The Automation And Its Effects On The Environment

The article “Automation Makes Us Dumb” from Nicolas Carr, published November 21st, 2014 talks about how the advancement of technology has resulted in the automation of many jobs and processes, which in return has caused the human proficiency and creativity aspect to dwindle. Carr does recognize the importance of automation in the different job fields and uses the examples like airplane pilots’ ability to conduct manual maneuvers that are required for pilots to always know. He has found that these types of skills have slowly slipped away as pilots have relied on autopilot automation functions more. Carr starts his example with workers in a factory shortly after World War II and continues his example to even the white-collar workers today.

Nicholas Carr, the author of “All Can be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Heads of Machines”, expresses the major concerns towards technology. In this story many crashes and devastating accidents are presented. These accidents could have easily been avoided through the proper knowledge of the air staff members. As a result of technology, pilots are trained less expensively and therefore are unable to react in urgent situations. For example, they now rely on auto-pilot to do more of the directing than they rely on themselves for. This idea is expressed throughout many other stories, demonstrating the lack of knowledge due to the increasing use of technology. One main point that Carr makes is that individuals are constantly starting

article Carr explains how machines are making humans lazy and are weakening our awareness and attentiveness. He gives examples about situations where humans relied on computer operated machines. One of those examples were about a plane crash that killed all 50 people on board. “It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it.” said Carr. The pilot of that plane had training but the more planes he let be in auto pilot the less control inputs he remembered causing him to react in an adverse way and unable to safely land the plane.

In her introduction, Barbara Garson gives the reader an idea of her personal work experience as a clerk with automation. One can see that Garson is a strong critique of automation. In order to convey how automation is affecting our society the author begins by analyzing and studying various jobs from the bottom on up (i.e. starting with the most unskilled labor).

Increased automation is the result of a need to reduce cost, which in turn is driven by a company's need to become more competitive and grow market share -- a trend accelerated by pressures felt by the difficult economic situation.

"Ironies of Automation", by Bainbridge discusses the problem that technological automation systems may increase issues with the human operator, rather than decrease them. “The Great Forgetting” mentions Bainbridge and explains that individuals have trouble focusing on information for more than half an hour, so people that are forced to watch these automated machines do the work instead of them are losing their own skills of doing the job. Bainbridge’s article discusses an irony in the field of automation systems. An irony she mentions is that these systems are invented to do the operators job better than the operator would do it, yet the operator is required to watch the system to make sure everything goes alright. The article mentions the fact that even these high technological systems need human supervision and maintenance.

We live in the age of constant technological innovation and endless information; in which we are so connected and dependent on the technology we use that we sometimes don’t even realize how much we’re relying on it. In The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr, Carr defines automation as, “the use of computers and software to do things we used to do ourselves,” and argues that there are daunting consequences to our reliance on technology (Carr 1). In his book, Nicholas Carr sets up three arguments related to automation, tacit knowledge, and the idea of work. His main arguments throughout the novel are that humans are overestimating the benefits of automation, losing tacit knowledge through our reliance on technology, and

While the study makes a number of recommendations on how to acquire autonomy-literate operators and maintainers, it misses a key constituency the strategic leaders that will make the programmatic, ethical, and operational decisions associated with autonomous systems. This requirement for educated and savvy senior leaders, whom likely have very little background in a fundamentally new set of capabilities, does not stop with autonomy. For example, consider Deputy Secretary of Defense Work’s key building blocks for the third offset strategy: autonomous machine learning; human-machine collaboration;

A high level of interconnectedness between system components, reliance on indirect information sources, an unpredictable environment, or incomprehensibility of a system to its operators indicates complexity within a system (Perrow, 1999). Since systems are designed, run and built by humans, they cannot be perfect. Every part of the system is subject to failure; the design can be faulty, as can the equipment, the procedures, the operators, the supplies, and the environment. Since nothing is perfect, humans build in safeguards, such as redundancies, buffers, and alarms that tell operators to take corrective action. But occasionally two or more failures can interact in ways that could not be anticipated. These unexpected interactions of failures can defeat the safeguards, and if the system is also “tightly coupled” thus allowing failures to cascade, it can bring down a part or all of system. The vulnerability to unexpected interactions that defeat safety systems is an inherent part of highly complex systems; they cannot avoid this (Perrow, 1984).

“The report reviews several practices whose evidence came from the domains of commercial aviation, nuclear safety, and aerospace, and the disciplines of human factors, engineering and organizational theory. Such practices include root cause analysis, computerized physician order entry and decision support, auto-mated medication dispensing systems, bar coding technology, aviation-style preoperative checklists, promoting a ‘culture of safety,’ crew resource management, the use of simulators in training, and integrating human factors theory into the design of medical devices and alarms.”

Introduction: Humanity has always struggled with the concepts of automation because of its lasting effects on people. While most would argue against automation in this classroom, I suggest instead that we accept it and allow it to become part of our lives. I have family members whose jobs have been replaced by automation, and I honestly think they are living a better life because of it. It will affect humans well in both the long and short term by allowing us to continue to push towards an optimistic future. I understand that this is a long way off, and I understand it will be a hard road but it is worth it.

The purpose of this study is to examine the performance of pilots flying multiple types of aircraft in an experimental setting. Pilot performance will be assessed by written tests and simulator sessions. This study will build on a previous field study, Pilots Flying Multiple Aircraft Types or Multiple Flightdeck Layouts, which was conducted for AVS 4504 Aviation Safety Analysis. The results of that study showed a need for a simulator study to further identify if pilots have issues maintaining currency in multiple types of aircraft.

As a ramification, it is difficult for human operators to anticipate faults within the system and prevent and manage the risks incurred by an operational accident accordingly, making them “incomprehensible”. Therefore, organisational accidents in complex systems are inevitable as despite defensive measures implemented to mitigate their risk, such as the training of operators and regular maintenance, the fragile design of the systems is the core reason why accidents occur.

Agricultural production has increased manifold due to the advent of automation and intelligence in various stages of a crop’s life cycle. Introduction of such processes has led to a significant increase in the output and reduction in the costs incurred in manual labour and other farm equipment. A scheme where machine vision is implemented can be used to perceive the position of a fruit for harvesting. This technology has been used to develop both land and aerial based systems for fruit detection and harvesting. Machine vision in harvesting is broadly based on visual cues and properties of fruit. Machine vision based systems have an advantage as apart from recognition of colour, texture and shape of any object, numerical points for the object are also defined.

According to Rodrigues and Cusick (2012) humans are accountable for approximately 70-80% of aviation accidents (p.156). A majority of these are caused by the different variables associated with human performance. Psychological factors have a key role in a pilot’s everyday responsibility. Some of these traits include: perception, memory, attitude, judgment and decision making, as well as ego (Rodrigues & Cusick, 2012, p. 158-160). These qualities can have drastic effects in commercial aviation if they are not recognized and adjusted accordingly. In this paper I will respond to some questions that are raised in aviation safety: