Many things we consider "automatic" require complex maintenance and upkeep, and inappropriate automation can actually increase the net amount of work needed to be done.
It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will produce more, which is good, but the loss of leverage is an important factor to consider.
There's also a wasting and dependency effect that occurs when too much of a system is automated. If people aren't needing to work on or maintain a system, they don't need to know how it works to use it, pretty much by definition. It's doing the work for them. That creates a dangerous situation where essential systems aren't really understood, and fewer and fewer people end up knowing how to fix things because there isn't the same need to distribute the knowledge of upkeep/understand the work it's doing personally by doing it yourself.
Automation is extremely beneficial, and I'm often frustrated by what seem to be clear cases of not taking advantage of it, but I think what you're saying here over simplifies things.
I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.
I am trying to not delve into a 20 pages presentation, but I have gone though and through these themes for most of my professional life. The question whether we can really go to 100% of automation is moot if we can go to 99%. Either way it means that full employment is unnecessary and leads to the creation of bullshit jobs.
> I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.
That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.
Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...
Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them. Worse: we assume they are going to be so criticized that they have to perform better by a magnitude on day 1. That's making us waste 40 years.
> if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...
Sorry, but that sounds hilarious. If "a city wanted", it's still people who would need to ensure "to signal construction work". And people don't care. And for other stuff, people would need to pay for it with their taxes. I'm sorry, but as an outsider, I would say the roads (usual roads!) in the US are in "perfect" condition only in California. In other states, it's the usual asphalt-with-cracks, which will turn into a hole when a heavy truck rides it thru the rainy/snow season.
Heck, majority of the world has problems with trash on the streets, and cities can't neither teach their people to not litter, nor clean up timely after them.
> And for other stuff, people would need to pay for it with their taxes.
Automation benefits cities as well, you know. For instance computers probably drastically reduces the number of manual processing of paperwork. That's tax money you can use for something else.
> That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.
I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.
> Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...
I believe there already are official maps and standardized signs in the developed world. I agree that incremental improvement is possible and desirable, I also think people are working on these things already. It is possible that signs could be redesigned to make them easier for machines to read but I'm not sure that's much of a bottleneck.
> Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them.
I see lots of effort to promote them, they just aren't technologically ready to perform at scale yet.
> I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.
We have decided to move all our factories to China instead of automating them. We still have subway drivers despite having the tech to automate subway since the 1960s.
> Many things we consider "automatic" require complex maintenance and upkeep, and inappropriate automation can actually increase the net amount of work needed to be done.
As seen in some test suites and CI/CD pipelines...
It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will produce more, which is good, but the loss of leverage is an important factor to consider.
There's also a wasting and dependency effect that occurs when too much of a system is automated. If people aren't needing to work on or maintain a system, they don't need to know how it works to use it, pretty much by definition. It's doing the work for them. That creates a dangerous situation where essential systems aren't really understood, and fewer and fewer people end up knowing how to fix things because there isn't the same need to distribute the knowledge of upkeep/understand the work it's doing personally by doing it yourself.
Automation is extremely beneficial, and I'm often frustrated by what seem to be clear cases of not taking advantage of it, but I think what you're saying here over simplifies things.
I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.