Another explanation: electricity is dangerous. So are machines. If you can automate some portion of your desk job, you're a much more valuable employee. The s

Another explanation: electricity is dangerous. So are machines. If you can automate some portion of your desk job, you're a much more valuable employee. The same is theoretically true for factory workers and mechanical/electrical engineers, but the barrier to creating your own factory automation is extremely high. And no one is going to let a random factory worker tweak/augment expensive machinery in a novel and untested way. Whereas an Excel macro or quick Python script for parsing some data and doing some computations or sending some emails is very accessible and totally acceptable in many environments.