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What is full automation?

Full automation does not seem to have a dictionary definition at the moment.

So we will call it a system where no humans are needed, to sustain the production of something.

From sourcing the resources needed, to the delivery of the final product. No human labour is needed to make something.

To try and answer the question of “how we get to full automation” let’s have a look at what it would take to make a simple wooden stool, with a fully automated system.

This is one of the most basic things we can make, and possibly one of the first things we manufactured, that was not used as a weapon.

In it’s simplest form, all you need is a flat slab of wood, put three holes in one side, then add three bits of wood for legs.

You don’t even need any glue or nails to hold it together, it can use gravity.

As we are not evaluating furniture here, we can skip the details of how it works.

Instead, lets look at how we would have made this throughout history.

In the earliest times, we would need some small sturdy bits of wood, some fibrous matter and the right stones. Then you can make some simple tools that can help work the wood, and make some holes.

Then you need the wood to make it. In this era this would most likely be a gathering process. People would be on the lookout for appropriate bits of wood, lying around somewhere, that can be useful.

So once you found some wood large enough to sit on, and a few bits for the legs, it’s fairly easy to make, the simple stool.

This version of the stool, uses the maximum amount of labour and time to make, but uses the least amount of tools.

One person with a lot of spare time, and the right knowledge, could easily make one of these stools, on their own.

Though, if you wanted to make a few dozen of them, then finding the resources, and making them, will get harder, the more you make.

Later in our development, when simple metal tools are common. Then we can make many more stools, in much less time.

This would involve a human heading out into the woods, and chopping down an appropriate tree, with an axe or saw, then cutting off any branches.

Once felled it would then be sawn up into smaller chunks for easy transportation.

Most likely using cattle or a horse to do the heavy work of moving the wood. As the appropriate trees are likely to be further away, as the population increases.

You might leave the wood to dry out for a period of time, then move it to a workshop as you need it.

Next saw an appropriate log of wood, into a nice flat slab, for the seats.

Then saw some of the smaller bits of wood into nice uniform lengths, for the legs.

Drill or chisel a few holes into the slab, and shape the end of the legs, so they fit in the holes.

Finally put it all together, so you have your finished stool.

With the change brought about by simple metal tools it became unlikely you would go from the raw materials, to making something, even as simple as this, all yourself. Especially if you include making all the tools you will use.

You will probably use a blacksmith to make the tools from the resources they get from a miner. Then you will have a wood smith that will fell the trees. Farmer to make the food to feed everyone, and maybe take care of the animals used. Then a carpenter to shape the wood and assemble the stool. Probably some sort of taxes for maintaining your society.

As you can see, by now we had already broken jobs down, into smaller tasks. So people would only do, a part of the process. You need quite a few people, just to make this simple stool.

You might have one person to find the right tree to fell and manage the woodland. Another to chop it down, and carve it up into transportable sizes. Someone to load the wood on, and off, the cart. Another in the logging mill to chop the wood into standard sizes. Then another to make the right shapes and assemble it.

Along with these advancement we also start to get, new resource pools, we never used to have.

If you wanted to make a stool, you don’t need to go cut down a tree. There will be a stockpile of wood somewhere, that was cut down, and prepared, much earlier. Instead, you would go down the wood suppliers, and get some appropriate bits of wood, that were already cut to size.

So, already by this era, you can see how a job, that was labour intensives, is starting to get broken into smaller and repetitive jobs.

We gained efficiency by creating jobs, that an average person can learn, mostly through repetition. Then learn to do it with their eyes shut, by repeating it numerous times.

A small team of people might clear a wooded area, in a week, that you could build a whole village with. The time it takes to get that tiny bit of wood for the stool is almost a rounding error.

Over time these jobs got broken down into sub jobs or trades.

The tools got better and more specialised.

While the speed and volume of things we could produce, kept increasing.

Though, alongside this you needed more resources, to maintain your society.

Things like schools, emergency services, waste disposal, farmers, transportation and the like.

As well as the managers, property owners and cleaners that help behind the scenes.

So already you can see that, even to make something as simple as a wooden stool, with modern tools.

A supply chain makes it much more efficient, especially if we want to produce them in bulk.

