Hi, I'm a final year university student studying Digital Design. I'm doing my thesis on automation in general (more about its sociological impact) and I've been looking for the broadest most applicable definition that covers all of automation, so the question popped into my mind about whether you'd consider natural processes as automated.

Your responses and comments on the poll or in general would go a long way!

Thanks!
Jake.

 

In the initial design of any control system, there are generally areas where you have control and others where you don’t, mostly fairly obvious.
A large waste water works can work out how much sewage it can handle (including future increases) but has to cater for drought conditions but more important, storms and continuous heavy rainfall. Thus weather is an integral part of this particular process but would not regard it as automated.

 

Automation in its most basic form has a controlled variable and a manipulated variable. The controlled variable is held within some sort of desired range. Currently, rainfall is not only often out of control, it often cannot even predicted accurately. The current prediction of rainfall is hard because we do not have a full understanding of the manipulated variables.

Many "natural" processes have been modeled and have been controlled in some fashion. an example would be fire. Fire is used in countless processes. From a " sociological impact ", think what life would be like if we had not harnessed fire. Then again, fire can be released by "natural" processes and destroy society and the things built by humans.

 

Hello,

Rainfall, like many other nature processes are not automated.
Nature can not be controlled, only mantained.

Bertus

 

There is no manual override, despite the government boondoggle financed dreams of the climate controllers. We can't control the sun or the earth's volcanic activity.

 

Thanks, those are interesting points you all make!
I'm not all that familiar with control automation (or at least that specific terminology), so it's opening my mind. I guess from my perspective I'm wondering does everything boil down to control automation or is there something broader?

For example, one of my more specific focuses within automation are consumer task automation services (such as IFTTT or Zapier)....so taking an event/trigger and then using that to do pretty much anything else that the user wants. Do we consider the event to be the 'control' or is control automation more of a separate type of automation concerning more of a looped style of process?

Again, thanks for the engagement, will help make for a good thesis.