[HN Gopher] Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf]
___________________________________________________________________
Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf]
Author : layer8
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-06-28 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| hospitalJail wrote:
| That was a hard paper to read, as someone who automates jobs. I
| only got 2 pages in.
|
| I felt like I could finish every sentence.
|
| Yes there are benefits, yes there are problems and humans needed,
| yes you refine over and over, yes you can't use humans to do
| checks because of long term focus so automation wins here,
| predicting all edge cases are near impossible, etc...
|
| Maybe I'll read this with friends to make it a bit more humorous
| and less painful.
| RedNifre wrote:
| The endgame is that we will be spending 99% of our time
| restarting IDEs and clearing caches to get rid of nonsensical
| errors, but since we will be 1000x as productive in the remaining
| 1%, it will still be worth it economically.
| starbugs wrote:
| Already approaching this with Xcode, but without productivity
| gain.
|
| And by productive you mean producing new problems that need
| solving instead of really solving anything, so that business
| can continue to make money?
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| Funny, I remember the discussion of this paper at my university
| a few decades ago. On your topic, I remember also a case that
| was discussed on a disinvestment of a fully automated factory.
| Loads of money was invested in the automation, but on several
| spots it still needed humans to glue the processes together.
| This work was so limited and dumb that no workers could be
| found who were able and willing to perform this task. As a
| result, parts of the automation was reverted.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| I see a factory like that! At one point the only remaining
| work was when something went wrong. The production line ran
| so fast, if something went wrong it produced enough garbage
| for 15 people to clean up. Not sure how they arrived at 15
| but with fewer it took longer to resume production.
|
| I estimate the thing crashed from 2-3 times per day to every
| 3 days or so with the later more often. Took about 15-20
| minutes to clean up with 15. Say 1 person would need 4-5
| hours. Then they gained 4.5 hours of production per incident
| (with 15 people)
|
| 15 * 8 hours * 3 days = 360 hours
|
| each of the 4.5 hours would then cost 80 man hours.
|
| Better numbers with more frequent crashes.
|
| Investors didn't like to see people sit, chat and drink
| coffee most of the day.
|
| The solution was to remove some machinery and all of the
| chairs. People had to work with insane speed to keep up. No
| time to scratch your itch, the work spot was designed for a
| machine, the one in storage.
|
| Imagine working there and going from drinking koffie all day
| to insane speed conveyor belt work because someone put the
| machine in storage because an investor might visit 1 time per
| year.
|
| Really brings out the best in people (ehm!)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Investors didn't like to see people sit, chat and drink
| coffee
|
| I do believe that the "workers must be uncomfortable all
| the time" mentality drives a ton of inefficiency. When my
| son was born, my wife worked from home, but we still needed
| a nanny to watch him most of the time so my wife could
| work. So we hired a teenage girl to come over and keep an
| eye on him for $10/hour. He was a baby, so it was pretty
| easy work - she spent most of the time watching TV. My wife
| complained that she was paying somebody $10/hour to just
| watch TV and insisted that she spend time cleaning instead.
| Well, she ended up leaving and we had a hell of a tough
| time replacing her - I said, "why do you care what she does
| as long as she gets her job (making sure our son doesn't
| die) gets done?" But she was adamant that if she was paying
| somebody, it had to look like "work" to her.
|
| I spent six years in college practicing the fine art of
| reading books and regurgitating their contents back in
| various contexts so that I could qualify for a job where
| any time spent reading anything is prohibited because it
| doesn't look like "measurable" work.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Back when the F-22 was in production, I was in the building
| in Seattle where the carbon fiber wing skins were being laid
| up using an automated tape placement machine. The machine
| head would come down to a precise 3D location on a complex
| contoured mold, contact it with a precise pressure, lay out a
| tow of CFRP tape prepreg for a precise length, then trim it
| to a specific geometry. Before the machine started the next
| tow, it extruded an inch of tape, trimmed it for the start of
| the next tow. At this point, a mechanic would reach over with
| a spatula taped to a length of steel electrical conduit to
| collect the little piece of scrap and throw it away. I asked
| a manufacturing engineer why they did not just add a little
| vacuum hose to collect the trim - Apparently the mechanic's
| union contract required each machine to have a full-time
| operator, and they had to invent a task for the operator to
| do to keep them engaged.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I'm sure his family appreciated it. I think he'd be okay if
| you automated that but had to pay him the full salary
| anyway in perpetuity.
