Lesson 18. The Slow-but-Safe Approach Robs Factories of Their Brilliance Approach to Equipment: Automation and The world is full of automatic mach Human Automation (Jidoka) The world is full of automatic machines. As their name implies, almost all of these automatic machines are "self moving." We just flip the ON switch, and leave the rest up to the machine. Today, there are even automatic machines busy making other automatic machines. Still, not everything is perfect in robotland. For instance, very few automatic machines have the ability to stop upon detecting defects caused by worn or missing components. Automatic machines that seem to be the ultimate in convenience at one moment can suddenly become mass producers of junk at the next moment. Obviously, this will not do. The natural response is to put a human inspector on the job to watch out for such sudden quality changes. But the need for a human dilutes the meaning of automatic machines as labor-saving devices, even though this is what has to be done to maintain product quality. This paradoxical situation gave rise to the idea of jidoka, or human automation Jidoka is what enables the machine to be stopped the moment a defect occurs, a machine component breaks, the production flow backs up, or a mistake-proofing alarm goes off. People apply their own human wisdom and