| ▲ | catdog 4 hours ago | |
> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified. Not necessarily. Automation may also just result in higher quality output because it eliminates mistakes (less the case with "AI" automation though) and frees up time for the humans to actually quality control. This might require the people on average to be more skilled though. Even if it only results in higher output volume you often have the effect that demand grows also because the price goes down. | ||
| ▲ | Animats 4 hours ago | parent [-] | |
There's a classic book on this, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor" (1926). [1] They show three cases of what happened when a process was mechanized. The "good case" was the Linotype. Typesetting became cheaper and the number of works printed went up, so printers did better. The "medium case" was glassblowing of bottles. Bottle making was a skilled trade, with about five people working as a practiced team to make bottles. Once bottle-making was mechanized, there was no longer a need for such teams. But bottles became cheaper, so there were still a lot of bottlemakers. But they were lower paid, because tending a bottle-making machine is not a high skill job. The "bad case" was the stone planer. The big application for planed stone was door and window lintels for brick buildings. This had been done by lots of big guys with hammers and chisels. Steam powered stone planers replaced them. Because lintels are a minor part of buildings, this didn't cause more buildings to be built, so employment in stone planing went way down. Those are still the three basic cases. If the market size is limited by a non-price factor, higher productivity makes wages go down. | ||