Automation is the use of control systems There are two common classes of control systems, with many variations and combinations: logic or sequential controls, and feedback or linear controls. There is also fuzzy logic, which attempts to combine some of the design simplicity of logic with the utility of linear control. Some devices or systems are inherently not controllable and information technologies Information technology is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware", according to the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to reducing the need for human intervention.^[1] In the scope of industrialization Industrialisation is the process of social and economic change that transforms a human group from a pre-industrial society into an industrial one. It is a part of a wider modernisation process, where social change and economic development are closely related with technological innovation, particularly with the development of large-scale energy and, automation is a step beyond mechanization Mechanization or mechanisation is providing human operators with machinery that assist them with the muscular requirements of work. It can also refer to the use of machines to replace automatic labor or animals. A step beyond mechanization is automation. Even the use of hand powered tools is an example of mechanization as it reduces the work of. Whereas mechanization provided human operators with machinery to assist them with the muscular requirements of work, automation greatly reduces the need for human sensory and mental requirements as well. Automation plays an increasingly important role in the world economy The world economy can be evaluated in various kind of ways: depending on the model used, and this valuation can then be represented in various ways . It is inseparable from the geography and ecology of Earth, and is therefore somewhat of a misnomer, since, while definitions and representations of the "world economy" vary widely, they and in daily experience.

Impact

Automation has had a notable impact in a wide range of highly visible industries beyond manufacturing. Once-ubiquitous telephone operators With the development of computerized telephone dialing systems, many telephone calls which previously required a live operator can be placed automatically by the calling party without additional human intervention. Before the advent of automatic exchanges, an operator's assistance was required for anything other than calling telephones across a have been replaced largely by automated telephone switchboards A switchboard was a device used to connect a group of telephones manually to one another or to an outside connection, within and between telephone exchanges or private branch exchanges (PBXs). The user was typically known as an operator. Public manual exchanges disappeared during the last half of the 20th century, leaving a few PBXs working in and answering machines. Medical processes such as primary screening in electrocardiography Electrocardiography is a transthoracic interpretation of the electrical activity of the heart over time captured and externally recorded by skin electrodes. It is a noninvasive recording produced by an electrocardiographic device. The etymology of the word is derived from the Greek electro, because it is related to electrical activity, cardio, or radiography Radiography is the use of the property of X-rays to cross materials to view inside objects. The impact on society of this technique has been immense with application fields including medical, non-destructive testing, food inspection, security and archeology and laboratory analysis of human genes A gene is a unit of heredity in a living organism. It is normally a stretch of DNA that codes for a type of protein or for an RNA chain that has a function in the organism. All living things depend on genes, as they specify all proteins and functional RNA chains. Genes hold the information to build and maintain an organism's cells and pass genetic, sera Blood plasma is the yellow liquid component of blood in which the blood cells in whole blood are normally suspended. It makes up about 55% of the total blood volume. It is the intravascular fluid part of extracellular fluid(all body fluid outside of cells). It is mostly water (90% by volume) and contains dissolved proteins, glucose, clotting, cells The cell is the functional basic unit of life. It was discovered by Robert Hooke and is the functional unit of all known living organisms. It is the smallest unit of life that is classified as a living thing, and is often called the building block of life. Some organisms, such as most bacteria, are unicellular . Other organisms, such as humans,, and tissues Tissue is a cellular organizational level intermediate between cells and a complete organism. Hence, a tissue is an ensemble of cells, not necessarily identical, but from the same origin, that together carry out a specific function. Organs are then formed by the functional grouping together of multiple tissues are carried out at much greater speed and accuracy by automated systems. Automated teller machines An automated teller machine or automatic banking machine (ABM) is a computerised telecommunications device that provides the clients of a financial institution with access to financial transactions in a public space without the need for a cashier, human clerk or bank teller. On most modern ATMs, the customer is identified by inserting a plastic 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 agrarian to industrial in the 19th century and from industrial to services in the 20th century.^[2]

Advantages and disadvantages

The main advantages of automation are:

• Replacing human operators in tasks that involve hard physical or monotonous work^[3].
• Replacing humans in tasks that should be done in dangerous environments (i.e. fire, space, volcanoes, nuclear facilities, underwater, etc)
• Making tasks that are beyond the human capabilities such as handling too heavy loads, too large objects, too hot or too cold substances or the requirement to make things too fast or too slow.
• Economy improvement. Sometimes and some kinds of automation implies improves in economy of enterprises, society or most of humankind. For example, when an enterprise that has invested in automation technology recovers its investment; when a state or country increases its income due to automation like Germany A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, has been known and documented before AD 100. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted until 1806. During the 16th century, northern Germany became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. As a modern nation-state, or Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is in the 20th Century or when the humankind Humans, known taxonomically as Homo sapiens , are the only living species in the Homo genus of bipedal primates in Hominidae, the great ape family. However, in some cases "human" is used to refer to any member of the genus Homo can use the internet The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and which in turn use satellites In the context of spaceflight, a satellite is an object which has been placed into orbit by human endeavor. Such objects are sometimes called artificial satellites to distinguish them from natural satellites such as the Moon and other automated engines.

