The Vast Automaton

In the opening pages of The Philosophy of Manufactures, Andrew Ure gave the factory system a description that no subsequent industrial theorist has improved upon: a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force. The phrase is not metaphor. Ure is describing an actual system in which cognitive functions previously performed by individual artisans have been absorbed into the design of the machinery itself. The factory replaces the worker's hands and, more consequentially, the portions of the worker's mind directed toward the productive process. This relocation — from biological to mechanical, from variable to regular — is the structural template that contemporary integrated AI systems instantiate on computational substrate. The phrase intellectual organs is the hinge. Ure meant it literally.