A tool like an axe or saw is most useful because you don’t need a new one, each time you need to use it.

This is the beauty of tools and automation machinery. An initial effort can save you a lot of time.

These are ‘sunk costs’ where a bit of effort is put in, for a long term return.

Take a blacksmith. Their kilns and workshop, could well have been built by their grandparents, and sill be used by their grandchildren.

In this case a few weeks of labour by one generation, making, the kiln, or workshop, saves a huge amount of work, by others that follow.

When you inherit the blacksmiths you don’t need to invest in the labour to build it, only the labour to maintain it.

Even making more kilns is easier, when you already have a working blacksmiths.

The better the tools and machines we have, the better tools and machines we can make.

So this is why these trades had such a big impact on, what us humans could achieve.

We have been playing around with melting metal for about five thousand years.

Often with tools and equipment that were used for generations.

Slowly evolving as we learnt new tricks, and found new resources, as the global demand grew.

So with the advancements with tools, mining, and fabrication, along with how working together saves time and effort. We steadily got more efficient at making something like a stool.

So, lets fast forward to today and look at what we would need to automate, to make this stool today.

There are a lot of ‘sunk costs’ we are starting with. Roads, computer controlled machines, vehicles and buildings that make it, so much easier to achieve.

There is even quite a high level of automation used to make the chair you are sitting on today. So all we need to do is automate those last few links in the chain.

To start with we need trees to chop down for the wood. In the modern world the wood is likely to come from a managed forest. Full of fast growing trees that get replanted.

So the first part of your automation task, is having a computer controlled system that can deploy a drone, to map the tree plantation, and monitor tree growth.

It’s quite possible something like this is in use today, though probably human operated or controlled.

Automated drone monitoring is quite a growth industry. So I’m sure something like this is quite doable, now.

Then schedule which trees are to be felled and when. Get the equipment needed, booked and deployed. Which is a simple computer automation task, should be no problem.

So for this you will most likely need an adapted self-driving system that can negotiate the forest terrain, and position the cutting machine at the base of the chosen tree.

I’d imagine someone is working on this sort of, low speed, and low chance of hitting a human, self driving system. We will need a lot of these type of self driving machines to complete this task.

We already have these impressive machines that can chop down a tree, de-branch it and slice it up into uniform logs. I believe they are mostly human operated, at the moment, so that will need to be automated.

If there are no humans in the area, that could get hurt, if it goes wrong, then this is probably, doable right now.

Next we need another machine that moves these logs onto a nearby self driving truck.

Up to this point. If you can do all this in an area that no humans are supposed to be. I would think you could easily knock up a crude system, that would fully automate, up to getting it on the truck.

One of the benefits of full automation, is that the time it takes to complete a task, may not be as critical, as it would be, in a human operated system.

The machines can work 24 hours a day, and you don’t need to pay them, while they are working, or when they are not working.

This can be very handy for a job like working a forest.

I’d imagine with humans, you get days when the weather is too bad, or there is not enough light, and you have to pay people, who can’t do the job at that time.

A fully automated system can use night vision, or some other sensors, to be able to work in poor conditions. Often working in worse conditions than a human would be allowed to work.

Fully automating this system, will probably get the job done in a timely fashion, but will need a lot of power, and maintenance.

Next bottleneck, at the moment, would be the self driving truck. These seem to be on the way, and most likely will be on the roads everywhere, reasonably soon.

Next we are going to need some sort of mobile machine, with lifting capabilities.

For jobs like lifting the logs out of the woods, and onto a truck. Then lifting, from the truck, to the lumber mill.

We have a few of these sort of things, in very controlled environments, at the moment, and these are going to be popping up, in a lot more places soon.

An advanced logging mill these days, is a fairly automated process. With logs moving along conveyor belts. Sorted and cut automatically. Then stacked up into piles of similar sized bits of wood.

So now we send these right sized bits of wood, to a computer controlled cutting machine, that will get the individual bits, needed for the stool, into the right shape.

Another machine could assemble the parts into the final stool.

Finally load it onto the self driving delivery truck and, send it of to the person who wanted it. Job done.

To do this with with no human labour would only take a small amount more automation.

Things like the self driving vehicles and tree cutting machine.

