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My father-in-law provides a good counterpoint. He worked at a bridge span builder when PCs were coming out. A supplier gave them 5 Apple computers for buying so
by wil421 6y ago
My father-in-law provides a good counterpoint. He worked at a bridge span builder when PCs were coming out. A supplier gave them 5 Apple computers for buying something. His boss told him to throw them away it’s just some fad.
That night he picked up a manual and learned a little BASIC and put together a program to do some calculations for manufacturing bridge spans. It would normally take 3 guys 2 days double checking and redoing the precise calculations but the Apple II took minutes. Now 3 guys were free to do other things and a bottle neck was removed. The company could take on more work and the boss was pleased. “Take those things out of the trash!”
What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful.
- maxk42 6y agoThis is called "productivity". It's the reason the world isn't full of unemployed horse-and-buggy drivers right now.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoIn this case, the man-hours per bridge drop. But how many man-hours were available in the field pre-computer? So now we've got excess man-hours and we've got a choice. Either move those man-hours to higher value tasks OR release the bridgespanneteers from the job. And that's the conundrum we face with automation where we remove bottlenecks, and we can't retask the capacity.
- skwb 6y ago|What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful. I would almost change it to say "what the boss didn't really understand was how to use the computers to make my employees more productive". I think the specifics in how you automate is incredibly important, and there are many cases of how it can fail. 737 Max MCAS system is a prime example of how ramming automation through without consideration of "human factors" leads to massive failure.