UK car industry trouble ahead..?

[confused_buyer]

Yipper said:

Today, an average robot has the skills of a 5 yearold. By 2035, it will be around a 20 year old. And by 2050, a 40 yearold. The "robot gap" to humans is closing and will soon be closed.

Ah, but what happens in 2055 when the robot has the skills of a 45 year old and starts moaning that the light in the factory is rubbish and there is nothing wrong with their eyes at all, they're sure they did put that spanner down there only 3 minutes ago so it must be somewhere and they'll get going in half an hour just as soon as the Paracetamol has kicked in for their back?

[iSore]

craigjm said:

They have been operating under capacity for a long time

It may well be that PSA want Ellesmere Port ( a very efficient plant) to manufacture Peugeots as well as Vauxopels. Ryton was closed a few years back because it was a factory from the dark ages that was anything but efficient.

Mind you, where did the Ryton jobs end up going?

[youngsyr]

Liokault said:

Yipper said:

Robots and AI will eventually replace the craft-workers and also the managers. Nobody, from the bottom to top, is safe. A financial hedge fund in New York, for example, is on track to replace 50% of its own CEO's role with an AI bot by 2020.
.

I can't see it. I can see forumaic jobs going to AI, but I can't see craftsman ship or development jobs going.

I can see how accountancy of medicine can be done by an AI, it's a formula basically, easily done...plug in the symptoms, figures, get a tax demand/prescription out.

How are you going to get an AI to tile your bathroom? How is an AI going to trim a car seat when a human can't get it right more than 75% of the time?

I had to bin £1000's of pounds of prototype parts last week and missed them from a homologation round due to human error, that's a whole team of highly paid (german ironically) engineers messed up a part due to simply not realising it wouldn't fit....its a cad model and everything...why will an AI do it better?

I'm far from an expert, but my understanding is that the huge advantage of AI is that once you know how to do something properly and can programme it, a robot will be able to repeat that task thousands or even millions of times perfectly and quickly, 24 hours a day, with little maintenance.

Given that we now have cars that can drive themselves on busy motorways, I imagine there are few tasks that a robot cannot do if we really want them to.

[craigjm]

There is a piece in Autocar on this and they suggest that there is a correlation in the UK car market with UK market share and where the cars are built. They point to the growing market share of PSA after the Rootes take over and contrast that with the dramatic fall in share since Ryton closed. Also talk about the UK built Astra being the major contributor to GM market share in the UK.

I would have thought that being UK made was less of a concern to consumers now say than it was 40 years ago when anything but BL Vauxhall and Ford (kind of adopted British) were seen as the motors the man in the street bought