Significance of Automation

Automation" and "robotization" are all the rage.

After years of struggling to automate visual inspections, I have come up with an idea.

Automation used to be,
To do things that people can't do.
What people could do, they could do better.
The significance of this was great.

On the other hand, much of automation these days,
Many of today's automations are attempts to replace things that people can do well.
On the other hand, many of the recent automations are trying to replace things that people can do.
I think the significance of such automation has been reduced considerably.

If you are replacing people, you are naturally limited in the cost you can spend on automation.
No matter how much labor is needed, if the cost is higher than people, they should not invest in it.

If something can be done better by people than it can be automated, it will not be appreciated even if you do your best to automate it.

The automation of visual inspection is a prime example.

I've always felt that "automating" things in the same sense as before wouldn't yield very good results...