Technology > Aptitude?

In the coming age of automation, those with literacy challenges could be the first and the hardest hit.

For longer than most of us can remember, the demolition and construction industry has offered an employment and career refuge to formal education’s under-achievers; the illiterate; the semi-literate; the dyslexic; and the disruptive.  And, in the main, it has worked for employer and employee alike.

There is a well-known UK demolition man who is very open about his lack of literacy; but he owns and operates a very successful demolition company.  There are equipment operators with little or no formal education; but they can make an excavator sing and a skid steer dance.  There are high reach operators that struggle to write their own names.  Yet they are blessed with an innate grasp of structural engineering that allows them to accurately predict how, when and where a structure will fall, long before it actually does so.

Even the industry’s training is geared in this direction, with touch-screen tests in the place of more daunting exam papers.

All of that is changing, however, with the advent of increasingly complex machine guidance, control and management systems.  These driver aids will make work far simpler for some and virtually impossible for others.

Like the planned eradication of diesel from demolition sites, the transition from simplistic to complex will come not from some overnight technological uprising.  Rather, it will likely come from an insidious and creeping sidelining of certain humans.

This is not some dystopian nightmare of tomorrow torn from the pages of an Isaac Asimov novel.  This is happening right now in machine cabs up and down the country and across the world.

In the past, machine controls were helpfully simplistic.  Graphics rather than words adorned button and switches. Flashing lights warned of low oil and engine overheating.  Machine revs were set by selecting a point between the tortoise at one end of the spectrum, and the hare at the other.

Those still exist, of course.  But they are now being supplemented by often highly complex in-cab computer systems and displays that require greater literacy, a good understanding of mathematics and - increasingly - a fundamental grasp of physics and geography.

Unquestionably, these in-cab systems make the machines more productive.  Machines are better protected from mismanagement and misuse.  And computers are very good at minimising fuel consumption, a key consideration in this day and age.

But by bringing all these potential benefits wrapped in a cloak of words and numbers, we are potentially taking the first step towards removing certain men and women from the construction workforce. And those certain men and women are those with literacy issues for whom construction has traditionally  been a safe haven.

In our endless pursuit of ever greater levels of performance, we are in danger of choosing technology over raw aptitude.

From a pure productivity and profitability standpoint, such a switch is unquestionably attractive; desirable even.  From an ethical standpoint, however, quietly pushing those with literacy challenges towards the exit feels rather harder to justify.