A History and Future of the Rise of the Robots

• As technological mechanization increased, a cobbler for example is now able to complete the total project faster and still retains direct control of the entire process. 
• The new tools and machinery of the industrial revolution made production possible at vastly grander scales. In response to these new abilities, the complete Shoemaking processes began to be Segmented and specialized. 
• Specialization necessarily demands coordination, and that has dramatic implications for our cobbler's time as we watch him move into the city and get a job at one of these factories.

At this phase, the humans and machines work together side by side as tools in a large and distributed production process of specialized tasks. Neither the machine nor the human directly owns their time but must bow to the demands of coordination. 

Put another way, humans are now simply the semi-autonomous tools of the larger production and distribution processes. Time is of existential importance to the tools in the project as any human or machine that continually fails to keeps its deadlines will almost certainly be replaced with one who will. 

Humans now undertake work largely as tools within much larger projects/tasks and are working side by side with machines, under the schedule, virtually everywhere. I’m not lamenting scheduling. Coordination can make wonderful things possible. It is, however, important to understand how the massively complex and intertwined systems of coordination that service the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have dramatically impacted our relationship to time, and also have implications for the future.

As the machine tools become increasingly automated, human labor is susceptible, and the position of the manager as tool is reinforced as they are as susceptible to replacement as all other human tools. 

Much of the initial replacement of human tools by machine tools, however, is largely not yet a replacement but a shift towards more service-oriented work. 

There is no reason to believe that human labor will somehow prevail as machine labor becomes more efficient, effective, and cheaper. It’s not the machines that are driving the take-over, it’s simply profit-maximizing decisions by the company owners.

Leaping all of the ways into science fiction territory, in full automation, the giant processes of segmented tasks can be subsumed under one great master machine.