I have read this story before and it reminds of the phrase "Necessity is the mother of all inventions". What if that $8M project was never implemented ? The fac

I have read this story before and it reminds of the phrase "Necessity is the mother of all inventions". What if that $8M project was never implemented ? The factory worker would then not need to manually go and remove the empty boxes. So one way to look at it is that the $8M project actually created a necessity to be more efficient and gave the guy an idea to not manually move the boxes by installing a fan which in turn solved the overall problem of empty boxes being shipped. May be he would have thought of all this without the $8M project but what are the odds ?