When scientists first developed automation based on a series of centuries-old theories in the mid-1940s, nobody could have predicted how the technology would take off today. This primitive use of automation involved creating machinery in a factory that worked with the stimuli to a set of protocols in order to complete repetitive tasks rapidly. As the price of computer hardware began to fall from the 1970s onwards, automation, which had grown increasingly sophisticated, began to really take off. There are countless aspects in our lives that involve automation that we probably aren’t even aware of.
Industries Boom Thanks to Automation
Many industries have been improved due to automation and have saved considerable time and money while also promoting safety. Many joke (or fear) that the robots will come to steal their jobs, with the advent of driverless cars and factories which don’t require any human intervention. The automotive industry benefitted from automation when they faced shortages of human staff. Rather than replace human jobs, they enable the output to be increased as humans are able to manage the machines. The medical industry is also benefitting from the use of robots – including one which helped a surgeon with its superior ability to cut flesh with greater precision and accuracy and less surface damage. Little Caesar’s restaurant patented a robot arm that helped prepare its pizzas in order to make them more uniform and allow the humans to work on the customer service aspects that robots couldn’t possibly try to replicate.
How Does Automation Affect My Life?
Most examples of automation have been of how processes for large corporations have been streamlined, but how does automation actually affect your daily life? Automation and machine learning is being trialed in gaming to make the non-player characters more intuitive and console games more realistic and immersive. This has come along way since the software developed for super chess computer Deep Blue. Call centers and customer service responders have been replaced by automated systems and bots in order to solve common problems that those calling may have, freeing up time for human employees to handle more complex issues.
While hopefully not day-to-day life, bomb disposal is exclusively done by robots, removing a vast majority of the threat to human life during this activity. Meanwhile, Forex Robots are used for monitoring multiple different possible currency trades and obtaining analysis that helps users understand which trades to make. Again, this is a huge time saver for humans, as it means traders don’t need to spend hours in front of the computer manually performing that analysis. AI is used by banks to monitor accounts, patterns, locations and fraudulent behavior. If you receive a phone call about your card being used in another country, it’s because automation has signaled your behavior as atypical. The list goes on.
Is Automation All Good?
The start of 2019 saw an Ocado factory in the UK burn down, losing the company thousands of pounds. Why? Because the automation hardware that operated the packing of the home delivery groceries couldn’t detect the smoke in the air. This may be a glaring oversight for the use of automation, but prior to this, the factory worked fairly well, especially as the robots were working on a job that most humans would balk at.
The initial cost of automated systems is one of its major drawbacks: the high capital outlay means that the progress on developing new automation is slower than advocators would like, limiting its impact on human jobs. Yet, where automation is introduced, the aforementioned ‘robots stealing jobs’ that people joke about does actually happen. That is because, once a company has been able to set up the automated system, the processes are almost always cheaper as a result – hence, jobs lost to automation.
The Case for Automation
However, the way we have used automation thus far has greatly increased the safety and security compared to the analog of running things before. If the shape of things to come is a safer and more streamlined world, then automation is nothing but a godsend. The level of productivity for robots is greater than humans and the cost of human error can be reduced and possibly even removed.
While robots can malfunction, this happens a lot less frequently than most would expect – such as the difference between plane crashes and car crashes is the difference between machine breakdowns and human error. The year 1900 saw factory workers expending 70+ hours a week doing repetitive tasks, but those long hours were subsequently reduced and this was in part due to the new ways we found to do some of these tasks. The essence of automation is that it should be there to make our lives better and for the most part, the robots fulfil this part of their remit.
Whether we like it or not, automation is the way of the future and will encroach on our lives increasingly. As with any new technology, each new piece of machine learning will be subject to trial and error initially as we get used to them. A decade from now, automation will likely be so prevalent in our lives that it will have taken a lot of the stress out of some of the more unpleasant or mundane activities, leaving us more time to focus on bettering ourselves. That’s the theory, anyway.
