Displaced factory workers have moved into office and service jobs, where, besides filling many new needs, they help devise and direct the manufacturing machines. But while that displacement still reverberates, machines are assuming the engineering, management and customer relations jobs of the service industry. The road of productive human employment may not lead much further. It is sometimes said that mass manufacturing ended the role of the craftsman, who was replaced by heavy machines stamping out identical parts. In fact, the craftsmanship moved into the engineering department, where products are first designed, the means to manufacture them devised.
Engineering is a thought, labor and creativity-intensive endeavor.
In the late 1980s it began to be massively automated. Like tractors and combines for farmers, computer design workstations are tremendous labor savers for engineers. With a good program, a designer can simply indicate an internal change in a complex device, and almost immediately see its effect on the other parts of the design. In the 1970s such an exploration, conducted on drafting boards, might have consumed several junior engineers for weeks. The overall effects on productivity and employment may never be precisely measured, but individual businesses as diverse as plastic injection mold designers and architectural firms have reported tenfold throughput increases with no change in employment after replacing manual methods with inexpensive computer design and accounting systems.