The idea of automation started when we identified the repetitive, tedious and error prone activities in our day to day life and programmed computers and machines to perform them. For instance, there was a time when my father would return home with a bundle of currency notes on his pay day and put it into designated envelopes to manage the monthly expenses. To get this bundle of notes, he had to sweat few hours standing in a bank queue. Thanks to automation, the entire saga of standing in a bank queue, handling the bundle of currency notes and the monotonous activity of putting of the notes in designated envelopes has been replaced by a single and simple SMS - "Your salary for the month has been credited in a/c no. XXXXXXXX". Thanks to a government portal and the associated automation, the filing of Income Tax returns has become lot easier than ever. From booking a movie ticket at the nearest multiplex to paying utility bills via online banking, an automatic smartphone app can do it all. This is truly an age of the "Rise of Machines" where every device has become more smarter and more efficient to aid mankind in every possible way that we can imagine.
But as a general rule, when everything looks very hunky dory, there is always some sign of trouble brewing up, underneath our feet. This extremely heavy dependency on automation has made us over-confident and careless. A few days back as I was returning after shopping from Big Bazaar, I decided to book a cab to home. Due to some network issues, my cab booking app was unable to connect to the company servers. So I decided to call them instead, and book my cab. But, to my amazement, even the cab company's call center executives were unable to book a cab on my verbal request, as booking was allowed via smartphone app only. Though, the network issue got resolved and finally I was able to book my cab for the return journey, still this raises an important concern. The concern is that, excessive dependence on automation and its extensive use as a measure of crowd control has made us callous. In this case, the app developers were so confident that they virtually left nothing for manual intervention as a fail-safe mechanism. What if someone needs a cab urgently but the smartphone data connection network is unavailable ?? This scenario reminds me of the exuberant branding of Titanic as "The Unsinkable" ship. As a result, the shipping company did not provide enough lifeboats for escaping in case of a disaster. What happened, as a consequence of that, got clearly etched in the pages of history on 14th April 1912, when the "Unsinkable" ship sank in the icy Atlantic waters killing over 1500 people onboard.
As I pen down these thoughts, my mind races back to the school days when we had a debate competition - "Can machines replace humans ??" I don't know, whether the topic is debatable or not, but my answer to this is a big NO. Machines, computers and the entire idea of automation is a wonderful creation of human brain, which in turn, is an extremely fine tuned product of evolution of life, spanning over millions of years. When I say, 'extremely fine tuned', I mean to say that no other creature has the brain power to think of this wonderful idea. How many of us have seen a lion creating another mechanical lion and programming it to hunt ?? This means, for something to replace human beings, it should be more finely tuned in the evolutionary process than humans have undergone. In other words, making a process fully automatic and removing all sort of manual intervention is like starting a brake-less vehicle at full throttle. So, to sum it up, technology and automation are a boon as long as they have a human element involved with them. The moment, the human element is lost, they can become real-time liabilities.
"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency." - Bill Gates
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