Most is either already automated, or near enough there, that a dedicated push to automate it could get you there in a reasonable time.

The final part is to make it self-sustainable. That would be to automate the nurseries where you grow new trees, and plant them out, near where you have just cut one down.

This then would be a sustainable, fully automated system, in isolation.

Though if we are thinking about a fully automated world, then we need much more automation, even to make this simple stool.

Maybe you could call this something like level one automation.

Level two could also include automating the energy supply for this system and the gathering of any resource needed. Including resources needed for maintenance and manufacture of any of the machines.

Then there is automating the making of the spare parts and repairing anything that breaks.

Finally you would need something to coordinate it all, which will be some sort of intelligent systems.

So it will take a bit of time to get all these sub systems automated.

Though, you can see how this automation, could creep up the supply chains.

Replace those human operators in mines and forests, with remotely supervised, automated systems.

Come up with machines that can swap a faulty battery, change a tire or other small service jobs. Then extend or expand what these machines can do.

Continue automating the production lines and moving things through the production cycle.

Just like how a blacksmith can make another kiln easier once you have a working kiln. Likewise we have seen an acceleration of automation with advancements in automation. Things like the steam engine, electricity, computers and other modern wonders are easier to make with automation.

From what I can see there are two things currently in development that can help make full automation easier. That would be droids and self driving technology.

Droids will be used for the small army of machines that will be needed to maintain anything in the system and move things around.

If you are thinking of an army of humanoid robots then I think you are probably wrong.

These will mostly be like the robots that shuttle things round warehouses or like the robot vacuum cleaners of today.

Fairly dumb simple machines that only have the technology needed to do their designated task.

Likewise most people will think of self driving vehicles as an electric car type thing.

Whereas they are much more likely to be to move around the machines that do tasks, like the tree felling machine. Or machines that can move the logs, or load the final product on, and off, a lorry. As well as doing the fiddly maintenance, which might be more of the human form.

So, if you owned a bit of woodland today, and had enough money. I reckon you could build a fully automated system that could chop down trees and replant new ones. Chop the wood into appropriate sizes and churn out wooden stools. All powered by renewable energy and batteries.

Not sure how cost effective this would be. That would depend a lot on the maintenance costs.

You could get it working but for how long? There is a lot that could go wrong without humans to monitor it and a small problem could escalate into a catastrophe.

The automating of, monitoring the system, is fairly easy, especially if it’s, a case of detecting the problem, and shutting it all down until a human can review and fix it.

To automate fixing any problem, without human intervention, is a much harder task, but getting easier year on year.

Even the automating of, making spare parts, and the machines that are used in a system, is getting easier every year.

We have 3D printing, with numerous materials nowadays. A lot of the parts of a computer from the chips to the boards are manufactured with a lot of automation today.

I believe there are a few thing nowadays that are almost fully automated, from quarries to processing plants.

As to when we get to a stage where we can remove all human labour from all tasks.

It’s hard to predict the future but that seems like it will take a while.

One thing is for sure. The first country, company or person who manages even level one automation of anything is going to change the world.

Their costs will be so low that they can drive prices down to a level you can’t compete with, if you have to employ labour.

This will start a race to automate everything.

Conclusion

So on one side, we are nowhere near automating everything, at the moment.

On the other side, we have never used as much automation, as we do now.

Take these, along with all this automation, its making, more automation, easier to achieve.

Could we have an automation revolution, one day, that has the same effects, as mobile phones or Wi-Fi did on the world?

Going from a very niche industry, to changing the world in a few decades?

Time will tell on that one.

I feel like automation will continue to creep up the supply chains.

You may get the automated forest no humans are allowed in.

Or the automated processing facility that automates it’s repairs with robots.

Maybe some software that manges to pull together multiple fully automated processes. Making something without needing human labour.

There are plenty of business’ that offer on demand manufacturing. Where your item is not made before you order it.

When ordered an automated process is started to manufacture and deliver the product to you.

At the moment humans are still needed in parts of this process.

Though every year the number of humans needed, per t-shirt or stool, to make and ship it to you. Well that number keeps falling.

The questions are do we hit any brick walls that stop us on the way to full automation?

If not then how long until it all falls into place?