[21 Days of Automation] Day 6: The case against automation

Originally posted by Blogbot on Medium on 31st Jan 2020 

Automation can be a divisive subject. Depending on your outlook, automation is either something to be feared or celebrated. I hope you have gathered by now, what side of the fence I reside, but let’s take a moment to recognise that folks on the other side of the fence aren’t as fond of Blogbot as you and I.

In my quest to investigate this fear of automation, I came across this fun website called “Will robots take my job?” which will help you determine how susceptible to automation your job is. If you are a dentist, and you are reading this, you’re safe, however, if you’re a Compensation & Benefits manager, I might direct you to my favourite website for all things learning — Udemy. They normally have a sale on at this time of year, so — Go wild, and God speed.

Here are some common misconceptions about automation and my perspective on these:

“Automation will put me out of a job”

Here’s my take on this one. I’ve had many jobs, and many of them have had huge administrative overhead, and I’ve never been in trouble for doing things quickly, efficiently and accurately. In fact, my ability to identify, streamline and automate processes has only ever been of benefit to my career, my blog, and my skill-set, so I would encourage anyone who has mastered “⌘+C”, “⌘+V” to look at how you, too can improve the task ahead of you, let it run in the background, and get on with some work that will add even more value to your customer or your company…Or watch some more cat videos #nojudgementzone

“Automation will change society for the worse”

If you’ve ever been inundated with automatic SMS messages or robocalls asking if you’ve been in a car accident recently, or a Twitter bot constantly ‘@’ ing you (Which I think Twitter has thankfully stopped), it would be hard not to be of the opinion that automation can certainly be used for evil as well as good, but overall, I think we can agree that anything can be used for good or evil, and the tools that are being developed to help you, the (hopefully) honest, hardworking professional to do your job better, be more informed, and have more time to be your human self, can have a truly positive impact on our lives. Let humans be human and the robots be robots.

“Automation is unreliable “

I would agree that we’ve all been on the other end of process breaking down, edge cases that have completely crippled all of our processes, or race conditions that have resulted in hours of work being lost, but on the whole, I would maintain that automation is a human creation, and any process will be just as fallible as its creator. I tend to believe that the pursuit of the perfect process automation is a noble one, and one that, at least for me, is infinitely more satisfying than trying to manually systematise your software.