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“The Danger Lies Not With The Humanisation of Robots, But With The Robotisation of Humans”
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Europa Star’s Pierre Maillard on the rise of robotisation and automation. The German futurologist Gerd Leonhard was invited to the 8th Haute Horlogerie Forum last autumn. He had one piece…
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
Europa Star’s Pierre Maillard on the rise of robotisation and automation.
The German futurologist Gerd Leonhard was invited to the 8th Haute Horlogerie Forum last autumn. He had one piece of advice to give to young people looking for a future career path: choose whatever you like, provided you can’t be replaced by a robot!
On closer inspection, the choice isn’t actually all that wide. Hairdresser (probably). Plumber, given that a robot will never be as good at disentangling tubes and pipes as a human being. (An image of Robert de Niro as the heating engineer in Terry Gilliam’s brilliant dystopian science-fiction film Brazil comes to mind…)
Lawyer – probably not. Since May 2016, a robot by the name of Ross has been working in the Cleveland offices of BakerHostetler. Ross has already fathered children. His father is IBM. Ross’s area of expertise is corporate bankruptcy (I’m not making this up). He doesn’t speak in court (although that day may come); what he does is analyse, extremely efficiently, thousands and thousands of documents relating to corporate bankruptcy. Some of which is probably caused by robots.
Banker – that’s definitely a no. Trading is already dictated by algorithms.
Journalist? The industry is already on its knees – and robots are rubbing salt into the wounds. “Researchers from the Intelligent Systems Informatics Lab (ISI) at the University of Tokyo have developed a new prototype capable of travelling around, interviewing people, collecting information, taking photos with an onboard camera, performing web searches and posting articles online, completely independently. Eventually, they could replace reporters in areas considered too dangerous for humans,” explains Romain Serre of the prestigious European Communication School in Paris.
Image: www.futuristgerd.com
Watchmaker, then? They do make quite a fuss about their manual skills: the painstaking hours they spend polishing chatons, angling bridges and mounting tourbillons in their handcrafted cages.
But let’s not be coy: robotisation and automation are already key factors in many aspects of watchmaking. Just recently Luxury Society reported on Baselworld the presence of the watch-inspection robot with Rebellion Watches. In many cases, and increasingly, human beings are only there to set up the robots. A new division of labour is emerging, as we saw at the Omega factory we visited in 2014: “Each time a bridge is added to an assembly, a single screw is inserted manually purely to secure the movement during its transport. The remaining screws are then selected and screwed in automatically by a special robot,” we wrote.
A very well-known watchmaker said to us a few weeks back: “There is an urgent need to put humans back at the centre.” Yes, but which humans?
As our German futurologist warned, “Contrary to what everyone is saying, the danger lies not with the humanisation of robots, but with the robotisation of humans.”
Article originally published on Europa Star
Editor -In-Chief, Europa Star
Pierre Maillard is Editor-in-Chief of Europa Star, the leading industry publication for luxury watches.
