[perrygeo]

> Automating things significantly increases the cost of changing them.

I've described this as the difference between traveling by train vs car.

When you're manually driving a car, you can go anywhere your tires are capable of driving. You have full freedom, full optionality, to change direction.

When you're sitting on a train (traveling by automation), there's a set schedule, set stations and pre-built tracks. There's no option to deviate from your itinerary at all. Moving train tracks takes too much time.

By laying the tracks up front, automation reduces control/visibility and ossifies your decisions in a way that limits future options. The tradeoff of is that you can sit back and read a magazine while a machine does the work.

People generally don't like to hear this - they immediately see the benefits but are very likely to ignore or brush off the additional complexities and contraints that automation adds.