Automation

Automation is the use of control systems such as computers to operate industrial machinery and perform processes, replacing human operators. In the scope of industrialization, it is a step beyond mechanization. Whereas mechanization provides human operators with machinery to assist them with the physical requirements of work, automation greatly reduces the need for human sensory and mental requirements as well.

Quotes



 * Anything that can be automatically done for you can be automatically done to you.
 * Wyland's Law of Automation
 * Quoted by


 * Besides black art, there is nothing left in the United States but automation and mechanization.
 * Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York


 * As the bourgeoisie, by means of its capital, completely monopolizes all new inventions, every new machine, instead of shortening the hours of labor and enhancing the prosperity and happiness of all, causes, on the contrary, dismissal from employment for some, reduction of wages for others and an increased and intensified state of misery for the entire proletariat.
 * Johann Most, The Beast of Property (1884)


 * Where you have machines, then you get certain kinds of problems; where you get certain kinds of problems, then you find a heart warped by these problems. Where you get a heart warped, its purity and simplicity are disturbed. When purity and simplicity are disturbed, then the spirit is alarmed and an alarmed spirit is no place for the Tao to dwell. It isn't that I don't know of these machines, but I would be ashamed to use one.
 * Zhuangzi, The Book of Chuang Tzu, as translated by M. Palmer, et. al. (Penguin: 1996), p. 99


 * If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, [...]; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.
 * Aristotle, Politics, Book I, part 4 (1920 translation by Benjamin Jowett)
 * Popularly simplified to "when the looms spin by themselves, we'll have no need for slaves".