> about early 18th century English sailing ships, but the lack of automation is part of the romance The highly hierarchical and structured command structure of

> about early 18th century English sailing ships, but the lack of automation is part of the romance The highly hierarchical and structured command structure of a ship means that autonomous and intelligent human beings each make autonomous and intelligent decisions on the best course of action in a way that doesn't require constant and immediate upper layer attention all the time. The more limited amount of human beings required to upkeep a ship those days are mainly because of manpower shortage and cost reasons, not because the removed humans were "worse" at doing such operations. Those automation flows are in my opinion the same thing, they're replacing things because of manpower shortages or high costs of the previous thing, not because they're better.