The main disadvantages of automation are:

• Technology limits. Current technology is unable to automate all the desired tasks.
• Unpredictable development costs. The research and development New product design and development is more often than not a crucial factor in the survival of a company. In an industry that is fast changing, firms must continually revise their design and range of products. This is necessary due to continuous technology change and development as well as other competitors and the changing preference of customers cost of automating a process is difficult to predict accurately beforehand. Since this cost can have a large impact on profitability, it's possible to finish automating a process only to discover that there's no economic advantage in doing so.
• Initial costs are relatively high. The automation of a new product The noun product is defined as a "thing produced by labor or effort" or the "result of an act or a process", and stems from the verb produce, from the Latin prōdūce '(to) lead or bring forth'. Since 1575, the word "product" has referred to anything produced. Since 1695, the word has referred to "thing or things required a huge initial investment in comparison with the unit cost of the product, although the cost of automation is spread in many product batches. The automation of a plant Plants are living organisms belonging to the kingdom Plantae. They include familiar organisms such as trees, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae. The scientific study of plants, known as botany, has identified about 350,000 extant species of plants, defined as seed plants, bryophytes, ferns and fern allies. As of 2004, required a great initial investment too, although this cost is spread in the products to be produced.

Concerns about unemployment

At first glance, automation might appear to devalue labor Labour economics seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the market for labour. Labour markets function through the interaction of workers and employers. Labour economics looks at the suppliers of labour services , the demanders of labour services (employers), and attempts to understand the resulting pattern of wages, employment, and through its replacement with less-expensive machines; however, the overall effect of this on the workforce as a whole remains unclear.^{[citation needed]} Today automation of the workforce is quite advanced, and continues to advance increasingly more rapidly throughout the world and is encroaching on ever more skilled jobs, yet during the same period the general well-being and quality of life of most people in the world (where political factors have not muddied the picture) have improved dramatically. What role automation has played in these changes has not been well studied.

Dependence on social factors

It is commonly thought that automation implies unemployment because the work of a human being is replaced in part or completely by a machine. Nevertheless, the unemployment is caused by the economical politics of the administration like dismissing the workers instead of changing their tasks. Since the general economical policies of most of the industrial plants are to dismiss people, nowadays automation implies unemployment. In different scenarios without workers, automation implies more free time instead of unemployment like the case with the automatic washing machine at home. Automation does not imply unemployment when it makes tasks unimaginable without automation such as exploring mars with the Sojourner or when the economy is fully adapted to an automated technology as with the Telephone switchboard A switchboard was a device used to connect a group of telephones manually to one another or to an outside connection, within and between telephone exchanges or private branch exchanges (PBXs). The user was typically known as an operator. Public manual exchanges disappeared during the last half of the 20th century, leaving a few PBXs working in.

During the industrial revolution

The widespread impact of industrial automation raises social issues, among them its impact on employment Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as: "A person in the service of another under any contract of hire, express or implied, oral or written, where the employer has the power or right to control and direct the employee in the material details of how. Historical concerns about the effects of automation date back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, when a social movement of English textile A textile is a flexible material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibres often referred to as thread or yarn. Yarn is produced by spinning raw wool fibres, linen, cotton, or other material on a spinning wheel to produce long strands. Textiles are formed by weaving, knitting, crocheting, knotting, or pressing fibres together machine operators in the early 1800s known as the Luddites protested against Jacquard's automated weaving looms^[4] — often by destroying such textile machines— that they felt threatened their jobs. One author made the following case. When automation was first introduced, it caused widespread fear. It was thought that the displacement of human operators An operator is a mapping from one vector space or module to another. Operators are of critical importance to both linear algebra and functional analysis. Important properties that various operators may exhibit include linearity, continuity, and boundedness by computerized systems would lead to severe unemployment.

During the information revolution

Critics of automation contend that increased industrial automation causes increased unemployment; this was a pressing concern during the 1980s. One argument claims that this has happened invisibly in recent years, as the fact that many manufacturing jobs left the United States during the early 1990s was offset by a one-time massive increase in IT jobs at the same time. Some authors argue that the opposite has often been true, and that automation has led to higher employment. Under this point of view, the freeing up of the labor force has allowed more people to enter higher skilled managerial as well as specialized consultant/contractor jobs (like cryptographers), which are typically higher paying. One odd side effect of this shift is that "unskilled labor" is in higher demand in many first-world nations, because fewer people are available to fill such jobs.

Late 20th century emphasis

In manufacturing, the purpose of automation has shifted to issues broader than productivity and costs.

Reliability and precision

The old focus on using automation simply to increase productivity and reduce costs was seen to be short-sighted, because it is also necessary to provide a skilled workforce who can make repairs and manage the machinery. Moreover, the initial costs of automation were high and often could not be recovered by the time entirely new manufacturing processes replaced the old. (Japan's "robot junkyards" were once world famous in the manufacturing industry.)

Automation is now often applied primarily to increase quality in the manufacturing process, where automation can increase quality substantially. For example, automobile and truck pistons used to be installed into engines manually. This is rapidly being transitioned to automated machine installation, because the error rate for manual installment was around 1-1.5%, but has been reduced to 0.00001% with automation.

Health and environment

The costs of automation to the environment are different depending on the technology, product or engine automated. There are automated engines that consume more energy resources from the Earth in comparison with previous engines and those that do the opposite too. Hazardous operations, such as oil refining, the manufacturing of industrial chemicals, and all forms of metal working, were always early contenders for automation.

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