Related:

Ironies of Automation (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36638026 - July 2023 (1 comment)

Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505285 - June 2023 (38 comments)

Ironies of Automation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33476157 - Nov 2022 (5 comments)

Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23300195 - May 2020 (11 comments)

Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132724 - Feb 2019 (27 comments)

Ironies of Automation (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18230258 - Oct 2018 (3 comments)

Ironies of Automation (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587611 - July 2018 (1 comment)

Ironies of Automation [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12749342 - Oct 2016 (1 comment)

Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9756838 - June 2015 (2 comments)

Ironies of Automation (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726496 - May 2014 (5 comments)

I like to imagine semiconductor manufacturing is the most extreme case of automation we have today.

One shift supervisor can oversee thousands of wafers per hour. Humans aren't even in the factory anymore due to defect rates. Many employees are asleep at home with tool alarms and/or statistical triggers over metrology data that will page them out of slumber if something goes wrong.

It feels like something exponential starts to happen once you get into automation rates exceeding 99%. There isn't a single tool in a modern fab that isn't on the automated material handling system. They build dedicated bridges just for these robots to travel between the fab buildings.

If automation is something that get done, but not by me. Then management is automation, globalization is automation, using other people's code is automation, LLM is also automation. The central theme to me is that, what to do when things go wrong, how often and how badly. Clueless management don't know what actual progress is, covid, single point of failure due to no longer maintained software, hallucination, etc

I think automation is like recursion, more you automate, more there is to be automated.

Very interesting read, and new to me. Thank you!

New to me as well. Awesome density of well formulated common-sense ideas and references. Adding this to my arsenal in defence of humanity alongside Gall's Systemantics, Demings 14 points and Forrester/Meadows. Can we ever stop the cult of making insane machines and cruel systems - while believing we're "making the world a better place" - even when science tells us we're wrong?

Written before Chernobyl and it stands out.