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| Of interest:
|
| Baxter G, Rooksby J, Wang Y, Khajeh-Hosseini A. The ironies of
| automation: Still going strong at 30? In: Proceedings of the 30th
| european conference on cognitive ergonomics [Internet]. New York,
| NY, USA: ACM; 2012. p. 65-71. Available from:
| http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2448136.2448149
| dobbse wrote:
| Also available on the author's website:
| http://www.complexcognition.co.uk/2021/06/ironies-of-automat...
| csours wrote:
| My favorite Irony of Automation: People think that automations
| solves problems, but in reality, you have to anticipate and solve
| problems IN ORDER TO automate.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| It seems that we've long since reached the point where most
| professionals should be spending most of their time training for
| abnormal conditions (and the rest of it handling them), but
| instead we have a rising managerial class whose primary function
| is to find people to fire: those who haven't produced a visible
| result in the past couple of days or so.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Automation is the only thing that will actually work in some
| situations now.
|
| Semiconductor manufacturing might be like a unicorn in terms of
| this paper. You can't really put humans into a factory without
| cratering the yield at 7nm and beyond. You see full-auto rates
| approaching 100% in the highest-end foundries. It is likely that
| all of the chips in all of your devices never saw any direct
| human contact until they arrived at Foxconn or wherever.
|
| Achieving this level of automation requires an unbelievable
| amount of capital and extra human support. The irony definitely
| holds in this case. The amount of trouble created by the
| automation is exponentially beyond what any single human could
| cause. These factories generate event logs at a rate of 300+
| megabytes/hour. No human team on earth could break shit that
| quickly.
| hobo_in_library wrote:
| Fun fact: in the early days of silicon wafer manufacturing (60s
| or 70s IIRC) they would randomly have yields crater for a few
| days each month.
|
| Eventually they discovered yields were tanking when their
| female employee was on her period.
|
| Source: The Big Scoree
| morkalork wrote:
| Why would yields be influenced by that?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| No idea. Maybe she stayed home?
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| That sounds remarkably similar to many urban legends.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| Related: one of the fake cancer cures that James Randi ("The
| Amazing Randi") debunked didn't have very good test results
| in December when a particular person would take vacation. She
| was very Christian and took the whole month off to prep for
| Christmas. She also felt that faking test data was ethical
| because in her heart of hearts she wanted the cure to work.
| When Randi showed that the data was faked in all months
| except when she was on vacation.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Source link or bs.
| jvm___ wrote:
| I've read that the first person to touch a concrete cinder
| block is the person installing it.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Ironies of Automation_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33476157 - Nov 2022 (5
| comments)
|
| _Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23300195 - May 2020 (11
| comments)
|
| _Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132724 - Feb 2019 (27
| comments)
|
| _Ironies of Automation (1983)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18230258 - Oct 2018 (3
| comments)
|
| _Ironies of Automation (1983)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587611 - July 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _Ironies of Automation (1983) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9756838 - June 2015 (2
| comments)
|
| _Ironies of Automation (1983)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726496 - May 2014 (5
| comments)
| nickpeterson wrote:
| The point of this paper about the relationship and absurdity of
| human-machine automation could not be better summarized than
| dang having to chime in with all the past submissions of the
| same paper.
| blueline wrote:
| for a film interpretation of this paper: playtime by jacques tati
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-28 23:01 UTC)