I like to imagine semiconductor manufacturing is the most extreme case of automation we have today.<p>One shift supervisor can oversee thousands of wafers per hour. Humans aren't even in the factory anymore due to defect rates. Many employees are asleep at home with tool alarms and/or statistical triggers over metrology data that will page them out of slumber if something goes wrong.<p>It feels like something exponential starts to happen once you get into automation rates exceeding 99%. There isn't a single tool in a modern fab that isn't on the automated material handling system. They build dedicated bridges just for these robots to travel between the fab buildings.
New to me as well. Awesome density of well formulated common-sense
ideas and references. Adding this to my arsenal in defence of humanity
alongside Gall's Systemantics, Demings 14 points and
Forrester/Meadows. Can we ever stop the cult of making insane machines
and cruel systems - while believing we're "making the world a better
place" - even when science tells us we're wrong?
If automation is something that get done, but not by me. Then management is automation, globalization is automation, using other people's code is automation, LLM is also automation. The central theme to me is that, what to do when things go wrong, how often and how badly. Clueless management don't know what actual progress is, covid, single point of failure due to no longer maintained software, hallucination, etc