I don’t want my freedom…
Sorry, that’s the lyrics of “It’s A Hard Life”, one of my favourites in Queen’s smash hit album “The Works”. I want to get to “Machines (Or Back To Humans)” – the fifth song on the album or the first song on “Side B” during the days of vinyl records or cassette tapes. Does anyone remember? Or does anyone who reads this know what I’m talking about?
“It’s a machine’s world
Don’t tell me I ain’t got no soul
When the machines take over
It ain’t no place for rock ‘n’ roll
They tell me I don’t care
But deep inside, I’m just a man
They freeze me, they burn me
They squeeze me, they stress me
With smoke-blackened pistons of steel, they compress me
But no one, but no one, but no one can wrest me away
Back to humans
We have no disease, no troubles of mind
We are fighting for peace, no regard for the time
We never cry, we never retreat
We have no conception of love or defeat
What’s that machine noise?
It’s bytes and mega chips for tea
It’s that machine, boys
With random access memory
Never worry, never mind
Not for money, not for gold, yeah
It’s software, it’s hardware
It’s heartbeat, it’s time-share
It’s midwife’s, a disk drive
Its sex-life is quantized
It’s self-perpetuating, a parahumanoidarianised”
Lyrics from Queen’s “Machines (or Back To Humans)
Evolution of music – live to recorded
For a long time, music was recorded and sold on black twelve-inch vinyl discs (surprise, surprise, it made a strong comeback) where the music was imprinted in the microscopic “grooves” that ran in a spiral pattern from the outside of the vinyl disc to its inside. As the vinyl turned at certain speeds, a microscopic diamond stylus read these groves and turned them into electrical signals, which in turn were amplified to “drive” the magnet of a loudspeaker which moved a diaphragm and created sound.
Another device was the cassette tape, which had ferromagnetic material embedded in the tape. The ferromagnetic was aligned to “record” the music onto the tape. It was later picked up by a “head/reader” and then converted to an electrical signal, and to cut short – the music that we heard.
These days, we simply pick a song on Spotify (or other “streaming” services) installed on our smartphones. Spotify streams a “file” from a server and so on and so forth… became a song that we heard. Or, you could have this file stored on your smartphones and play the music without an internet connection.
The wonders of technology. Record the song once, and saved it into a “file”. Give this “file” to anyone then you and everyone could listen to the song. WOW!
Music at A Café (from a machine)
As I sat down at Q Bistro, a popular Indian Muslim (or popularly known as Mamak) restaurant in a suburb near where I live, I heard this “electronic” music which sounded like this character “Wall-E’ going into a fight. As I looked in the direction that the sound came from, a robot which looked like a stack of trolleys and had a screen which was arranged with ears and eyes to look like a pussy cat came to deliver drinks and food to the table next to my family’s.
This was not my first experience with it. If you had been to many Indian Muslim restaurants in the Klang Valley, especially the bigger ones like Kayu, Pelita and Q Bistro, you’d already been served by this pussy cat robot waiter. They don’t do much – they’d just come to you with the food and drinks that you ordered, the pussy cat face screen would smile at you, you pick up and transfer your orders onto your table and then tap on the “OK” button and it would back to where it came from. With different “music” this time.
Machines – are they replacing humans? Have they replaced humans?
I trained a class of interns earlier this year on Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0), Internet of Things (IoT) and Social Return of Investment (Social ROI). We looked at how menial or tedious work that used to be performed by humans is now done by machines. Machines also had started to perform “menial” thinking for us.
There had been videos on the internet that in Hong Kong and China, machines were already frying fried rice and fried noodles. Uncle Roger would decry this! He would say that you could not get the same wok hei compared to the rice or noodles being fried by humans.
