For all the talk about how artificial intelligence is going to transform our daily lives, Ford CEO Jim Farley said that technological advances are leaving some people behind.
“So far, maybe 10% of our operations can be roboticized. With the humanoid robot, maybe it’s 20%. But it’s not going to be 80%,” he said.
Farley said that humans are doing things in factory plants that robots still cannot, pointing to an example of a worker in one of Ford’s plants in Germany, who creatively used a bicycle tire and a wheel with a wooden slat to close a tailgate of a truck that had gotten stuck going down the line.
“I think we need to go back to the basics—to trade schools—and we need to have a society that doesn’t look down on people like that,” Farley said.
During the talk, Farley put up a picture of his grandfather, who had joined Ford as an hourly employee, its 389th hire. “Look around the room. At some point, almost all of your families came from these kind of jobs,” he said.
Farley said it was “very clear” to him that technology has left a lot of Americans behind.
“We have to acknowledge that these new technologies are great. They’ll make a lot of people’s lives better, even people in the essential economy. But what are we going to do as a society for the people that it leaves behind that are valuable humans?” he said. “We have to have a plan for sustainment, and we don’t have that plan today.”
