Automation is Coming for You

You are forced to utilize your human potential. In preparing for automation, you should write, read and review.

Recklessness, aimlessness materializes in a young man speeding, with tons of metal formed into a vehicle, a stray bullet, into self-assertation. The vehicle, the technology, is not the most dangerous element in the story.

Automation, like the technology before it — like digital media, jet engines, and tractors — is set to amplify our actions as humans. This follows from the line of thought of Elting Morison’s “Men, Machines, and Modern Times”.

This helps pinpoint the dilemma attached to their ethics. Part of the complexity underlying the ethics of autonomous systems is that human will could not be attached to the system as an independent agent. When machine learning algorithms exhibit racial bias or self-driving cars overrun pedestrians, systems would need to be fixed, but it is humans that need to be questioned and held accountable.

It is not coming after your job, automation is coming for you.

Many argue that automation would not “steal” jobs. It would create positions different than the one it obsoletes. They base their argument that complete automation is nowhere near, and human operations would still be required for designing, controlling, or maintaining robots. This is only partially true. Nevertheless, you should rest assured. It is not coming after your job, automation is coming for you.

Before attempting to understand what it could do for you, take a minute to understand how groundbreaking technology makes itself comfortable in the public realm. As our elders in Lebanon recall, if you were to apply for a driving license around the ‘60s, you would have likely been asked to demonstrate your ability to identify different mechanical systems and repair common faults in a vehicle. With the expanded public embrace of motorized vehicles and the development of their technology, the requirement has been waived.

Likewise is the case with machine learning. Years ago you would have had to learn arduous mathematics to enter the field. Today, you could read a Medium article, and find yourself dragging and dropping visual components to train your system.

The barriers to the adoption of technology are lowered, allowing it to become the next hype.

As it develops, and more production-ready versions of itself become available, the barriers to the adoption of technology are lowered, allowing it to become the next hype. This is why quantum computing, which has been proposed decades ago, is finding its way to fame now.

The cycle detailed above also explains the demise of the engineering-manager and the rise of the senior developer. As the gates to technology are flooded, the gatekeepers are rendered unthreatening, and, if successful, the technology lends itself to the people. This is vividly described in Vonnegut’s novel, “Player Piano”, in the scene where the angry mobs break into factories and destroy machines, only to start tinkering with their parts and building their own.

The collapse of a solution into a problem calls upon the skilled and the experienced to reconsider the overarching process.

One last usually dismissed part of the cycle, is that the world eventually adapts. As it adapts, the problems which the technology attempted to solve, arise again. Tools that were meant to simplify communication amongst people called upon digital marketers and copyeditors. Airplanes that were designed to accelerate travel became disease vectors. Whereas widespread adoption shines the spotlight onto the generalist tradesman, the collapse of a solution into a problem calls upon the skilled and the experienced to reconsider the overarching process.

The God-endowed free-will is characteristic of humans, and the tools you create intensify it. The Word is an embodiment of this human ability, the ability to conceptualize, create, and act upon thoughts. As such, higher degrees of automation would require that you further clarify your intentions, your thought processes, and your operations.

You should push yourself to become aware of the overarching processes.

This is because as automation chips away tasks, labels them “mundane”, you are forced to utilize your human potential and your characteristic cognition. Learning a skill is no longer enough. Starting from your skills, you should push yourself to become aware of the overarching processes. As robots leave the confines of factories, and rest on tabletops, in preparing for automation, you should write, read, and review.

Write

Attempt to make the processes underlying your actions explicit. A great start would be writing them down. The faster you want to move to adopt new technology, the more detailed you should get with your writing.

This does not have to be in text, this “writing” step could be developing a CAD model for the furniture you hand-carve. It could, for example, also be working out a digitized visual guideline for spacing in your graphic design.

To automate a process, you must first be able to describe it.

The assumption here is that as you try to get more detailed, you would be increasing your adoption of digital formats in making your processes explicit. To improve and to automate a process, you must first be able to describe it.

Read

Data is where trade secrets lie.

The importance of “reading” lies in figuring out what to look for, and what to measure when you are tuning your automated system and measuring its performance. You could have been in operation for long, or you could be just starting. Both cases offer you the opportunity to utilize troves of data that are already being generated by your work. While legacy formats, say paper blueprints require greater efforts to digitize, data from the work you are yet to do is more easily subjected to being read. Data is where trade secrets lie.

Even if you are still small and unsure of what system to use, you could do this manually. For example, if you’re selling cookies out of your kitchen, think of yourself as an experimentalist, and make a spreadsheet to record the different timing and temperature for the baking process, as well as the count produced by a given recipe for each batch.

Finally, the most interesting part is reading about the technicalities, the nifty details, of others, whether through a blog post or a quick search through patents. When doing so, do not forget to go back to the first step, and write!

Review

Reviewing is the link between the two steps above. It is about making sense of what you do. It is about revisiting your process, setting your performance benchmarks, staying up-to-date with industry standards, and maintaining your cutting edge.

Adjust your processes, as you review.

Writing describes what you do, reading describes what comes out, and reviewing allows you to truly understand the whole cycle. It allows you to write more, to adjust your processes, as you review what you have read, what you have recorded.

In brief, automation is about intensifying your will and amplifying your processes. As observed in other aspects of life, cyclic processes appear in technology and their adoption. This is true for not only general, but also specific developments.

Cars had train tracks replaced with tar, and Hyperloops will soon bring them back. Digital devices pushed analog computers to the side, and quantum computing is reviving them. Factories reminded us of the urge for self-expression against the tolls of scientific management, and automation seems to be bringing the scientific method back.

You should become explicitly aware of yourself, your processes, and your workflows. Is it not that machines go around orchestrating what we otherwise would be doing to conduct ourselves?

So that you are not consumed by technology, you should know yourself before the technicalities.