The Automation Reality

Automated things require lots of manual work to maintain

Photo by Built Robotics on Unsplash

“You Didn’t Build That”

Famously (or infamously if you’re a friend of big business), Barack Obama, on the campaign trail admonished his opponents:

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that…

If you set up an automated system to run your business, using tools like Zapier, Google Docs, or any of the myriad tools and cloud services, let me tell you that these systems are anything but automated… i.e. “You didn’t build that”… The manual parts are just invisible to you.

In programming there’s the idea of the OSI model, a set of layers that all systems have to move through, but I’d like to divide our automation systems into the manual or “toil” layers.

This stack of invisible things is:

• Utilities
• Hardware and Servers
• Open and Closed Source Code
• Data

Utilities

Every piece of software running uses electricity.

There were mechanical computers at one point (could you imagine an Internal…