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They only employ 200 or so employees, as per the article. We are talking probably $10 million in payroll a year which is a rounding error at this scale. The aut
by cylinder 9y ago
They only employ 200 or so employees, as per the article. We are talking probably $10 million in payroll a year which is a rounding error at this scale. The automation fetishism is exhausting.
- swalsh 9y agoPayroll is a terrible number to look at to estimate if automation is worth doing. Automation provides ancillary benefits which are often more important than simply replacing people. For example automation can provide increased consistency (perhaps reducing human error?) for some tasks it can do the work faster. Sometimes automating things allows a company to do that thing more often. There's a bunch of reasons to automate, and replacing people is probably the last reason to do it (since often the people just get shifted to tasks which previously didn't have enough resources to do, sometimes those tasks pay off big)
- secstate 9y agoTo say nothing of the fact that automated tasks work 24/7 under the most basic human observation. Silly humans needing to sleep, eat and rest.
- mikepurvis 9y agoI think the point is that automation doesn't have to mean _total_ automation, with the lights out. Giving a human labourer a better, smarter set of tools can capture a significant chunk of the automation benefits, while also retaining the flexibility and awareness of having a human present for whatever the task is.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoWho maintains the robots? Precision equipment needs to maintain calibration, so who does that work? More robots? Is it robots all the way down?
- pm90 9y agoUltimately, I think this is where we are going to end up. Humans will mostly exist for analyzing trends in the market and to improve optimize automation. Almost all manual labor will be eliminated.