It’s time.
“Automation costs jobs!”
That protest was probably first heard when a cave dweller invented the wheel. The truth is that automation makes us more productive. If we had only the technology of a pre-tech society, we’d be living like a pre-tech society. It’s especially the mundane and risky tasks which free us to be more productive and lead better, safer lives.
We romanticize the days before machines and industry, but life back then was, in Hobbes’ famous words, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Most people lived on farms. They had to do hard physical tasks. This included children; there wouldn’t have been enough to eat if they didn’t work.
The advance of technology has saved people from those tasks. A power saw is safer and easier to use than an axe. Electric lighting is more reliable than torches and causes fewer fires.
The benefits of automation
The Ford Motor Company coined the term “automation” in 1948, but the practice existed long before then. Using machines in production let people be more productive, improving their standard of living. A downside, during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, was that work could be very tedious; people spent long hours in factories repeating the same motions, as if they were machines themselves. But just for that reason, those were tasks machines could do. Over time, the need for workers shifted to tasks requiring skill and care. There was still reason for dissatisfaction, but the long-term trend was toward greater productivity and more opportunities to think on the job. As a result, wages had more purchasing power.
Today automation has taken on a new dimension. It can do even jobs that traditionally required human judgment. Once again people see it as a threat, but it’s an opportunity. Some jobs are still tedious and risky, and they’re the best candidates for letting machines do the work. Why make people do heavy lifting when machines can? Why make a human hold a welding torch or handle toxic materials for hours every day? Why send someone into a dangerous environment if a robot can do the job?
Bernard Myerson, IBM’s CTO, wrote: “Indeed, robots are ideal for tasks that are too repetitive or dangerous for humans to undertake, and can work 24 hours a day at a lower cost than human workers.”
Collaboration, not replacement
Machines still can’t make final judgments on tasks requiring intelligence, and we wouldn’t want to give them that power…yet. They can’t push human workers aside; rather, they make their jobs easier, safer, and less tedious.
People aren’t good at staying alert for events that rarely happen. Their attention will wander, and they’ll lose precious seconds when an alarm goes off. An automated emergency response system is always watching with its full capacity, and it will take programmed action immediately. A human is still necessary to make sure that what it does is appropriate and adequate. It may be necessary to shut down a response to a false alarm. A human may have to take extra action, such as getting someone with a disability out of danger. Automated systems sometimes fail, and people have to notice.
As automation develops, it pushes the work people do to a higher and more productive level. People who lose their old jobs don’t always appreciate this, of course. They’d rather have a dull, dangerous job than none. But the answer isn’t to hold technology to a standstill. It’s to give people opportunities to learn skills for working with the new machines and systems.
Automation in small businesses
Robots’ traditional domain has been large industries. They were expensive, and each one could do only one task, so economies of scale only worked where there was lots of work to do. This is rapidly changing, We now have cheap robotic vacuum cleaners in our homes. Niches for automation in smaller businesses are opening up.
Many shops have automated security work by installing surveillance cameras. Places that are too small to hire a security guard aren’t putting anyone out of work by using them. They’re protecting themselves with no loss to anyone except would-be thieves. They’ve installed point-of-sale terminals which make sales clerks’ jobs easier and eliminate most errors. Lines are shorter, customers get better service, and clerks are under less pressure.
The devices that do these things are all valuable separately, but they become even more useful when they communicate with each other. That’s what the Internet of Things allows. Smart thermostats can adjust themselves to the weather, wasting less energy. PoS terminals can update inventory. Alarms can trigger automated phone calls or text messages.
There are dull and dangerous tasks to do in small businesses, and the people who have to do them aren’t happy, even if they’re a small part of the work. They don’t think that’s what they were hired for, and they don’t have much training in doing them. Machines to inspect and clean hard-to-reach places don’t take away their jobs, just the part which they’d rather not do. Machines to help them respond to fires or plumbing disasters keep them safer from injury. The day may not be far when every office and store has an on-duty robot for unpleasant tasks and emergencies.
Welcoming automation
Change always frightens people, but without it we’d still be living in caves. Over the centuries, technology has freed us from difficult, tiring, boring, dangerous tasks. Today’s breakthroughs in automation are freeing people from mundane, risky tasks which we used to think people would always have to do. It’s a change we should welcome.
