You can’t believe I studied my almost 12 years of primary and secondary school in French! And for the last 8 years, by the time of writing this in April 2024 in a train from Brussels to Arlon, I have been learning and using English.
Now, English took over despite the fact that I only have studied and used the language for the last 8 years. I started using the language in my everyday life when I fled and left my home country to Rwanda. I started to study in English changing from French. It didn’t seem to be a problem for me by the way for what it is worth.
Few years later I moved to Europe where I found myself working in a factory around August of 2023. I have never imagined what entails the work in the manufacturing. I was amazed to see how the world has been trying to make factory self-running by maximising the work done by robot and machines. It’s true that human beings have at least 20% of the work needed to make the final products from the factory.
Here are four surprising lessons I’ve learned from working in the factory:
- We are f*cked, we still have more manual work to do
Before going to work in the factory, I was so curious about what human beings are doing there actually; of course I didn’t think it would be well run without human beings there; I didn’t even think it would be possible to make final products without human beings; but the number of people needed there was so compelling that I wanted to understand why so many people are need in factory than any other places, at least in my analysis.
But when I started working there, that’s when I realised that there are a lot of work that human beings needs to do. Of course things like people management in the factory, fixing machines, cleaning of certain places among others…
- The human beings work in the factory is so obvious that robots can’t replace it
I started working there and the first thing I noticed is that there is still a long way to go for robots to replace human beings in the factory because the work of human beings in a factory is so obvious that robots can’t do it. And I was convinced before than it is only a few years to come that robots will take over human jobs especially those done manually like those in a factory. But it wasn’t necessarily true and the people on the front line of AI and robotics confirmed this idea of mine too.
It wasn’t until when I listened this conversation between Joe Rogan, the host of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast and Sam Altman the CEO at Open AI. Sam told Joe that when they start Open AI back in 2016, he thought that AI will start with jobs such as factory jobs, driving trucks and a couple of others jobs like that and then go on with some knowledge jobs such science, programming, solving math problems etc… but later he realised it is the other way around. First with knowledge jobs and later those manual, physical demanding jobs because a lot is involved in solving or doing those jobs. You at least need a physical entity to be able to perform those jobs. Which makes sense to me because, for the knowledge job, you just need a brain power and a screen to display the result of the thinking of the machine.
- The more someone is experience as a production worker, the more he/she thinks s/he is special while it should be the opposite
When I was working in the factory, I’ve met different people during the four months period I worked there. The people who have impressed me the most are the people who are experienced there. They think they are special for spending more time there, for that they have been there for 10, 15 years etc. In my view point, the more time you spend in the factory work, the less valuable you are in the outside world because you only has dedicated your life to that job and living pay check to pay check. And the work there is so physically damaging that most of the people who have been working in that particular factory had back and knees problems due to standing for a long time; the minimum someone spends standing working in the factory is at least 6 hours mostly it’s 7 hours of your life. Sometimes standing in uncomfortable positions which leads to all those problems.
- At the end of the day everyone is so exhausted that it is hard to make friends – the first work environment that I found it hard to make friends
After spending four months there, I am usually strong with high level energy everyday but the job is so exhausting that I would get tired, and the only thing I would think was when I will finish my 8 hour shift and go to bed. And another thing is the change of shift every week that my mood was not stable throughout the month because I would change from working morning shift to night shift. Every week was a new schedule and I hated it. I was used to reading everyday but what happened was that my mood got disrupted so much that my routine of reading remained the same but the time changed; and this made it hard for me to keep reading regularly as I have previously done.
Every body was so exhausted at end of the day that to make friends was almost impossible because even though we had lunch or breaks, we didn’t have much time to socialise. The job is so tiring that you don’t even want anyone getting to know you but rather do the job and go home and that’s it. I DIDN’T LIKE THIS ….