To answer the question, “Will Mechanical Engineering Be Automated?”, we explore why there are still so many mechanical engineering jobs, what automation means for the future of mechanical engineering and the challenges that it does and does not pose for our society.

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Here is an interesting fact, in the 48 years since the introduction of the Automated Teller Machine, also known as an ATM, the amount of (human) bank tellers working in the USA has about doubled, from 250,000 to 500,000. 

250,000 in 1972 to around 500,000 today, with 100,000 jobs added in the years since 2000. These stats were discovered by a book written by an economist from Boston University James Bessen, and he has raised an interesting question:

What roles are these tellers fulfilling? And why hasn’t ATMs eliminated their role by now?

Inventions

If you cast your mind back, most of the famous inventions of the most recent 200 years were created to substitute humans in their respective roles.

Tractors were designed to replace human labor with mechanical power. Assembly lines were also created to eliminate consistent human errors with the perfection of machines. Computers were made with the programmable ability to replace human calculation that was inaccurate and error-prone with the perfection of digital calculation.

These creations have served their purpose, we do not dig ditches with a shovel anymore, make tools by hand out of iron, or carry out bookkeeping tasks using real books. The percentage of adults in the USA working in the labor market has increased and is larger now than it was 130 years ago in 1890, and it has risen in pretty much every 10 year sector within them 130 years.

This creates a paradox, as our machines do more and more of our work. Why doesn’t this make our workers and our skills redundant?

Why Are There Still So Many Mechanical Engineering Jobs?

2 very important principles are on show here, one refers to human creativity and genius. The other points to humanity’s greed and insatiable appetite.

As David Autor refers to it, the first principle will be called the “O-ring” principal, and it designates the type of work that we carry out. Principle number two is the “Never Get Enough” principle, and it stands for how many viable jobs are actually in the world.

O-Ring

ATMs (automated teller machines) have had two main effects on the employment of bank tellers. As one would expect, they did replace a good amount of teller responsibilities. The amount of tellers in every branch decreased by about 30%, but banks quickly realized that it was also less expensive to open new branches, and the number of active bank branches grew by about 40% in that same time period.

The result was more tellers and more branches, but the tellers were fulfilling different roles, and their roles had evolved more towards selling products and solving issues. This resulted in the tellers completing a more complicated job.

There is a bigger principle at work here, most of the tasks that mechanical engineers carry out requires a vast array of skills, talent and brawn, technical knowledge and mastery of their craft, “perspiration and inspiration“ in the words of Thomas Edison. Such skills on modern, up-to-date software programs like AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor and Fusion 360 also make mechanical engineers very attractive to prospective employers.

It’s the highly skilled nature of a mechanical engineers work that makes it resilient from being replaced by machines. While robots are very good at certain things, they are still very far behind humans in regard to others: problem-solving, creativity and situational analysis are still very much the domain of humans.

We are still a long way away from a point where machines have the kind of intelligence to be able to deal with issues as complex and broad ranging as mechanical engineering.

On that note, robots are still functionally the product of what is programmed into them. So there is no threat of mechanical engineering being automated for now!

Generally speaking, automating some smaller group of tasks, doesn’t make the other tasks unnecessary. In fact, it increases their importance. It increases their worth! You can improve your skills and learn online by completing courses on LinkedIn Learning, where you can obtain certifications and increase your worth and importance in the job market.

Space Shuttle Challenger

For example in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded in the air and crashed down to earth less than two minutes after it took off. The cause of the crash was an simple rubber “O-ring” in the booster rocket. It had frozen on the launchpad the night previously and shattered moments after takeoff.

In this multi billion dollar industry that generic rubber O-ring made the difference between the mission succeeding and the tragic death of seven astronauts.

A metaphor created by an economist from Harvard Michael Kremer for this disaster is what he referred to as the O-ring production function. This O-ring production function describes work as a number of interlocking steps, similar to links within a chain. Every single one of those links must do its job successfully for the mission to be completed. If just one fails, The product/service/mission comes to a halt.

This precarious description has a surprisingly positive application, which is that improving the reliability of just one link in the chain will increase the value of any of the other links.

If most of the links are weak and are prone to breaking, the importance of one link (i.e. your job) is not that big, another link will probably fail anyway.

However, if all of the other links become strong, dependable and reliable, the importance of your link becomes greater. In short, everything depends on your link to work.

The reason the O-ring was critical, and in turn fatal, to the space shuttle Challenger, was because everything else worked exactly as it should have. If the space shuttle was as reliable as a certain Italian car manufacturer ;), then the O-ring would not have mattered because the machine would’ve crashed anyway.

In pretty much all of the work that we as humans do, we are actually the O-ring. 

The automation of some tasks only increased the effect of the more taxing roles, this is true not only for mechanical engineering being automated but also if we were designing a building, diagnosing and treating a patient, or teaching a class to a room full of high school students. As our tools improve, technology accentuates and increases the importance of our knowledge, judgement and creativity. That brings us to the second principle:

Never Get Enough

The O-ring was simple to understand as it said that the jobs people do will be important, they can’t be done by machines and they will still need to be done. However, that doesn’t state how many jobs there will need to be.

In the year 1900, 40% of all employment in the USA consisted of farming. Today, it makes up less than 2%.

Why are there so few farmers today? Well, it is definitely not because we are eating less!

A century of growth in the farming industry now means that a few million farmers can feed a country of 320 million people. Astounding progress, but that means that there are only a limited amount O-ring jobs left in the farming industry. Evidently, technology can get rid of jobs, farming is just one example and there are many others like it.

But what is true for one industry or product has never applied to the whole economy. Many of today’s industries; insurance and finance, healthcare and computing barely existed a hundred years ago.

A lot of the popular products of today’s age; sports utility vehicles, air-conditioners, mobile devices and computers were extremely expensive, or again were just not invented yet.

As mechanical engineering is automated it frees up our time, it expands the the realm of what is now possible. We have and will invent new services, products or ideas, that demand our attention, take up our time and spur consumption.

Once these two principles are accepted, the O-ring principle plus the “Never Get Enough” principle, then it must be understood that there will always be jobs.

Does That Mean There’s Nothing to Worry About?

Mechanical engineering being automated, employment, robots and jobs it will all take care of itself?

No.

Automation generates wealth by giving us the option to do more in less time. The challenge that automation poses for us is not that we are using up all of our jobs. Jobs in the USA have increased by 14 million since the Great Recession.

The problem is that a lot of them jobs are not great jobs and many people are not qualified for the great jobs that are being generated.

The growth of employment in the United States and in much of the first-world is grouped into three sections. You have high education, high salary jobs; Doctors, nurses, programmers, engineers. Employment is robust in these jobs as well as employment growth.

Employment is equally as robust in low education, low skilled jobs like cleaning, food service and security etc.

Similarly, employment is reducing in the middle education, middle salary, middle-class jobs; production, operative and sales positions.

The reasons for this are easily explained, the middle skilled jobs use commonly understood procedures and rules that can easily be programmed and ran by computers. 

The challenge that automation creates is that it reduces the middle-class, and threatens to make us into a more divided society.

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