The Malays, heck even the Chinese, Indians and almost all the ethnicities in Malaysia, would say and swear by it – that food cooked with bare hands tasted way better than anything that involved other implements. Yes, even if it was just a metal spoon. Wooden spoons and spatulas were preferred. Even bread which in the old days (probably up till the 1970s) was kneaded by hand in smaller bakeries, and feet in the bigger ones! Many of you would want to vomit already at this point. But hey, many upmarket wines are still pressed by feet, to this day!
Machines in F&B – at home!
We can investigate the food and beverage (F&B) industry and witness that machines are replacing humans. It used to be on an industrial scale, but today, a huge development had hit our homes. Expedited by the recent pandemic. If previously we only had juicers, microwave ovens, blenders and bread makers in our homes, the writer was informed that with the implements like the Thermomix, you could just chuck in everything in there and out would come not just a freshly baked loaf of bread, but you’ll get Hainanese Chicken Rice for a family of four, Stir Fried Beef Kwayteow and whatnot! Just like those that you get from restaurants!
Alright, I severely exaggerated about Thermomix. However, I was told that it had helped a lot of working mothers during the work-from-home (WFH) times during the pandemic. I don’t have one, had only seen one O-ring from the implement but WFH mothers were screaming wonders about it! Liking it to having replaced the maid at home or even the husband who wouldn’t help chop the onion too!
Machines and Workers
These machines to some would be godsent. Especially restaurants today in Klang Valley which were struggling due to the shortage of workers – most being foreign workers. Other non-F & B businesses also suffered from the shortage of foreign workers. Recently, after much kerfuffle, Indonesia had agreed to allow one thousand of its citizens to come back to work in the palm oil plantations. Bangladesh however was still not happy with how its citizens were treated in the factories all over Malaysia.
Machines and 3D Jobs
These foreign workers came to fill in the void, a huge one, which Malaysians simply refused to work in – the “3D” jobs. Dirty, dangerous, demeaning.
As someone who had squatted on a wet floor, for eight months, in a chicken shop, the author wondered what was dangerous or demeaning about these kinds of jobs… Sure it was dirty – I had to slaughter the chicken (there was blood everywhere, gory scene…), soaked them in hot water to loosen the feather for easy removal by the “finger machine” (hey! we had a machine already thirty years ago!), held the butt firmly to cut open from its butthole to remove all its innards, chopped and cleaned the whole chicken ready to be coated with turmeric and to be fried.
Now, let me see where the dangerous part was – aah, the knife was razor sharp. Demeaning – yes, I did not wear aprons thus my shirt was always covered in chicken blood, and smelly. Embarrassing, if I were to bump into the girl of my dreams – who worked at the nearby fruit stall at the market.
I saw, however, that in the UK where chickens, cattle, sheep and other livestock were processed in factories, a whole lot of machines – some automated, some human operated – were already utilized. We know also those automotive factories had been using machines for ages – even Rolls Royce and Bentley to a small extent. The agriculture sector had also long ago embraced machines and automation.
Machines in Cafes
Only in Malaysia’s F&B scene that it was slowly being utilised, as we realized that the foreign workers were not coming fast enough. Even then, are the other restaurants following suit with the pussy cat robot waitress? Are we going to see the fried rice or stir-fry beef being cooked by robots soon?
Or would it be “back to humans” once the “pandemic-panic” and labour importation rules are relaxed?
Machines, Co-exist With Human
Those who are smart enough, they’d realize that machines would not be able to fully replace humans. If the automotive factories were something that we could learn from, Henry Ford, the Rolls Royce and Bentley companies did not replace humans. There is still a lot of work that needs an artisan’s skills. The quality of an artisan’s work. Even if it is a simple stitch on the seat.
Machines can, and probably should be utilized for repetitive and menial jobs. Yes, the 3D jobs too. We had been talking about this for ages – design, produce and use the right machines for goodness’s sake! Not just menial or 3D jobs, even those which are “logarithmic” and do not require much brain power. Train and utilize our human resources for heuristic work – those that need some brain power, and serious brain power.
But first, we also need to figure out how to keep these brains in Malaysia.
