Sunday, April 9, 2017

Automation is boon or bane

"Automation" dictionary meaning is "the use or introduction of automatic equipment in a manufacturing or other process or facility. And the next line is ‘unemployment due to the spread of automation’. This word is quite old probably its in practice from 1940. So when we read lots of stories like impact of automation and job loss because of it, I wonder how this problem is not solved yet.
If we look back Human evolution, apart from the biological changes we are continuously improving tools and adapting to use them. So we invent and discover something lets say motor car. then we try to produce them in scale by setting up factory and establishing process. And slowly we delicate these task to different tools which are machine, robots and computers. In this process we force our fellow human from one form of job to another. So we always move to more productive things.

I belong to digital industry which thrives on the possibility of automation. Computers and software are catalyst for automation. After automating different industry now we are looking inside. It means IT will be more efficient in term of economy more people can afford and use.

For a developer perspective if we look beyond job risk, there are lots of possibilities are in horizon. Now all the development platform or systems are automatically provisioned. So we can have more servers, compute more storage to write and test our code. With test automation we will be more confident on our changes and quality. With automatic monitoring the health of our production system and software our systems will be more reliable. We are having smart editor which generate some part of code to assist developers. So in less time we can code more features.

My point is automation is a contentious process and an ultimate truth. The one who adapts it open to learn new productive way of doing always thrive.