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Wallace Whipple, 1964 Twilight Zone episode, explains why automation is such a good idea—mainly the elimination of human beings, whose inefficiencies and costs are bad for profits. Thus they are fired and replaced by computer-controlled machines.
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I was at a large printing facility last week.
The floor covered at minimum several acres. Hundreds of machines humming away. Almost no people on the floor. Even the fork lifts were automated.
Happy talk articles like this one ignore many things. But one of the main things they ignore is numbers.
Sure, the facility I was at required workers to operate and maintain the robotic equipment. These are no doubt good jobs, much better than the machine operator jobs they replaced.
But it’s probable no more than 10, at most, of these jobs are provided for every 100 workers no longer needed. This is especially true because this plant operates 24/7. It therefore probably replaced three or four plants, and their workers, of equivalent size from just a couple of decades ago.
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Wallace Whipple, 1964 Twilight Zone episode, explains why automation is such a good idea—mainly the elimination of human beings, whose inefficiencies and costs are bad for profits. Thus they are fired and replaced by computer-controlled machines.
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