I'm not romanticizing quality of human work. I'm not claiming people give more shit than it seems. I'm claiming that with humans doing the work, quality can only get so low[0] - and automation lets you punch through that floor, achieving much lower quality standards.
Or, put another way:
> Removing humans from the loop often directly leads to improved quality.
Yes, but improved quality for the same price means leaving money on the table, so approximately every business immediately drops quality to the baseline and pockets the difference - and from that point on, competition will optimize the quality further down.
> Of course, those are same humans that make decisions about how to use automation, so it’s not a panacea.
It's not the humans being replaced that make that decision - it's their bosses, who rent or own the automation, that make this call.
> There’s tons of things where quality improved immensely due to automation. Engines, drugs, batteries, just to name few.
Sorta, kinda. In areas with strict regulatory standards? Yes. In areas where automation improves both cost and quality, and the competitive pressure isn't very strong? Sure. With products not yet commoditized? Often enough. When it enables market segmentation? Of course.
But then you have commodities, or automation replacing people directly on the "critical path" of value chain. That's where products and services go to shit. Bonus points if automation allows to engage customers in "self-service" - i.e. outsource work to the customers.
Case in point: automated checkout machines in stores. They reduce jobs, but in theory, they could reduce queues, increase throughput, and make shopping more pleasant - win-win deal for everyone - even the cashiers could be shifted to oversight/support jobs, ensuring increased throughput and more profit for the store, for the same number of employees.
In practice, it turns out the optimal setup for the store is deploying way too few machines, and instead of having dedicated employees for oversight/support of the machines, those responsibilities are just tacked on to the workload of the existing (reduced) work force. As a result, queues are longer, customers are frustrated, overall shopping experience is shit - but the store knows perfectly well the customers will endure it anyway[1].
The market optimizes for profits, not quality or happiness. It's not just greed - money is the lifeblood of companies, and without it they die. As a result, however, competitive pressure ensures that any value or virtue that can be sacrificed to improve profits, will be sacrificed. Those who refuse get outcompeted by those who make that sacrifice. The ratchet turns, and the sacrificed value is lost forever.
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[0] - There are many limiting factors. If the business is pushing down quality of human work too hard, they'll eventually have to deal with employee frustration, or hit limits imposed by OSHA or labor law, or just a soft limit where producing a fixed amount of goods/services costs X in labor, and there's no point in trying to save 0.1X on quality if it requires workers to put effort, which will make them produce less per unit of time, or increase variability of output, or both.
[1] - There are many reasons for it, including customers being price sensitive to the point of irrationality, usually valuing their free time at 0, and being easy to confuse with constant churn of deals. Stores also know that frustration is a fleeting feeling, while well-crafted product selection makes a store/chain sticky. Notice how automated checkout machines tend to proliferate in grocery stores and drogeries, and are seldom seen anywhere else: that's because they work best in places where customers are susceptible to factors I described earlier - and thus will endure bad experience and still come back for more. It's not like there are alternatives - competitive pressure ensures all competitors offer equally shitty experience. The ratchet made a turn, there is no going back.