I’ve been thinking a lot about automation lately.
First, I’ve been working a bit on this server, and I’ve noted how many things I’d like to be notified about. For example, I’d like to know when…
- …the server logs get really big and need to be trimmed
- …one of my webpages links to a webpage that’s now dead
- …the traffic to one of my sites increases significantly
- …some program on the server begins to eat up a large amount of processing time and/or memory
Thanks to Brennen, I have a little more automation running on this server. I’m now notified about most of the above things.
I’ve also been implementing some automation at work. I discovered that Microsoft Word will read a
One of my great automation inspirations is Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime, an SF novel involving people from multiple time periods. The really advanced humans have huge amounts of automation, both as robots and as computer programs that monitor and report all sorts of things. Everyone knows how to create these things.
That strikes me as a pretty neat future, one in which everyone can automate their lives. Seems to me that we don’t automate enough things. I have to tweak several files every time I upload a photo to my pictures; I would be so much more willing to upload photos if that were more automated.
What would you like to automate in your life?
Comments:
| Brennen | Most of my job?
More realistically, I’d like to stop manually checking any of a dozen input streams (3 |
| Brennen | I think the problem is that automated processes require just enough initial thought to be vexing, and on top of that they’re fragile.
The first time I set up those nifty little shell scripts and cron jobs and what have you, I thought “gosh, why didn’t I do that ages ago?” By the fifth time a change in webservers or mail clients or whatever necessitated replacing them again, I was back to doing things the stupid way with more keystrokes, and it’s taken me forever to make the effort again. False laziness is endemic. |
| Brent | Actually, you can automate those input streams nicely. I have several |
| Brent | But I definitely have felt frustrated when a script breaks or |
| Brennen | Concur.
I think there are some generalizable reasons the automation facilities we have are underutilized. One is that most people aren’t using a unix platform or any reasonable approximation, so the known available tools are pretty limited (they’re there, to an extent — I know Windows does scheduling, and surely somebody is using all those embedded scripting tools for something besides malware — Macs have had Applescript forever and a day — but most users don’t know this stuff exists). I think the more profound ones are close to what I mentioned above — automation takes thought, which is another way of saying that programming is hard. And automation really does tend towards fragility. I know the tools could be improved and made more robust, but I think they will continue to be fragile in some sense at least until we have strong AI. I just had the thought, not for the first time, that part of all this has to do with how the computer systems we use have become generic and commodified, which is not the reality that |
| Brennen | “users'”, I meant to say. |
| Brennen | And does anyone else kind of miss that idea? The shared environment of your home machine? MOTDs and talk and the graceful mapping of some directory in your home onto domain.org/~jrandom/? |
| Brent | Wow. My forum just became worth every hour I put into it. And yeah, I concur. I actually see my home machine as a shared environment, but I hadn’t realized that that’s probably because of my increased Unix experience over the past five years or so. |