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Automation is the use of control systems such as computers to control industrial machinery and processes, replacing human operators.
In the scope of industrialization, it is a step beyond mechanization, where human operators are provided with machinery to assist them with the physical requirements of work.
Early machines were simple machines that substituted one form of effort with a more humanly manageable effort, as lifting a large weight with a system of pulleys or a lever.
Some advantages are repeatability, tighter quality control, higher efficiency, integration with business systems, increased productivity and reduction of labor.
For example, Japan had to scrap many of its industrial robots when they were found to be incapable of adaptation to substantially changed production requirements and so not necessarily able to justify their high initial costs.
By the middle of the 20th century, automation had existed for many years on a small scale, using simple mechanical devices to automate simple manufacturing tasks.
However the concept only became truly practical with the addition (and evolution) of the digital computer, whose flexibility allowed it to drive almost any sort of task.
Digital computers with the required combination of speed, computing power, price, and size first started to appear in the 1960s.
Before that time, industrial computers were almost exclusively analog computers and hybrid computers.
Since then digital computers have taken over control of the vast majority of simple, repetitive tasks, and ever more semi-skilled and skilled tasks, with some food production and inspection being a notable exception.
Human pattern recognition, and human language recognition and language production ability is well beyond anything currently envisioned by automation engineers.
This leads to precisely controlled actions that permit a tight control of almost any industrial process.
Human-machine interfaces (HMI) or computer human interfaces (CHI), formerly known as man-machine interfaces, are usually employed to communicate with PLCs and other computers, such as entering and monitoring temperatures or pressures for further automated control or emergency response.
Among them is automation's impact on employment.
Indeed, the Luddites were a social movement of English textile workers in the early 1800s who protested against Jacquard's automated weaving looms -- often by destroying such textile machines -- that they felt threatened their jobs.
Some argue automation leads to higher employment.
Some, such as technocrats, argue the reverse, at least in the long term.
It appears that automation does devalue labor through its replacement with less-expensive machines; however, the overall effect of this on the workforce as a whole remains unclear.
Chinese industry is highly automated and is becoming ever more so, as China insists on leading edge manufacturing technology.
Even doctors have been partly replaced by remote, automated robots and by highly sophisticated surgical robots that allow them to perform remotely and at levels of accuracy and precision otherwise not possible.
This is rapidly being transitioned to automated machine installation, because the error rate for manual installment was around 1-1.5%, but is 0.00001% with automation.
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