> Ford style assembly lines

The ones with 10 hour shifts and mandatory overtime? Yea, I don't think it's the _line_ that's making them miserable.

> Partially automated cashier did the same thing.

I've not once heard anyone in the service industry make this complaint.

> as the efficiency benefits are too important.

You can squeeze every last drop of productivity from your employees. In the short term this may even evidence profits. In the long term it only works if you hold a monopoly position.

"The ones with 10 hour shifts and mandatory overtime? Yea, I don't think it's the _line_ that's making them miserable."

The whole innovation was about making the jobs as simple and repetitive as possible so humans would basically work like robots.

Once you're there, having removed any agency and freedom, pushing the hours to the limits of human exhaustion is just one logical step.

You've described the amazon warehouse. Ive worked in there and trust me, I did not see people displaying exhaustion etc. There were many there who did the job purely because of how simple it was and were ok with it. Perhaps they got conditioned to it.

Yes it was jarring for me to experience that.

> was about making the jobs as simple and repetitive as possible so humans would basically work like robots.

So they make fewer mistakes. Not that they become zombies that you are then able to abuse.

> pushing the hours to the limits of human exhaustion is just one logical step.

There's nothing logical about ignoring consequences. Which is probably why the "union strike" even exists. It's fighting illogic with illogic.

Efficiency gains are more important than people not having to spend their working life with soul-crushing tasks? I don’t quite follow.

The assumption is that orders of magnitude more people will benefit from the efficiency gains, like it was the case in agriculture automation or factory work automation.

In those cases, that led to a transition period, nowadays only a small fraction of the human population is working to produce food, and their job is more about planning, finance and orchestration of machine work, but many specialised jobs were lost or made miserable in the process.

IMHO any job that can be done by a machine should not be done by a human, the tricky part is going there with as little undesirable effects as possible.

Yes, eventually we will all be able to enjoy our delicious algorithm, attention, and data sandwiches on our lunch breaks.

All this skips the fundamental question: can this job be done by a machine? Or does the job just have a vaguely machine-doable look, particularly to those outside the trenches?

Because the latter is how you get the software engineering equivalent of collapsing bridges, en masse.

Almost nothing is fully automated yet. So the answer is tricky.

In the beginning, they are irrelevant, but at some point, edge cases are everything you have to deal with.

We’ve had partial automation in programming since the first assembler was written. I don’t think we’re more miserable than we would be if we still had to write machine code by hand.

People who enjoyed programming at this level (myself included) were not really that happy but most had to transition into a job that didn't value some the skills they patiently acquired and were machines never attained the highest level.

I would have been happy writting z80 and 68000 assembly code for an entire career.

Same here, but I think even you and I would get annoyed if we had to write machine code directly. Some people like assembly, but I've never encountered someone who eschewed even that.

If we look at automation beyond assemblers (e.g. compilers), even if you or I might be content without it, I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of programmers are glad they don't have to write assembly.