OPINION • Oct 26, 2020
The Common Denominator between Tesla, Communism, and Creationism
This is Old news. Tesla, about a couple of years back, tried to fully automate the Gigafactory in hopes of scaling up the production to 300,000 units a year and then what began as popularly called “the Production Hell”. They struggled to keep up with the orders. Even Musk conceded that it was a mistake to fully automate the factory. This critique is not about Tesla in general; they are awesome. It is just about that fully automated factory.
In hindsight, a lot of opinions came out about this, and honestly, this is one of those too. But unlike many others, I think my reasoning has some merit to it. I believe that it is because of a deep philosophical flaw.
And it is that "Any sufficiently complex system cannot be created". It has to evolve; it has to follow a path of organic growth. I have already written an article close to this concept.
If you ask the Apple engineers in 2007 to design the first iPhone to the specifications of the iPhone 12, They would have never made it. We would never have had an iPhone. It will not have been because of the lack of technology, but because of the complexity of the system.
This is the reason for the success of the Toyota Production System. They have always had the slickest manufacturing system in the world with the least inventory, the least lead time, the least overall cost of production, and the highest manufacturing quality. That is the reason behind them still selling the second most number of cars in the world despite not being a cult classic of a brand and not having the trendiest or the most high-tech of cars.
Toyota production is more than just a manufacturing system. It is a philosophy. One that is predicated on organic and evolutionary development.
They have a lot of principles that they are following to achieve these goals, most of them developed by Taiichi Ohno, but their core principle is quite simple. Start with the basics and follow decentralized development. Here the decentralized-development is the crux of the issue. It is called Kaizen, and it means continuous development contributed by everyone for a better process in the company. By everyone, I mean everyone from the top management to the workers in the assembly line.
Leave this and think about the scenario at Tesla. The most probable scenario is that about 200 or 300 engineers developed an automated assembly line on a computer, speculating scenarios, and developing automation. They would certainly have conducted some experiments. But it won’t usually cut it.
The whole scenario in an assembly line is much more complicated than any one person or a team can comprehend. That’s why Toyota succeeded and they did not have it easy. It was years of slow but real progress. I am not by no way claiming that Tesla tried to have it easy. They did not have the right philosophy behind them and did not give the time for it.
Look at what Tesla did to scale up after the “Production Hell”. They even went as far as to de-automate things that are usually automated in a conventional assembly line. They are slowly but surely improving.
Just because robots are faster than humans does not mean that a factory of robots will be immediately quicker than a factory of humans. Humans can improvise and robots can not.
I am not against Automating factories. It is my true belief that fully automated factories are the future. The issue is that the complexity of the system demands an organic and evolutionary approach to development and not a transformative change, in which all the cars come rolling out of the factory that has practically no human workers.
Let’s go back to the title, what is common between Communism, Tesla’s fully automated Gigafactory, and the concept of “Creationism”.
The fundamental tenet of Communism is predicated on centralized control of the country, the economy, the development, and everything in it. A handful of people in uniforms believe that they understand everything that goes on in the country. This flaw with communist countries is why Capitalism always triumphs Communism in any measure. There are not enough people generating intellectual output. This scenario is never conducive to any growth. This is not even my opinion; it is the consensus opinion among great scholars.
And this is also why any Creationist thinker (One who believes that God designed and created every lifeform on Earth as it is) cannot stand any intellectual debate with an Evolutionary thinker (Darwin’s evolutionary theory). Creationist thinking in any scientific domain is just plain stupid, and that’s just because of the complexity of the Life on Earth, and there are thousands of more reasons for its stupidity. People naturally presume that complex systems have to be created by some genius. But what most do not understand is that this is not how the world works.
That’s why Toyota Production triumphs Tesla’s full automation, Capitalism beats the hell out of Communism, and Darwin’s evolution is simply indisputable, at least with the current state of scientific understanding of the world.