subject: Industrial Automation--- [print this page] Industrial Automation--- Industrial Automation---
Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization. Whereas mechanization provided human operators with machinery to assist them with the muscular requirements of work, automation greatly decreases the need for human sensory and mental requirements as well. Automation plays an increasingly important role in the world economy and in daily experience.
Automation has had a notable impact in a wide range of industries beyond manufacturing (where it began). Once-ubiquitous telephone operators have been replaced largely by automated telephone switchboards and answering machines. Medical processes such as primary screening in electrocardiography or radiography and laboratory analysis of human genes, sera, cells, and tissues are carried out at much greater speed and accuracy by automated systems. Automated teller machines have reduced the need for bank visits to obtain cash and carry out transactions. In general, automation has been responsible for the shift in the world economy from industrial jobs to service jobs in the 20th and 21st centuries Most people consider it common sense that automation has the potential to foster unemployment, because it obviates human work by transferring tasks to machines. However, the translation of that potential into observed effect has largely not happened in the two centuries during which it has been continually predicted. After many decades of automation development and dissemination, the net macroeconomic effect has been generally positiveautomation has been part of a general trend of economic growth worldwide; standards of living have risen in many places; and automation has never yet been shown to have induced any widespread structural unemployment.
The main explanation for this is that, so far, job losses in any one particular economic niche have always been more than offset by job gains in other niches. As the lowered unit cost of goods and services (which the automation made possible) gave consumers more purchasing power to devote to other goods and services, new jobs sprang up in the production of those goods and services. Thus each time that automation has freed up human resources, those resources have been redeployed by market forces (although it did not always happen without turbulence in the lives of individual workers).
One of the earliest promises of automation was to allow more free time, without any threat of income reduction. This effect has been seen in many individual facets of life (for example, the automatic washing machine has made laundry less time-consuming; engine control units have reduced the amount of automotive downtime; the automatic dishwasher has made dishwashing less time-consuming), but the net outcome of modern life in developed economies remains a state of hurry and busyness, mostly because rising living standards have brought rising expectations in direct relation.
For more information on Industrial Automation you can visit http://www.axcend.com/Home.aspx
