Editorial Material Flow 06/2017
And where is the human being?
Meeting intelligent and opinionated people is one of the best things about the job I've been doing for more than 20 years. One's own ego, one's own opinion and one's own feeling for a topic are one thing, all well and good (sometimes), but expert judgment is something completely different. A good journalist must be able to weigh up, measure and correct their own opinion. And sometimes discussions go differently than planned. That's nice too.
During the round table discussion with the winners of the IFOY Industrial Truck and Intralogistics Award (from p. 40), for example, it wasn't all about "Mine is the best, finally the jury has recognized that" statements. Suddenly we were talking about automation in the warehouse. "Of course, we can already make forklift drivers superfluous thanks to autonomous systems, but is that what politicians want?" one of the panelists interjected. Thoughtful looks. What will happen to low-skilled workers when jobs disappear thanks to swarm intelligence, sensor phalanx and surveillance overkill? What do politicians want, what do we want? Do they want to keep people in work and ignore the fact that the physically demanding work in the warehouse wears people out and, in the worst case, even makes them ill after decades? Or is it promoting rationalization and autonomization? (Incidentally, if we were in the editorial section of our sister magazine LT-manager, we could also have this discussion 1:1 for professional drivers). If our Digi-Dobrindt in particular is advocating 4.0 and hastenichtgesehen, do he and other ministers know what they want to offer the unemployed masses?
"A good journalist must be able to measure and correct their own opinion."
With this somewhat intellectual thought experiment, I bid you farewell until the next issue. It will be continued in the next editorial. Stay thoughtful!
Best regards, Your
Martin SchrüferManaging Editor-in-Chief Material Flow, LT-manager
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