Since at least the industrial revolution, workers have worried that machines would replace them, writes The New York Times (June 8, 2025). But when technology transformed auto-making, meatpacking and even secretarial work, the response typically wasn’t to slash jobs and reduce the number of workers. It was to break them into simpler tasks to be performed over and over at a rapid clip. Small shops of skilled mechanics gave way to hundreds of workers spread across an assembly line. The personal secretary gave way to pools of typists and data-entry clerks.
Workers complained of speed-up, work intensification, and work degradation. Now this appears to be happening with A.I. in one of the fields where it has been most widely adopted: coding.
As A.I. spreads through the labor force, many white-collar workers have expressed concern that it would lead to mass unemployment. But the more immediate downside for software engineers appears to be a change in the quality of their work. It is becoming more routine, less thoughtful and, crucially, much faster pace.
The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, A.I. can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work. Amazon says it saved “the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years” by using A.I. to do the thankless work of upgrading old software. Many Amazon engineers use an A.I. assistant that suggests lines of code. But the company has more recently rolled out A.I. tools that can generate large portions of a program on its own. One engineer called the tools “scarily good.”
Classroom discussion questions:
- How can A.I. transform factory jobs?
- Professors’ jobs?
Yum Brands, owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC is partnering with Nvidia to build a range of new AI-driven services in its restaurants. The first—AI-powered voice-ordering at the drive-through lane and on the phone—was built using tools from Nvidia, and will begin rolling out at 500 Yum Brand restaurants this year.
Science fiction has long been full of robots that look, move and even think like we do. In the real world humanoid forms have, until very recently, been a nonstarter. Hard to build, expensive, slow and lumbering, they have never made sense compared with the countless other varieties of purpose-built—and vastly more affordable—robots that have multiplied rapidly in the past decade.
The ability to react quickly to supply chain disruptions is critical, and companies are under increasing pressure to predict and prevent them before they occur. Instead of managing reactively, firms are turning to 
Speed and its benefits
Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot have already proven their value in many product designers’ daily design work, asking questions about design decisions and giving advice on design and CAD strategies. (See Chapter 5 in your Heizer/Render/Munson OM text). 
In its new report, 
Jeff Schulze, at ClearBridge Investments, argues this productivity jump is thanks to some unique features of the postpandemic labor market. People have switched jobs, locations and even industries at a high rate, meaning workers are now better matched to their roles. “When you look on the horizon with all this investment in AI, it’s not hard to get too excited about a productivity boom that will move us up to 2.5% or even 3%,” he states.
With inflation keeping the cost of raw materials high, it has become more important than ever for manufacturing companies to reduce waste as much as possible.