Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ...
by JohnFen on Sunday October 22, 2023 @01:03PM
(#37977082)
There's another aspect to it as well.
It's really common to see jobs that people are doing that appear to be easy to replace with robots. But if you actually try to develop automation to do it, you very commonly hit a bunch of gotchas that make the automation infeasible. Sometimes this is a systemic thing (you can't effectively automate this without having to change too much of the rest of the process at the same time, which makes it economically a nonstarter), but more often than you'd think it's because there's an aspect of the job which doesn't seem particularly hard or important because humans do it without even thinking about it -- but to computers and robots, it's incredibly difficult.
It's really common to see jobs that people are doing that appear to be easy to replace with robots. But if you actually try to develop automation to do it, you very commonly hit a bunch of gotchas that make the automation infeasible. Sometimes this is a systemic thing (you can't effectively automate this without having to change too much of the rest of the process at the same time, which makes it economically a nonstarter), but more often than you'd think it's because there's an aspect of the job which doesn't seem particularly hard or important because humans do it without even thinking about it -- but to computers and robots, it's incredibly difficult.