Challenging the Myth of Job Replacement in the Age of Automation

Why is there a need for a cultural and educational shift towards appreciating, building, and maintaining industrial systems? What would a rebirth of manufacturing look like in 2025? How would we go about setting up a new Industrial Enlightenment?

David A. Mindell is a professor of aerospace engineering and the history of engineering and manufacturing at MIT. He is also the author of several books. The title of his latest book and the primary subject of this discussion is The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution.

Greg and David discuss the 18th-century industrial enlightenment and its implications for modern industrial society. They also explore the evolving relationship between technology and labor, the persistent myths around automation, and the importance of valuing industrial contributions in today's digital economy. 

Mendell emphasizes the need for a cultural and educational shift towards appreciating building and maintaining industrial systems, advocating for what he describes as a new industrial enlightenment.

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Episode Quotes:

The overlooked power of process knowledge

12:41: If you are working on a very advanced, cutting-edge product, like a phone, you want to know exactly where there's capacity that's left on the table to enable you to build the next form. Did you design it too conservatively here? Is there something there you could do more with? And that familiarity with process, whether it's manufacturing or maintenance or other aspects of it, is a really important source of knowledge in an industrial system that we've generally devalued in favor of the kind of product innovation. And inventing the shiny new thing. And I'm sitting on the middle of the campus here at MIT, where we spend a lot of time teaching students about what is essentially product innovation. And we have very few folks on this campus who know anything about the processes that make and maintain these systems, even though very often that knowledge is a source of really great innovation.

Is disruption really the enemy in industrial systems

11:16: Disruption is the enemy in an industrial system. Reliability, repeatability, efficiency, robustness—those are things that people care a lot about in these systems.

The untapped potential of maintenance cycles

31:59: Improving maintenance cycles is a huge source of process innovation that we have not paid enough attention to, and if you can make something that lasts longer, that's a real contribution. I'm a pilot, and people make airplanes last for 50, 60, 70 years because they're designed to be maintained and upgraded, and you replace the parts that wear out and keep them going. Why can't we do that with laptops and phones and even routers or other disposable parts of the electronic economy? And so, work is changing. Work should change. Work should always be responding to the technological changes and needs of the time.

On the myth of replacement in technology and work

45:55: The myth of replacement, as I talk about in the book, is really. It's not that technologies don't enable us to do things with fewer people. Again, that's really the definition of productivity and not a bad definition for technology in these settings. It's more that, for one, it's very rare that you see a technology replace a human job and do that job the same way. Much more common that they change the nature of the work. Either they move it to a different place, they change the kind of skills that are required. They maybe make the job higher level. Maybe they make the job lower level. And you want to ask those questions about who's doing the work, where are they? What's their background, what's their training? Why does it matter? Those things change a lot, but it's relatively rare.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Josiah Wedgwood
• Industrial Revolution
• Lewis Mumford
• James Watt
• Matthew Boulton
• Eric Schmidt
• Lunar Society of Birmingham
• Adam Smith
• William Thompson
• Lord Kelvin
• Dissenting Academies
• Joseph Priestley
• William Small
• Air France Flight 447
• Waymo

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at MIT
• Professional Profile at AeroAstro
• LinkedIn Profile
• Wikipedia Profile
• .Unless Profile
• Social Profile on X

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution
• Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy
• The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines
• Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
• Iron Coffin: War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS
• Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics
• War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor
• Research Gate Page