This kind of dehumanization isn't at all new in factory-type environments. Frederick Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management[1] was very popular 100 y

This kind of dehumanization isn't at all new in factory-type environments. Frederick Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management[1] was very popular 100 years ago, and included things like time and motion studies[2] which served to optimize processes as much as possible and remove individual variations as much as possible. The whole point was pretty much to make every worker a replaceable cog in the industrial machine. I'd argue that this is actually pretty much what happened - and as the abilities of robots and other forms of automation grew, it was easy to replace humans because so much of the work had already been precisely measured and systematized. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Scientific_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Scientific_M... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study