Corning, once extremely proud and protective of its manufacturing expertise, is now even teamed up with Samsung of Korea to tap that company's automation skills.
Erroneously, they said the job loss was really caused by automation and skills mismatches between dislocated workers and the new jobs that supposedly were waiting to be filled.
Practice of skills also leads to automation of these skills.
If automation can cause skill degradation among an elite group of professionals who train for years, imagine what it may do to drivers, who are tested only once (when they get their driver's license) and have a much broader range of driving abilities.
In many professions that demand highly skilled visuo-motor performance, typically automation of these skills takes place over time, perhaps reducing the demands on the higher cognitive abilities of its practitioners (sports, music) (Rasmussen 1987).
The conventional view has been that progress results in the automation of lower-skill jobs while creating more opportunity for those with higher education levels (economists call this "skill-biased technical change" or SBTC).
That, in turn, makes further automation of low-skill work less attractive.
Other lessons to be learned include "commercial constraints v creative freedom… competition v collaboration, automation v craft skills and long term v short term".
"There is nothing more important to our global competitiveness than mathematics, which will drive success in digital skills, automation and other important jobs of the future," she said.
The imbalance between power demand and supply, the equipment failures and the lack of comprehensive monitoring and control capabilities are other important signs to take incremental steps for switching to a smarter power grid with effective communication, automation and monitoring skills.
