The Inhumanity of the Human Factor - A Scoping Study of the Language in Cobot Introduction Methodologies in Manufacturing

The study dissects a trend in the literature on collaborative robots (cobots) within Industry 4.0. By examining 16 articles from 2017 to 2023, this scoping study lays bare the dehumanizing language used to describe the human workforce terms like "worker," "user," and "operator" reduce people to cogs in the machine. The author exposes the underlying agenda in these articles: a collective pursuit of efficiency with cobots as the spearhead. The study questions the practice of quantifying human experience, arguing that such reductionist views fail to account for the value of human expertise and context in the increasingly robotic manufacturing environment.