Or: Why Humans Still Matter
At this very moment, automation is transforming our business, our culture and our lives. Many of the terms we continue to use in this space as they relate to yard ramps—i.e., streamlined operations, optimized experience, business flow, etc.—readily apply to automation technologies.
Our man McCoy Fields has written eloquently about such advancements. From existing Kiva robots in sorting facilities to plans for home delivery via drone, technology is steadily transforming the way we conduct business and our everyday affairs.
And the Internet of Things, now taught in universities, seeks to more completely integrate the physical and virtual worlds.
So, everything’s great, and time marches on, and you can’t fight City Hall, right? Well, not so fast.
We’re not Luddites. We embrace the best of this technology. We see great benefit—potential and actual—to these advances in technology and their effects on the world.
That said, just because we can do something doesn’t necessarily mean we should. And so, we’d much rather employ a cautious approach for all things that involve and surround yard ramps.
For example, there’s talk and experiment with adapting driverless car technology to the freight transport industry. By extension, one day we might well include employing those Kiva robots for loading and off-loading a company’s inventory.
In our experience, the human involvement—our perspective, intuition, experience, flexibility, and attention to nuance and detail—is irreplaceable. Simply: algorithms are not people.
It could very well happen one day in the future the business landscape includes an automatic, retractable ramp that travels from truck to bay and from ground to dock, all calibrated to hand angles and loads. If and when that happens, we’ll adapt.
Until that point, though, we continue—and proudly so—to put human interaction and experience at both the foundation and the forefront of how we conduct business.
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