Why is the robot still waiting on the human?

In 2018, Tesla was trying to build the Model 3 at a rate the industry called impossible.

It was failing. Elon Musk had built one of the most automated car factories in the world, and the line kept stopping. In April, he admitted on Twitter that excessive automation had been a mistake. His exact words: humans are underrated.

The most automated factory on earth was waiting on the humans.

What's the pattern?

In 1988, the roboticist Hans Moravec noticed something strange. The things we think of as hard, calculus, chess, logic, are easy for machines. The things we think of as easy, walking across a room, picking up an egg, noticing that a part is slightly wrong, are enormously hard.

The reason is evolutionary. We've had a billion years to perfect perception and movement. We've had a few thousand years of abstract reasoning, so it's shallow, and easy to copy.

That's Moravec's paradox, and it's the reason the robot is still waiting. Every factory that tried to go fully dark hit the same wall: the machine could do ten thousand identical motions and then stop, helpless, at the one part that came in slightly bent.

The pattern shows up in every era. Steam didn't remove the machinist. Electricity didn't remove the line worker. Each one changed what the human did and made the remaining human work more valuable, not less.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

Automate the identical, not the variable. Anything that happens the same way ten thousand times, give to the machine. Anything that varies, keep a person nearby, and design the job so the machine hands off gracefully instead of stopping.

Measure the handoff. The productivity of a modern line lives at the moment the robot needs a human. Make that fast, obvious, and dignified.

And pay for perception. The worker who notices the bent part before the line stops is worth more than the robot. Most pay scales say otherwise. Fix that.

Humans are underrated. Tesla learned it the expensive way. You don't have to.

Where in your operation is the machine waiting on a person, and how long does it wait?

Related: How do you get employees to adopt change they didn't ask for?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote