On Equivalent Product

The following is an excerpt from "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" by Richard Hamming. Over the last year it has been replaying in my head with regards to the shifts with agentic coding.

The computers make it possible for robots to do many things, including much of the present manufacturing. Evidently computers will play a dominant role in robot operation, though one must be careful not to claim the standard von Neumann type of computer will be the sole control mechanism, rather probably the current neural net computers, fuzzy set logic, and variations will do much of the control. Setting aside the child’s view of a robot as a machine resembling a human, but rather thinking of it as a device for handling and controlling things in the material world, robots used in manufacturing do the following:

A. Produce a better product under tighter control limits.

B. Produce usually a cheaper product.

C. Produce a different product.

This last point needs careful emphasis.

When we first passed from hand accounting to machine accounting we found it necessary, for economical reasons if no other, to somewhat alter the accounting system. Similarly, when we passed from strict hand fabrication to machine fabrication we passed from mainly screws and bolts to rivets and welding.

It has rarely proved practical to produce exactly the same product by machines as we produced by hand.

Indeed, one of the major items in the conversion from hand to machine production is the imaginative redesign of an equivalent product. Thus in thinking of mechanizing a large organization, it won’t work if you try to keep things in detail exactly the same, rather there must be a larger give-and-take if there is to be a significant success. You must get the essentials of the job in mind and then design the mechanization to do that job rather than trying to mechanize the current version—if you want a significant success in the long run.

I need to stress this point; mechanization requires you produce an equivalent product, not identically the same one. Furthermore, in any design it is now essential to consider field maintenance since in the long run it often dominates all other costs. The more complex the designed system the more field maintenance must be central to the final design. Only when field maintenance is part of the original design can it be safely controlled; it is not wise to try to graft it on later. This applies to both mechanical things and to human organizations.