John Connor must be working in Toyota, because humans are getting their jobs back right now. The pros of automation haven't outweighed the cons, and that means human factory workers are back in business.

The move is quite unconventional. But Toyota's reasoning makes sense. It has apparently been suffering from an excess of average workers and a dearth of master craftsmen.

According to project lead Mitsuru Kawai who told Bloomberg:

We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them. When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything...

We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again. To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.

While robots may work faster and for less money, Toyota pays for their lack of ingenuity and expertise in the long run. Workers are now physically twisting, turning and hammering metal into crankshafts, a process which was previously automated. Doing it manually has led to a reduction in scrap material and a shortening of the production process by 96 percent in three years.

[Bloomberg via Quartz]