“Everything on autopilot”…! The dream of things working without us having to repeat actions ad nauseam permeates our personal and professional lives. We want things to work without us having to be constantly attentive, as if “someone” were taking care of them—and in our own way. In practice, we want automation to be much more present than we currently experience.

One condition for automating activities is the organization of tasks. Consequently, this reflects on the organization of projects, teams, and companies. When thinking about automation, we need to be attentive in analyzing our routines and identifying what will really bring gains. It is important to look at tasks that are repeated frequently to assess what can and needs to be done automatically.

But who came up with the idea of doing everything automatically? When did humanity begin to dream of making things work on their own, and how did this evolve in the field of technology? Let's take a quick tour through the history of automation and better understand the possibilities it offers us today!

Our capacity to imagine

At the heart of automation lies the characteristic that sets humanity apart from all other species: the ability to think symbolically. This ability not only enables us to perceive the reality around us, but also allows us to imagine that something will happen. It is our ability to think symbolically that enables us to link memories, actions, and projections—or, in other words, the past, present, and future.

To automate, you will necessarily have to think about how a future action will happen and, consequently, plan for it today. This ability is so inherent to our species that it has been used for tens of thousands of years: just remember the traps that were already being built in the Paleolithic period. When we imagined that a mammoth would pass by a certain route, we would dig a hole and cover it with leaves. In this way, we "automated" part of the hunting process.

So much so that the word "automation" derives from the Latin term Automatus, which means "works by itself." Just like traps, machines, and software "work by themselves," since someone planned a future function and, therefore, programmed it.

In human history, the presence of automated processes changed dramatically with the Industrial Revolution. From then on, everyone's life became automated, at least to a minimal extent. The principle of automation began to drive industry, capitalism, and, consequently, reality.

Automation: from industry to computing

In the article we published here on the blog about artificial intelligence, we explained how it defines a new era. Another era was marked by the Industrial Revolution, when society realized how much incorporating the work of machines could enhance the results of human labor, generating unprecedented productivity gains.

If mechanization and automation of activities are what bring scale to an industry, it is only natural to imagine that one of the most iconic industries would give rise to the first Automation Department. In 1947, it was created at Ford by its then vice president of manufacturing, Delmar Harder.

Less than two decades later, the software industry would join forces with industrial automation: in 1961, Unimate, the first industrial robot, arrived on the General Motors production line. Automation thus became a major area of engineering, creating a strategic professional and operational field, bringing together industry and software development.

Well, if the motivation for automation is to envision future activities and plan them in the present, isn't that exactly what software does? With code, we program activities to be performed by the software, given the conditions to be executed.

Much of software development is based on automation, and we, as users, reap the benefits of this every day: we schedule antivirus scans on our computers, create rules in email inboxes, schedule posts on social media...Automation is one of the strongest principles governing software development. And for a simple and obvious reason: while something works on its own, we can do something else.

Ultimately, automation helps us realize that our ability to imagine a different future can optimize our time. That is why we plan and build tools that will save us time, time that is yet to come.

Here at Inmetrics, we believe that there are smarter ways to achieve business goals; more efficient ways that generate better results. Much of our quest for efficiency involves automation at various stages, from planning to system implementation. We are even recognized for our test automation solution. In 2022, we were leaders in Continuous Testing in ISG Provider Lens™️ Next-Gen ADM Services Brazil, precisely because of our vision and ability to reduce costs and validation time for new versions or updates in software applications.

If your company has identified potential efficiency gains and needs to create automations to perform repetitive tasks, contact us and talk to one of our specialists to take this step forward in transforming your business. We have a team ready to identify areas for improvement in your processes and develop solutions to accelerate them! Click here and talk to us!