us can stop the flow of progress, which is exactly my point.

Technology rules the world. Economics rule the world. We need to stop thinking that politicians can bring back 20^th century jobs. They can’t. We need to stop thinking that politicians can change the flow of globalization, because they cannot. We need to stop thinking that maneuvers like tariffs and subsidies are going to change anything. They might delay things but will not change or permanently stop them.

China has already lost 30 million jobs. That’s millions of jobs to automation. Those jobs are not coming back. The coal industry has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs since the ‘50s and they are not coming back. Those jobs were not lost by EPA rules or one political philosophy or another. They were lost because of automation. Coal mining is now largely done by giant machines, not by men with picks and shovels.

Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, who has been known to compare his millions of employees to animals, has said that he is going to replace as many of his workers as possible with robots, because robots cost $250,000 each, work 24 hours a day, and are never sick, so they are a much better investment than people. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the future, except the future is today. If we want to survive, we will have to adapt.

Turn to our own industry for an example. Whelen Engineering is making PCBs on a fully automated line in the USA. One of the largest PCB providers in the world is making plans to build a shop that will be able to produce $40 million worth of PCBs a year with fewer than 25 people.

It’s all pretty scary, isn’t it? But as Tony Soprano used to say, “It is what it is.”

So where does that leave the small PCB supplier? We need to specialize. We need to provide the technology, and more importantly, the service that only human beings can provide. If you want to know what I mean, just walk into an Apple store and see the new genius of retail with true customer service. Check out Amazon for a great example of ease of doing business. Study the meticulousness demonstrated by any great company that is not only surviving, but thriving in this new world order. This will give you a good idea of the kinds of things your company should be doing—no, has to be doing—in order to survive into the next decade, let alone the next century.

It’s only common sense.